By Emily Smith
It will be a stormy scene at the venerable Yale Club in Manhattan on Wednesday because tradition-loving members are up in arms about “declining dress standards.”
The storied Ivy League private members club, housed in a 22-story neoclassical clubhouse near Grand Central Terminal, is holding its annual meeting. But members are complaining about a failure in enforcing the dress code, which insists on “business casual” and that “neat, respectful appearance is required at all times.”
One member wrote in a letter to the club, “A horrifying example of this denouement, this sad decline in the atmosphere and spirit of the club, occurred on September 5 in the men’s locker room. A young man (a Yale law student) was wearing a tee shirt emblazoned in large letters with: ‘F - - k Forever.’ I was shocked and told him that it was offensive and inappropriate; that this was a club for ladies and gentlemen. He smirked. Why was he allowed through the front door? Why did those on duty at the desk at the locker room allow him to enter? Why was he allowed to walk around the club dressed as such? Is there no decency at the club anymore, no class? Will the management be held accountable (and members)?”
The member also states that security is lax and “anyone who wishes may enter the club,” adding that Marvin Berenblum, CEO of National Executive Service Corps, recently had his briefcase stolen in the lounge by “two young, slovenly dressed teenagers in dirty cutoff jeans. Why were they let in downstairs?”
Other members have complained that the club’s famed lounge is often booked for private functions, such as weddings, while the roof dining room is also unavailable for many months of the year. Yale Club spokeswoman Jennifer Warpool was not available for comment Tuesday night.
The Yale Club of New York City, commonly called The Yale Club, is a private club in Midtown Manhattan, in New York City, New York, United States. Its membership is restricted almost entirely to alumni and faculty of Yale University. With a clubhouse comprising 22 stories and a worldwide membership of over 11,000, it is the largest private clubhouse in the world.
The club is located at 50 Vanderbilt Avenue, at the intersection of East 44th Street, across Vanderbilt Avenue from Grand Central Terminal and the MetLife Building. Four other clubs affiliated with Ivy League universities have clubhouses in the surrounding neighborhood: the Harvard Club of New York, the Princeton Club of New York, the Penn Club of New York City, and the Cornell Club.
The neighborhood also includes similar clubs not affiliated with universities, like the New York Yacht Club and the University Club of New York, as well as the flagship stores of Brooks Brothers, J. Press, and Paul Stuart, which traditionally catered to the club set.
The 22-story clubhouse contains three dining spaces (the "Tap Room," the "Grill Room," and a rooftop terrace), three bars (in the Tap Room, Grill Room, and Main Lounge), banquet rooms for up to 500 people, 140 guestrooms, a library, an athletic center, and a barber shop, among other amenities.
The heart of the clubhouse is the main lounge, a large room with a high, ornate ceiling and wood-paneled walls lined with fireplaces and portraits of the five Yale-educated U.S. presidents, all of whom are or were members of the Yale Club: William Howard Taft; Gerald R. Ford; George H.W. Bush; Bill Clinton; and George W. Bush. Outside the lounge above the main staircase hangs a posthumous portrait of Elihu Yale by Francis Edwin Elwell.
The roots of the club reach back to 1868 and the foundation of the Old Yale Alumni Association of New York. In response to the association's desire for a permanent clubhouse, it formally established the Yale Club in 1897.
One of the incorporators was Senator Chauncey Depew, whose portrait by the Swiss-born American artist Adolfo Müller-Ury painted in 1890 hangs in the building. The first president of the Yale Club was attorney Thomas Thacher, founder of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett. The first clubhouse was a rented brownstone at 17 East 26th Street. Thereafter, in 1901, the club built and opened a new, twelve-story clubhouse at 30 West 44th Street, which today is home to the Penn Club of New York.
The current clubhouse opened in June 1915, designed by architect and Yale alumnus James Gamble Rogers. It was largely paid for by money raised or contributed by President George C. Ide of Brooklyn (whose portrait by George Burroughs Torrey also hangs in the building).
It purposely was situated on the very corner where Yale alumnus Nathan Hale was hanged by the British Army for espionage during the American Revolution. Today, the site of Hale's execution is disputed.
According to the Ken Burns documentary Prohibition, the Yale Club was able to stock up enough liquor to see the club through the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.
In July 1999, the Yale Club became the first of New York's Ivy League university clubs to change its dress code to business casual, a move which upset some members and was received with polite scorn from other clubs. Today, the dress code remains business casual, except in the athletic facilities. In the fall of 2012, the club began to allow denim to be worn in the library, the Grill Room, and on the rooftop terrace during the summer, but nowhere else, as long as it is "neat, clean, and in good repair."
Membership
To be eligible for election to membership, a candidate must be an alumnus, faculty member, or full-time graduate student of Yale University. The club also offers legacy memberships for any Yale-affiliated member's children and grandchildren. The club sends out a monthly newsletter to all members.
Yale College did not allow women to become members until 1969. Wives of members even had to enter the club through a separate entrance (today the service entrance), and were not allowed to have access to much of the clubhouse.
Once Yale opened to women, however, the club quickly followed suit on July 30, 1969, although the club did not open its bar, dining room, or athletic facilities to women until 1974 and did not open its swimming pool (known as "the plunge") to women until 1987. Now, though, women constitute a large percentage of the club's membership.
Three other, smaller clubs also are in residence at the Yale Club: the Dartmouth Club, the Virginia Club, and the Delta Kappa Epsilon Club. Members of these other clubs have the same access to the clubhouse and its facilities as members of the Yale Club itself.
According to a book published for the club's 1997 centennial, members at that time included George H. W. Bush, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bill Clinton, Gerald Ford, John Kerry and George Pataki. Among others were architect Cesar Pelli and author David McCullough. Today, the Yale Club has over 11,000 members worldwide.
In popular culture
In the third chapter of the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the narrator, Nick Carraway, mentions that he "took dinner usually at the Yale Club", when describing his life as a bonds broker in New York. In Baz Luhrmann's 2013 film version, Nick and Tom Buchanan both belong to the Yale Club and are on their way there by train from Long Island when Tom takes Nick to meet his mistress, Myrtle. Later, Nick opines that Myrtle's raucous party was "better than the Yale Club."
In F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1926 short story The Rich Boy, the main character, Anson Hunter, is a member of the Yale Club and spends a great deal of time there, even when no one else is there. He also lives at the club temporarily during the summer.
Amy Vanderbilt used the Yale Club throughout her 1952 Complete Guide to Etiquette and subsequent editions when giving examples of how to address or style stationery, letters, cards, and invitations involving clubs.
In 1965, in his weekly column titled "My Turn," author John O'Hara lamented, "If Yale had given me a degree, I could have joined the Yale Club, where the food is pretty good, the library is ample and restful, the location convenient, and I could go there when I felt like it without sponging off friends. They also have a nice-looking necktie."[17] O'Hara lamented his lack of a Yale degree so often that his friend Ernest Hemingway joked that a collection should be taken up to send O'Hara to Yale.
In 1972, Frank Mankiewicz famously described John Lindsay as "the only populist in history who plays squash at the Yale Club."
In the 1991 novel American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis, main character Patrick Bateman gets up to use the restroom during lunch at the Yale Club, where to his chagrin he discovers that his coworker Luis Carruthers is in love with him. The chapter is titled "Yale Club."