Before I begin this story, I must disclose that much of it was written within the lacquered mahogany walls of Casa Cipriani New York, the 115-year-old ferry terminal turned members’ club next to where the Staten Island Ferry comes into Manhattan. My spot was a corner couch in front of the crackling fireplace, not because the club was a subject of this story but because I’m a member there and I like to watch the buzzing traffic of private helicopters and boats in the harbor. I would tell you about the characters I see in the Jazz Café on Thursday nights (often in sunglasses at 10 p.m.), and what I hear in the sauna on Tuesday afternoons (this town’s private schools are nuts)—I swear, sometimes it’s a full-Scorsese fever dream—but I can’t, because writing about the club’s members, along with baseball hats and photography, is not permitted.
I am not alone in warming up to the members-only experience. Since the waning of the pandemic, private clubs have proliferated in New York City. It is not a new phenomenon in major urban areas around the world, but this is the crest of a whole new wave of options in a city that has not regarded club membership as a signifier for cool in quite some time. Good for a Christmas party or a cocktail with your dad’s friend? Sure. But not cool. Even as nouveau members-only clubs, like Soho House, thrived in places like London (where it was founded) and Berlin and Mexico City and Bangkok, the sparkle of New York’s location came and went, due to the influx of bad start-up ideas and Allbirds sneakers. Now, though? Soho House’s cachet is back up, with three locations in the city. And pay-for-play social life is having its day. There are start-up clubs, eating clubs, coworking clubs, office clubs that become dance clubs, old blue blood clubs looking for new life, et cetera, et cetera. What happened?
First, obviously, the pandemic. Office life went away, restaurants and bars closed—I don’t need to explain the pandemic to you. But the long-tail effect in New York was not a hollowing out of Manhattan, as some predicted, but rather some real memory loss for how to hang out organically with friends, coworkers, and strangers. Into the breach stepped a slew of new clubs. As I started to get a taste of these clubs—the VC-backed, the university-backed, the birthright-backed—I started to realize that many new young members weren’t joining to connect over some shared value, but just to connect, period. It was easy, in the throes of COVID, to imagine that the absolute last thing that would ever return to New York City was a club where people would congregate to work. And yet here I am, by my new money fireplace.
Another big reason people are joining, it seems, is that, in 2024, it’s harder than ever to keep a secret in New York. If there’s an off-menu order that only regulars know about, some food writer is bound to divulge it for paid subscribers on Substack. Good luck having an affair without showing up in the background of your girlfriend’s favorite influencer’s Instagram story. And if you think you can go to a party at your buddy’s place without Find My Friends blowing the location, think again. Which leaves you with two options: Take all of your meetings in the back of a yellow cab, or join a photo-free club. In other words, many people seem willing to go to desperate lengths to retain the rush of privacy.
Members’ clubs—golf, yacht, university—are nothing new for middle-aged New Yorkers with cash to spend. What’s new is the idea that private clubs, as opposed to Carrie Bradshaw–approved velvet-rope bars, are places for people who are under 40, single, and possibly not even New Yorkers, to spend their Friday nights. It’s like the Cadillac salesman says to Don Draper in Mad Men: This is the car that shows everyone you’ve arrived. Maybe some of these prospective members haven’t entirely arrived yet (the bonus still needs to hit the bank account, the shares still need to be cashed in), but they want to look like they have. After all, a few grand a year in membership fees is less than a Rolex, less than a Cadillac. As these clubs, new and renewing, cast their nets wider for members, will they catch what they’re looking for? And will the prospective members find sex, connection, and community all under the guise of private networking? These are the questions I ask myself while lying under a red-light therapy panel in the empty gym at Casa Cipriani.
This winter and spring, I visited all the clubs I could. I learned of: swimming naked with the boss, priests shooting guns, $200,000 initiation fees, real Warhols, fake names, taxidermy, and all the spicy rigatoni money can buy. Private clubs are weird, it turns out. But the rooms where photos were banned were often the most fun to look at. And beyond the many locked doors and many velvet curtains was an answer to whether club life is a fad confined to this strange period of city living, or if we’re in it for the long run.
In order to better understand the present of New York City club-dom, I figured I’d start in the past.
The burger was pretty good at the New York Athletic Club, which was founded in 1868 and has varying membership rates based on age and “heritage.” The friend I joined there didn’t use my real name on the guest list, to assure their membership wouldn’t be affected by the story. After downing a few Negronis in the company of barely-drinking-age men in Patagonia vests, we decided to explore the building, which truly smelled like chlorine and cash. This involved feeling around the walls in the dark for light switches, which then illuminated empty ballrooms and stately portraits of past NYAC presidents. Labels in the elevator indicated what activity each of the 24 floors were dedicated to—squash, judo, cards, swimming. Outside the elevators on each floor, there were stacks of pamphlets reminding members and guests of the dress code. My consensus was that the buzzing halls of NYAC were filled with people who love beer, hate halter tops, and want to flex Central Park vistas to their buddies.
I understood the universal appeal of having a Tom Collins with a view and signing a bill with a number, but I also understood that NYAC was not for everyone. It was the quintessential members-only club for trust-fund-clad analysts who like watching basketball while discussing Montauk share houses. The best of these concrete-jungle country clubs would endure—even among young New Yorkers—but the worst might fail long-term to attract new members to spend big money on…what exactly? A really nice apartment you can’t live in? Dubious of the pitch from some of the blue blood clubs, I called the youngest person I knew who might be in their thrall.
“The funny thing about the Racquet and Tennis Club” that friend told me, “is that you have to wear a tie in the front door but you have to swim in the nude.” The funny thing to me about the all-male Racquet and Tennis Club, which all of my sources said is the hardest door to get into, is how many people have seen their bosses naked. I learned more: about the Doubles Club, on Fifth Avenue near the park, which apparently still serves mayo salads and gelatin towers that look straight out of the ’70s—and whose application, I’m told, still must be handwritten. I learned about the Links Club, which is apparently exactly what it sounds like: old guys talking about golf. They’re old school, but they’re survivors.
Next up was Core: New York, described by the Times as “New Age” in 2005. Though it belongs to the present century, Core lives beside Soho House as a sort of in-between era of NYC club-dom—the Gen X of NYC clubs—emerging well before the current wave, but enduring through the 2008 recession and the pandemic. Core was founded by CEO Jennie Enterprise, and takes up an expansive 60,000 square feet and four floors of Fifth Avenue. One of the most noteworthy features of the club, besides the 39-seat screening room and the 11 luxurious suites on-site, is the full-floor Dangene spa (run by Dangene Enterprise, wife of Jennie). Smiling practitioners closed each door as I passed through on a recent visit.
I think I’d buy anything Jennie Enterprise tried to sell me—she’s charming, blond, insanely driven, and looks like she was born to wear The Row sweaters over her shoulders. She built her first business as a teenager on Shelter Island—not a lemonade stand, but a tennis camp started with $150, which turned into $10,000 by the end of the summer. “I started to realize that this sort of sense of incrementalism is very important,” Enterprise said. “You have to be able to execute an ambitious vision by being an incrementalist, right?” Totally, I said.
Enterprise told me the club, which has initiation fees that run from $15,000 to $100,000, prides itself on curating a global community of people obsessed with “culture” and “changing the world.” The membership skews a little older, but Enterprise assured me: “We are absolutely interested in infusing and oxygenating the entire community everywhere with young leaders.”
In this way, the New York Athletic Club and Core appear to be finding ways to replenish their memberships. Other older clubs, it’s harder to say. People join the Yale Club because they want to eat the same BLT that their ancestors have been enjoying for a century; people join New York’s hottest restaurant club when they want tuna that was caught in Japan yesterday. To me, demand for the former seems limited. Demand for the latter, I’d find out, is infinite.
Over the past decade, the folks at Major Food Group have opened restaurants that are in such high demand on a nightly basis that they struggle to accommodate their V-est of VIPs. No matter how much care they take with the reservation book at Carbone (in New York, in Miami, in Las Vegas, et al.), they’re always pissing off somebody who’s important to them. The solution? ZZ’s Club. Which includes the signature Japanese restaurant, ZZ’s, and the upstairs Carbone Privato. There are precedents globally, but there’s never been anything quite like ZZ’s Club and the spate of other members-only restaurants that have popped up in New York recently.
The ZZ’s in New York (there’s one in Miami too), which opened in late 2023, is located in a far-away land called Hudson Yards and takes up 25,000 square feet over two floors. Every detail in the club was designed by Ken Fulk, who has also worked on Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom’s house on Lake Tahoe and an “anonymous billionaire’s” private jet. There is an original Warhol, seafood flown in daily from Tokyo, and ornately decorated rooms upstairs that were described to me on my tour as exhibiting “Medici opulence.”
The food was great. I ate more Kobe beef in those two hours than I had in my first 29 years, and the surprising pours of Champagne every 30 minutes resulted in the hangover I’m experiencing as I write this. I learned from a ZZ’s Club member who approached our table that the club replaced the Tavern by WS, a restaurant for wine aficionados that the Times’ Pete Wells once called “better than it should be.” But, get this—that member, who works at Goldman and lives in the West Village, was grandfathered into ZZ’s because he was previously storing his wine at the Tavern. Besides Mr. Goldman, I saw a C-list MTV reality show star and an A+++-list stand-up comedian on my night.
Maybe you don’t want to spend $3,000 a year to chase daddies around the carpeted floors of one of the new social clubs on offer but would like to spend $30,000 (initiation for two, plus $10,000 a year) at ZZ’s Club to have Mario Carbone replay a fantasy of your actual daddy and the lamb chops he used to grill. “We’re the first private club ever to have something called a Culinary Concierge,” Carbone told me. “With as little as 48-hours’ notice, we can reimagine a diner’s favorite meal from when they were a child or make their mother’s chicken soup recipe.”
Before I left, I asked Carbone and his business partner Jeff Zalaznick how they researched the project to make sure there was a market for this kind of place. “We did what we always do,” Carbone said. “Spent a lot of time eating and drinking in private members’ spaces.” Reinspired, I did too.
Tiro a Segno, the oldest Italian-heritage organization in the US, opened on MacDougal Street in 1888, and permits what most rooms in New York don’t: firing guns. (The club’s name literally means “target shooting.”) When members tell me about Tiro a Segno’s food, they focus on garlic and red sauce (there’s apparently no menu); when they talk about the room, it’s on the remarkably casual shooting range in the basement.
I called a friend’s dad’s best friend (of course, he’s a member), and when I asked his thoughts on the guns, he said: “You need some of that stuff in the city, whether you believe in it or not.” When I asked if you had to be of Italian descent to join, he said: “It would be nice to have some Italian roots, a DNA test or something…but anyone can join.” Other people I met who’d visited the club whispered of NYPD officers, priests, and sex workers who take selfies with firearms. When I called the phone number on the club’s site to ask some more questions, the woman who answered put me on hold with music playing. When she got back on the line she said, “You said GQ magazine? I’m sorry, he said we can’t because we’re a members’ club.” I never found out who “he” was, but it sounds like a couple of New York’s most talked about clubs were inspired by “him” and his club.
Scott Sartiano, co-owner of the downtown social club Zero Bond, said he’d be interested in buying Tiro a Segno one day. When we sat down recently on the fourth floor of his club on Bond Street, Sartiano couldn’t have been aware of the ways he shaped my early 20s. When I was a freshman at the Fashion Institute of Technology, 1 Oak, Up & Down, The Darby—all cofounded by Sartiano—were an extension of my Manhattan campus. The nightlife in the early 2010s felt pure, fast, and endless. Some of the nights I laughed the hardest were in bathrooms of 1 Oak with French skaters or finance guys, hiding from other college students who were only there to hook up with rappers or roll on Molly while dancing to Tiësto—and nobody’s phone ever died! I couldn’t tell you where to find a room like that in the city today.
By the time I’d graduated in 2016, the sparkly buckets of New York nightlife, served on ice, had melted. I often think about an April 2020 episode of the Red Scare podcast where actress and model Hari Nef (who happened to be an Up & Down hostess before appearing in The Idol and Barbie) described what made the scene dim. “There stopped being secrets in New York after Instagram,” she said. “As soon as something was good, it was not only documented for clout; the clout was also always tied into an economic buy-in…. Eventually, you get something that is so watered down and divorced from its original state…even though it’s more accessible.”
There’s a strange storm brewing in New York right now: Late millennials who don’t want to grow up (usually men) are in rooms with Gen Z’ers who are growing up too fast (usually women). Is this a tale as old as time? Yes, I’m sure any Strokes concert had the same demographic breakdown. But now people are paying to join clubs that just hand them this experience—flirtation, sex, the performance of networking, status masquerading as power. And that’s just in the nightclubs. The city’s restaurant experience was killed by Resy. The city’s bar party scene was ruined by 9 a.m. Pilates classes. And then there’s the phones….
I raised this sense of a very different post-COVID landscape to Sartiano, who pivoted his focus from nightclubs to members’ clubs in 2020. Zero Bond, which has hosted everyone from Elon Musk to Taylor Swift over the past four years, describes itself as the piece you’ve been missing to perfectly complement your life living in the city. “I noticed young kids were kind of feeling differently about [clubbing], and the price of what you’re paying for went up, but the quality didn’t change,” Sartiano told me. “You were going to the same nightclub with the same sound system, the same furniture, same drinks, but the price went up 3x.” Sophisticated people (or those who identified as such), he continued, had no interest in waiting in lines outside of a club, let alone having Grey Goose poured in their mouth by a club promoter. “Getting jammed in a nightclub is not their thing anymore, which goes for all my friends, whether they’re 25 or 65. There was a huge demand in the market, and there was no supply.”
Sartiano is skilled at manufacturing “fun” for those who would rather pay someone to tell them how to live. Who want a sexy cool experience created for them rather than sought out and found. Some of the best nights I’ve had in New York have been because of happy accidents—staying too late at a restaurant and drinking after hours with the staff, giving someone my number in the sauna at the Wall Street baths, telling a joke to a group of women who were about to get up.
Another thing I noticed about these clubs crafted by the never-age generation of Gen X’ers is that the clubs don’t really end up being for the under-40 crowd—they’re better characterized as for the under-55s. Or in club years, the 34-year-olds who think they’re 25, the 44-year-olds who think they’re 27, and the 55-year-olds who are certain they’re 30.
When I asked Sartiano how many members Zero Bond has, he stared directly at me and calmly responded,“Just the right amount.”
Being a member here grants you access to this space and the people who are interested in the same things you are—exclusivity, privacy, culture, diversity (these words came up constantly while reporting on this story). He said there were “over 10,000 applications, and I don’t exaggerate my numbers.” This is in part because the $3,850 a year is on par with an Equinox membership. “I know I could charge more than anything if I wanted to, and succeed. I judge it based on how hard it is to get in here.”
“Look,” he continued, “there are a few things here that I’m really proud of. One is our art program.” By which he means the works he commissioned for decorating the place. I glimpsed the wall of sneakers created by a conceptual art collective in front of the club’s library (which appeared to have only Assouline coffee-table books) and framed prints of women in thongs in the Baccarat-crystal-filled Tast-ing Room, and I nodded along. I tried to picture Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson sitting in this room on their second date.
“The second,” he said, “is that we’ve had three couples who have met at orientation-member meetings get married. Or two married and one engaged.”
The third? “If you google ‘Zero Bond,’ I think there’ve been three instances in three and a half years of things being written of what supposedly went on inside. One of the three was partially accurate, and the other two were totally made up. And I’m so proud of that because it shows how much my members care and how they follow the rules. Because what’s gone on here is nothing I’ve ever seen in all my years.”
“I think they all respect Zero Bond,” Sartiano said, “and what it brings to their lives in a way that far exceeds hospitality.” Someone like Eric Adams, who has held court often at Zero Bond since being elected New York City’s mayor in 2021, can live life at the club like it’s pre-TikTok 2012—outside the gaze of cameras, possibly even with recent bachelor (and occasional Zero Bond guest) Tom Brady.
I asked Sartiano for an example of what someone has to do to get kicked out. He said, “Ask someone for a photo.”
This was getting exhausting. Whipping around the city all day, doing the Lord’s work. Good thing Casa Cipriani is encouraging of members taking naps beside the fireplace.
I had to press onward.
A members’ club in Bushwick (a new borough has entered the conversation!) called 154 Scott opened recently in the SAA (Scott Avenue Associates) Building. “Bushwick is one of the last neighborhoods in New York where there is a genuine feeling of serendipity, where you could literally stumble upon anything,” the club’s creative director Gabriella Khalil told me. “Members’ clubs are a moniker that are commonly used right now—but ultimately, SAA is founded on community.”
Khalil and her husband also run the Instagram-famous Palm Heights hotel on Grand Cayman and the almost-Erewhon market on Canal Street, Happier Grocery, and the new Financial District “vertical neighborhood transforming space” WSA. WSA, a converted finance, insurance, and real estate office that now houses downtown creative businesses, is a throwback to Working Girl–era Wall Street–office grandeur. When I asked the team at 154 Scott the price of a membership, they said you have to apply to find out. The most information you’ll find online about them is that they’re hiring a scrub therapist and a sommelier.
Where else? Oh! Silencio. Shhh. The club closest in energy to Sartiano’s past projects (nightclubs) is down a narrow staircase on 57th Street. If you’re thinking, That must be named after the theater in Mulholland Drive, you’d be correct. The club’s original Paris location was designed by David Lynch; the New York location was designed by Harry Nuriev, and takes inspiration from Lynch’s Twin Peaks. On a recent night, the crowd was Dimes Square meets skater meets hip-hop meets “If you know, you know” older art world people. The thick red velvet lining the walls makes it a sexier option for those looking to spend money on a members’ club, and although it’s open to the public (albeit with a tough door), 1,200 euros a year gets you exclusive and priority access to Silencio locations worldwide and a coworking space in Paris.
Aman New York, which opened in 2022, can’t stay out of recent headlines. One of its full-floor condos sold this year for $61 million, the hotel rooms are among the city’s most expensive ($1,950 a night to start), and it has a members’ club with a $200,000 initiation fee. Members of Aman Club New York were the most skittish group I spoke to for this story—they did not want to even think about jeopardizing their memberships. So I went to the next best source: a friend who has been a few times. I asked him to set the scene for me.
“When I walk in with my friend,” he texted me, “everyone knows his name. I’ve entered without him before and it’s all a bit drier. You go up in an elevator to a massive floor with high ceilings. There’s an outdoor area for smoking and they bring you cigars and little snacks. The olives are fire, actually. And some wasabi peas and nuts. They’re refilling shit constantly. Definitely more men than women. The men range from bankers to Long Islanders—I mean that, unfortunately, in a derogatory way.” This is where I tell you all I’m from Long Island. “The food is solid but unspectacular. And there’s a jazz club that is actually amazing, with a total of five people in the crowd. So it actually felt like a personal show.” It’s sad to think about a trumpet player absolutely shredding to a crowd of five, but if these places are supporting New York’s jazz musicians? That’s a type of patronage I can get behind.
Around the corner from Soho House, in the Meatpacking District, is the home of a not-yet-open club called Chez Margaux. Chez Margaux’s website breaks down the membership fees ($1,800 a year if you’re 31 or under, $2,600 if you’re over), and guides visitors through watercolor illustrations and copy that personify Margaux (the club) as someone who “owns you before you ever knew you were for sale.” The primary selling point of Chez Margaux is a restaurant by Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Michael Cayre, the landlord of the building, is the landlord of Soho House and Casa Cipriani. From what I’ve learned, where the general public of Manhattan sees just an empty building, Cayre sees a pile of cash.
All of these clubs have their acolytes and detractors, each solving for a different, somehow previously unmet need of New Yorkers. But will any last long-term? New shiny things come and go. But there’s one club, due to open later this year, that most people I spoke with are convinced might stick.
I’m talking about the East Coast location of San Vicente Bungalows, which is taking over the historic Jane Hotel property. SVB—not to be confused with the beleaguered Silicon Valley Bank—prides itself on attracting a community of “extraordinary individuals,” which includes 3,000 board-vetted members, from (supposedly) Steven Spielberg to Elon Musk. The success of the original LA edition, from hotelier Jeff Klein, accounts for the fact that there are rumored to be 10,000 people on a wait list for a club no one has seen yet.
Despite gossip being the glue that holds members’ clubs together, it’s strictly prohibited at the San Vicente Bungalows. Also prohibited are: taking photos, posting photos, smoking marijuana (cigarettes are fine in the Smoking Garden), and discussing what you “witness” at the club. The warm welcome I got as the guest of a member at the Los Angeles location recently was two green stickers—one for the front camera of my phone, and one for the back. I know more than one person who has been reported on and later kicked out of the club for taking photos on-site (a member told me that the security cameras are heavily used). A club wants to be as private as its most secretive member. But really, it’s only as private as its least secretive member.
How the West Village’s Jane Hotel—once known for its velvet couches, Italian-disco dance parties, taxidermy, and my first kiss with a Harvard student (who took a plane to New York with his final club for the night)—will be transformed is the burning question on the minds of the club-inclined. “The only reason I might join is based on what the space looks like,” a designer in New York told me. Rose Uniacke (whose client list includes the Beckhams, and whose husband, David Heyman, is the producer behind all eight Harry Potter films) is responsible for the interiors.
The opening date has slid back three or four times since I started reporting, and in a recent email, Klein told me, “We hope to open in August or September of 2024!” When I asked the team for more information, the following response was one of the many prompt, polite rejections I received: “We are due to open our doors in 2024 however we do not do any press. Wishing you all the best moving forward.” As these evasive emails piled up,
I became a student of their butler-ish, at times ominous, copy.
San Vicente Bungalows West Village, in particular, represents the untested future of clubs in New York—a future fueled by the creative-celebrity culture that dominates so much of social media right now. Spaces like it are appealing to people who like to talk about money and be seen spending it—but who also want to feel like they had to earn their way in through their profession or lifestyle. Though privacy, privilege, and exclusivity are the thing you’re paying for anywhere, this kind of club is about being marked as a person of note in the high-end, bicoastal creative class. The Raya of IRL clubs. The blue check mark of memberships.
When YOU finally do arrive, we can assume you’ve also left something else behind. After applying for the club, after sitting through interviews with strangers who are paid to quantify how interesting you are and to measure how much cool you can bring to a room—then what do you get? Gloved hands and glimmering smiles hiding the contempt of someone who knows they’d never be in the same room as you outside of their uniform? A social fortress filled with one hundred other people who have nowhere better to be on a Friday night? Delivery on a promise that you’ll always get inside the door? I learned that, for many people, that’s enough.
But there have to be members who look out the window on the drive home at night and think about the city’s other doors—the thrill of sneaking into a suite at Yankee Stadium, or going to an old bar with new friends who are down to slip a stranger their number, or taking shots and singing “Happy Birthday” to the manager at their regular restaurant after closing time. Resurfacing from the pandemic, we found we’d grown apart. Even now, it often feels as though we’re relearning how to connect. Some got rich (or richer), and are willing to crack open their purses and wallets to fast-forward through the boring parties, the loneliness, the uncertainty and discovery of finding solid footing. The unmarked doors are the most tempting to try to slip through. Not knowing precisely who or what is behind them is part of why we all still live in New York.
I heard the word no a lot more than yes while sourcing for this story. The institutions worked as designed: I didn’t belong there. All the responses taught me that these clubs fill voids, most commonly an almost juvenile yearning for friends under the guise of the word community. We’ve still got a long way to go before we reach peak club. A new West Village restaurant called Frog Club is costuming as a members-only club by putting stickers on diners’ phone cameras and limiting reservations to a word-of-mouth email address. And Sporty and Rich, an activewear brand that recently opened a store in SoHo, sells $190 sweatshirts for those who want to signal that they’re members of Sporty and Rich Country Club, which doesn’t even exist. But then again, San Vicente Bungalows West Village doesn’t exist yet either, and it still (supposedly) has 10,000 people refreshing their inbox, waiting for acceptance.
Emily Sundberg lives in New York and writes the “Feed Me” Substack.
A version of this story appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of GQ with the title “How New York’s Social Life Went Members-Only”