New York Life | The Last of Brooklyn’s Private Clubs

(New York) At a time when private clubs are springing up like mushrooms in Manhattan, there is only one left in Brooklyn: the Montauk Club, founded in 1889, in the heart of the Gilded Agethis period of prosperity which inspired the creators of Downton Abbey a series of the same name set in opulent New York in the late 19th century.^e century.

Its survival is due to the same factor that has contributed to the opening of a plethora of private clubs in Manhattan in recent years: the COVID-19 pandemic.

“In 2021, when I took over, the club was on the verge of bankruptcy,” said Mary Brennan, president of the Montauk Club, leaning on the bar on a recent Friday night. “COVID has actually been really good to us, in a weird way.”

As the retired urban planner recounts the past and present history of the club in Park Slope, a popular Brooklyn neighborhood, members seated on leather sofas and armchairs watch a broadcast of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics on a giant screen.

In a room decorated for the occasion with small national flags, there will not be anyone to complain about the drag queens of director Thomas Jolly.

“The commitment to diversity is not new to the Montauk Club,” Mary Brennan would say, looking back in time.

“In 1889, when the club opened, its first members were Jews and Catholics. If you know anything about the Gilded Age, you know that this was completely unprecedented. It was the first club in Brooklyn and one of the largest in New York. Yet no one followed suit.”

“Magnificent” architecture

Like other members of the Montauk Club, Mary Brennan was first attracted by the Venetian Gothic architecture of the building that housed it, which contrasted with the neoclassical style of most other private clubs of the time.

That was in the early 1990s. Three decades later, the Montauk Club’s annual membership fee remains modest: $650. Pessimistic compared with what many of the private clubs that have sprung up in Manhattan in recent years charge.

The Aman Club, nestled atop the Crown Building on the corner of 5^e Avenue and 57^e Rue, is one of the most exclusive. Membership fee: $200,000. Annual fee: $15,000. The Aman Club is part of a phenomenon that the New York Times called the members-only maniawhich could be translated as the madness of exclusivity.

And while they may not all be able to afford memberships in the new private clubs for the ultra-rich, a growing number of New Yorkers are looking for exclusive places to hang out with their peers outside of work, especially those who are still working from home. A quest that savvy entrepreneurs are making a point of satisfying by taking advantage of buildings or spaces left vacant by the pandemic to expand their private clubs.

But the members of the Montauk Club are different.

“I like that the club is not snobby,” says Sargama Gupta, a 34-year-old illustrator who recently joined. “People don’t expect you to behave in a certain way, it’s a bit more relaxed.”

“An expression of civic prosperity”

It wasn’t always this way. Although open to Jews and Catholics, the Montauk Club’s founders wanted only wealthy men with a certain standard to uphold as members (women, while present from the beginning, wouldn’t be admitted as members until the 1960s).

“We recognize this enterprise as an expression of civic prosperity,” said one speaker at the Montauk Club’s groundbreaking, after noting that “comfort and entertainment [des] “members” were no longer the reason for the existence of the clubs, which had become “centers of information, discussion and influence.”

Over the years, the Park Slope club would host several famous politicians, including William McKinley, Grover Cleveland, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.

It also had to go through several crises that shook its finances or called into question its mission: World War I, Prohibition, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

The most recent crisis—the pandemic—could have finished it off, but it didn’t. Instead, it forced the Montauk Club to change its offerings and its rules. Gone is the traditional private club menu of four appetizers, three or four main courses, and as many desserts. Introducing a menu of small dishes that don’t require a full kitchen brigade.

Gone, too, is the dress code. “All we ask is that members don’t wear anything offensive,” Mary Brennan says with a laugh.

The changes coincided with the city lifting restrictions on bar and restaurant attendance.

“That’s where COVID was really good to us,” says the president of the Montauk Club, named after an Algonquin tribe on Long Island. “After being stuck at home, people were ready to socialize. And the club felt safer than a bar with 100 people. We have high ceilings, big rooms and, as I like to say, 135-year-old windows that let the drafts in.”

Another home

Result: the number of club members, which stood at around 200 before the pandemic, now stands at around 550.

Emily Ashton is part of the new cohort of members.

“I joined the club for two reasons,” says the 51-year-old New Yorker, who lives in Park Slope and works in the city’s Department of Emergency Management.

“I also think it’s really nice to have a place where you can bring your childhood best friend, where you can bring your grandmother. It feels like everyone is welcome.”

Sitting next to him, childhood friend Soroya Pinheiro nods. “I like the feeling the club gives of being a home away from home,” she says.

But would the founders of the Montauk Club approve of all the changes made by the current management? At the bar, Mary Brennan’s response is not long in coming.

“I like to think they would be pleased with it, for two reasons. First, the club is still open. Second, these were men who were willing to admit Jews and Catholics, and who had opened their doors to women. They were willing to break the norm. They were willing to do things that were unusual in many ways. I’d like to think they would think we were following in their footsteps in a positive way.”