Clubs are Alive and Well
Down with the preemptive obituaries
Peruse any major newspaper and you might come across some articles nearly celebrating the demise of Clubland as we know it.
The Wall Street Journal has run in broad strokes a feature headlined “exclusive Ivy League social clubs are desperate for members”. And yes, they’re paying Facebook to ensure that club rats like me see it. Even the Robb Report was more than happy to oblige the Journal and echo its opinions. The New York Times sang praises in print and in video of the “new” privately owned and operated “clubs” that are hospitality businesses masquerading as “clubs”: think SoHo House, as if one format weren’t enough. The Financial Times, usually a stalwart of the right and proper, decided that new and trendy was worth highlighting, and thought to diminish our fellow Clubland at St. James by highlighting the “new clubs”.
Thankfully, however, not every single pundit thinks Clubland is dead. An initially reluctant Joy Lo Dico comes to the defence of the Financial Times’ house style of right and proper, while the double-barrelled Fergus Butler-Gallie’s illustrated guide to London clubland, in those same salmon pages, is a respite from the doomerism that has become the norm for the news to-day.
Yes, we ought to mourn those we lost in the past half-decade: the Princeton Club, Friars Club, India House Club, in New York were not the only casualties. The Sangamo Club of Springfield, Illinois, University Club of Albany in Albany, NY, the Nebraska Club of Lincoln, Nebraska, and the Little Rock Club of Little Rock, Arkansas were three other notable victims of pandemic-induced losses. It is always sad to see clubs go: these clubs, owned by their members, are toiled for and nurtured, generation after generation. They deserve a moment of silence: our clubs could have very well been part of that coterie. But they are not; for now, the storm has been weathered.
We, at Clubland USA, say: stop. Stop with the catastrophism and decline-mongering.
Clubland is alive and well. While in 2020, Clubland seemed like it would be imperilled by the impending digitisation of every single interaction and the removal of interpersonal, in-person interaction, when the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and Financial Times took aim at Clubland, it was four years thence, and the overarching narrative that they are pending is simply unsustainable.
Observers in various quarters have celebrated the rebirth and rejuvenation of clubland. Andy Medici, a senior reporter at American City Business Journals, has observed the increasing number of younger members at country clubs in recent years, which is a significant change in their demographic profile. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times have all observed that clubs have been popping up faster than they can be whacked in the latest whackamole game in real estate, propped up between Manhattan and London.
Membership is rising. Waiting lists are growing longer. If your club weathered the storm, it’s probably going stronger than it was before the pandemic. The mid-winter January lulls are no longer as catastrophic and silent as they were a few years ago. Membership rosters are becoming less gray, an unexpected change from when I joined my first club — independent and away from a family charge account or an inherited membership. And, today, whilst writing this, I’m surrounded by a group of friends I’ve made here, young, old, new members and old alike.
Good luck finding a spot at the bar for happy hour.
Club life is a respite from the blandness and uniformity that has seized life outside Clubland: it is full of colour, of laughter and vibrancy, of the associational impulse that Tocqueville lauded the Americans for when he visited in 1831–32. There is still a world where the pomp and circumstance of dressing up, dining with friends, or simply doing cocktail hour can be conducted in relative comfort and style and privacy.
It is the definitive third place—not home, not work, reserved for leisure and the finer things (squash and scotch, namely).
A world still exists where you can make friends, young and old, and not fret about the digitisation of everything. In Clubland, you are a person: a real person, not a string of binary digits, not something that is swiped upon.
Clubland is the last bastion of personhood in an impersonal world. Clubland is alive, well and thriving across this great, vast land.