Members only. The sign is clear and direct in its simple insistence. This establishment—its grounds, the clubhouse, the exciting party now underway—is for the benefit of members only.
In this article, we consider how the clubhouse itself has often embodied the exclusivity that attaches to club membership. We consider also how the restrictions communicated by the “Members Only” sign and the sentiments it expresses have been subject to various interpretations and responses. It has usually been safeguarded, but at other times relaxed, sometimes granted special exemption and, on at least one occasion, in the distant past, breached!
The Soho House
This club system, with locations across the globe—London, Berlin, New York—is one of the latest incarnations of the exclusive city club. This club concept has a laser-like focus on who its target member is … and isn’t.
The club aims at young professionals, fully cosmopolitan and very much in touch with the contemporary scene as it relates to fashion, art and entertainment. Indeed, the New York outpost of the Soho House has actively discouraged the young investment banker or Wall Street financier from choosing the Soho House as his or her own. Writers, painters, directors and entertainers are fine, but hedge fund managers and private equity types need not apply.
Several years ago, McMahon Group sent a reporter to visit the club. Kathy Gilsinan was then a young writer (she’s currently an editor at The Atlantic) working out of Brooklyn. So we thought her credentials as a young intellectual might gain her passage into the Soho Club. But no such luck.
Not one to be easily discouraged, she provided an amusing piece of her observations of the club rhythms and patterns as gleaned from her reluctant status as outsider. Her vivid, if somewhat speculative, portrait of the alluring rooftop pool anticipated the prospect of stress-reducing massages and treatments administered in the playfully named Cowshed Spa, and generally imagined hanging with the beautiful people in at a bar the exuded an urban sensibility complete with exposed wooden beams and distressed brick walls.
Medinah Country Club
Harvard sociologist Robert Putman has charted the decline of “belonging” in America in his aptly titled Bowling Alone. He observed that in the second half of the twentieth century, citizens were less likely to join or remain as members in all kinds of associations or organizations. His title is a reflection of his observation that league bowling—once a popular activity across the country—has fallen dramatically as an American pastime. The same might also be said of social and civic groups and fraternal organization like the Elks, Moose, and Lions Clubs.
Medinah is a storied club in suburban Chicago that is especially well known for its great championship course that has hosted many major golf tournaments. Its clubhouse is also a remarkable piece of architecture, with its distinctly Moorish accents. Golf magazine has named it one of it top 20 U.S. golf clubhouses.
Perhaps, less well known is that Medinah was once a club solely established for those in the Shriners fraternal organization. But as the number of Shriners declined steadily over the years, the club’s membership charter was no longer sustainable. So, in 1932—coincident with the Great Depression—the club opened its membership to non-Shriners.
Today the club thrives with a strong roster of members that stretches to include national and international members. The dramatic clubhouse draws its name from the Muslim holy city of Medina and its architectural is unmistakably Middle Eastern, a smaller version, some say, of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. The orange-brick structure has real scale: three stories high containing over 100,000 square feet and two towers at either end of the structure. The minaret that reached heavenward is now gone, the victim of a lightning strike. There is much to admire inside as well, especially the rotunda, with its intricate and beautifully painted ceiling mosaic.
So hats off (including all red fezzes) to the estimable Shriners—their generosity of spirit reflected in their enduring charitable work and their exotic clubhouse that expands the boundaries of imagination.
Augusta National Golf Club
Three-time Masters Champion Gary Player has this observation about Augusta National Golf Club: “It’s not the most elaborate clubhouse, but the ambiance and history attached to it is unparalleled. I actually prefer a clubhouse of this nature, instead of something that is much larger and grandiose. It has a tremendous amount of character.”
It’s perhaps an irony that one of the most exclusive clubs in the world is also one of the most viewed, photographed and admired. We may not know precisely where Butlers Cabin is located on the hallowed grounds of Augusta National, but we can all nevertheless squeeze into its comfy confines via the magic of television each April to witness the ceremonial presentation as the Masters Tournament champion slips into his iconic Green Jacket.
The Masters trophy remains on site, but the champion does receive a replica, which is a model of the Augusta National clubhouse that is 13.5 inches wide, 6.5 inches tall and weighs 20 pounds. While the champion’s green jacket is custom tailored and can be worn out of Butlers Cabin and into the wider world, it does come with a sort of date: the winner is expected to return it to the club after his one-year reign presumably ends, and where it is safely stowed and available for wear by the past-champion at strictly club-hosted, on-premise events. The only Masters champion who chafed at this restriction was the late Seve Ballesteros, who from the Iberian peninsula, challenged the Augusta powers with this counter-offer: “If they want it, they can fly to Spain and come and get it.”
To steal a phrase from Jim Nantz at CBS, the one tradition at Augusta that is especially “unlike any other” revolves around a special area located in the upper reaches of the clubhouse—with an entrance which, if not exactly secret, is quite easy to miss. “The Crow’s Nest” is an attic-like space, which might pass for a sort of residence hall apartment (though one at a decidedly high-end college). The bedrooms here are reserved for a select group of “outsiders:” the amateurs that qualify to play in the Masters.
Imagine it! To be a young amateur with a game that has landed you at the epicenter of golf’s tradition: Augusta National and the first of golf’s four major tournaments. Here’s how one inhabitant described the experience:
The feeling all week was pure, pure happiness. Everything was beautiful, the grass just so, so green. The feeling you get inside is ecstatic. I enjoyed every minute. How the club treated the amateurs. The Crow’s Nest. Spartan. Bunk beds. One day I came flying around a corner and slammed into somebody. “Sorry guy,” I said, and, of course, it was Arnold Palmer. (Rick Bendall, Class of 1972, Golf Digest, February 26, 2012.
No less that eight young amateurs who bunked at Augusta National have gone on to win the Masters. A list of golfing giants: Jack Nicklaus, Tommy Aaron, Tom Watson, Ben Crenshaw, Craig Stadler, Mark O’Meara, Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods. How many dreamed up there in the Crow’s Nest that they might one day be Masters champions?
The Tomb
All clubs take a giant step toward permanence and recognition when they signal their presence in the form of a physical clubhouse. This was especially true of the various “secret societies” that popped up in and around undergraduate collegiate institutions in a now bygone era. The Ivy League colleges were an especially fertile breeding ground in the early 19th century for such activities that often focused on clubhouse mysteries.
Yale is famous (or maybe infamous) for its Skull and Bones secret society, which persists into the present era and is said to count among its members prominent politicians both past and present (several presidents, Senators and Supreme Court justices), as well as artists, writers and business leaders. Indeed, if the rumor mill is to be believed, a relatively recent U.S. Presidential election pitted two Bonesmen against each other—that would be the 2004 election in which incumbent George W. Bush (Bones 1968) faced off against John Kerry (Bones 1966).
When I was at Yale in the late 1970s, one of the worst kept secrets of this so-called secret society was that its clubhouse was located on High Street near the corner of Chapel in New Haven. Hardly an inviting edifice, the original structure was built in what the Yale Alumni Magazine describes as “a single forbidding, windowless block in Egypto-Doric style.” This Temple of Doom façade mingled with rumor and superstition to push pedestrians in the know to the periphery—many students elected to cross to the other side of the street rather than skirt the property too closely.
It was built in 1856, constructed of stone—when such edifices would have been relatively rare on the campus of Yale—and probably at considerable expense, perhaps as much as $30,000 (more than most official college structures would have then cost). Additions came, first in 1883 and then again in 1903, but the same tomb-like appearance was faithfully preserved, emphasizing its mysterious provenance and serving up a less-than-subtle warning to any curious passers by wanting to know more.
Of course, efforts to discourage attention were largely unsuccessful, serving only to draw more public scrutiny. School officials tried to dissuade, punish and intervene (even pleading for parental support) in their various containment efforts, all of which only gave the society further notoriety and attention.
The Tomb—as the campus focal point become known—beckoned. Here’s some typical 19th century hype: “The society halls are retired and guard their own secrets. Curiosity stops abruptly at the iron doors.” Of course it didn’t. Inquiring minds wanted to know.
And so it was in September of 1876 that an enterprising group of Yale undergraduates, with “the vulgar eyes of the uninitiated,” broke into the tomb to find out what all the fuss was about.
After prying bars from a back-cellar window and digging through a wall, the group gained entrance into tomb in the dark of night and “proceeded to examine the Temple at our leisure.” But not much of interest was ultimately discovered. They caught sight of some modest efforts to incorporate the actual skull and bones motif in the décor. A light burning in the cellar illuminated “a dilapidated human skull.”
Proceeding upward through the clubhouse, the explorers found the main hall on the first floor had “gaudily frescoed” walls. In one parlor room there was “a life-size fac simile of the Bones pin inlaid in the black marble hearth” of the fireplace and, below that, a club motto in the obligatory Latin, “Rari Quippe Boni” (or “The good are indeed few”). Evidently at the point of no return, the interlopers checked out the society’s safe, but it had little: “a bunch of keys and a small gold-mounted flask half-filled with brandy.”
In the end, one can scarcely dispute the raiders conclusion: “Thorough examination of every part of the temple leads us to the conclusion that ‘the most powerful of college societies’ is nothing more than a convivial club.” So, with this incursion into the sacred precincts of the clubhouse, the secrets of the Skull and Bones Society were revealed. Or were they? Peel back the exclusive and austere exterior and what you actually find in the clubhouse is the warm glow of conviviality.
Club Trends Fall 2016