The Club: There’s a Small Hotel

Where women cease from troubling And the wicked are at rest.

This distillation of the gentleman’s club tradition is carved on a stone slab in the floor of New York City’s spanking-new Princeton Club. But some old grads attending the dedication ceremonies last week were in for a shock. The words apply only to the grill. In nearly every other of the 140-rooms, women’s troubling is welcomed with open arms. For this nine-story building on 43rd Street may well be the mold and model of the club of the future—the “family club.”

Gone are all the ancient appurtenances of the Man’s World—the big leather chairs, the massive standing lamps, the gloomy high ceilings and rich carpets. Instead, the rooms are low-ceilinged (more floors) and cheerily antiseptic, with light furniture and artificial plants, bathed in the flat, shadowless lighting of fluorescent panels and inset ceiling lamps. From the complex air-processing plant in the clean sub-basement to the twin-bedded rooms and suites above, the club is planned, as the Princeton Alumni Weekly says, “to please the girls.”

No More Purdah. The main dining room is for ladies alone or ladies with men. Lone males are barred. They must eat in the strictly misogynist grill or the large Madison Room,* where movies may be shown or the rug rolled back for dancing. Suburban wives have quarters where they can shower and change, retool the hairdo, or snooze awhile before meeting their Princetonian husbands for an evening on the town. And there have even been rumors that the club’s three airconditioned squash courts might be made available to female racqueteers in off hours.

In U.S. life, the stag has long been at bay. But more and more men have begun to find the posture ridiculous, or at least uninteresting. Princeton men, in particular, are becoming increasingly family-oriented; wives and children sometimes almost seem to outnumber old grads at the alumni reunions. Other city clubs have tried to adjust by setting aside special rooms for the ladies. But Princeton decided to end the purdah.

Transients Only. Some complain that the result is nothing more (or less) than an Ivy League hotel. But it seems to work. When the Princeton Club sold its rambling mansion on Park Avenue and 39th Street three years ago for $2.300,000, membership had slipped down to 3,100 (from a peak 4,000 in 1955). Today it has jumped to a record 4,800, and the applications are pouring in, though the dues have been raised from $90 to $150 a year (as of April 1).

Chief victims are those confirmed bachelors or men-between-marriages who had made the club their home, establishing their squatters’ rights to a corner chair, reading the shared newspapers on the long wooden sticks. They have been banished; the new Princeton Club caters to transients only. “And our room prices are really reasonable.” says Manager Ray Adams, a graduate of Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration. “There’s no first-rate hotel in this area where you can get a single room for $9 to $12 or a double for $16 to $18.”

*Named for the first of the two Princeton graduates to become President of the U.S.