I should know: I belong to one, and it’s becoming more commodified.
I recently met a man who’s lived in New York for about 25 years. Like most people who’ve been here that long, he was lamenting that the city isn’t what it used to be. Back in the 2000s, he told me wistfully, you could go to some random event — and he knew whereof he spoke, he is an events planner — and meet someone who could change your life, or at least your career. Now things are much less organic: Instead of crashing a fashion party in a Soho loft, he said, people are just retiring to their private club.
I nodded sympathetically, though in my New York of the 2000s, a Soho fashion party may as well have taken place on Jupiter. I spent most of those years alone in a library working on my economics PhD dissertation. I would never have known about such a party, let alone had the social capital or wherewithal to go.
Fast forward a couple decades, and here I am writing this column from a private club. Much as I would like to believe that my membership is evidence of my exalted social status, a question nags at me: Are members’ clubs just a lot less exclusive than they used to be?
Continue reading the entire piece here at Bloomberg Opinion (paywall)
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Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
Photo by Bogdanhoda/ Getty Images
