The Knickerbocker Club (known informally as The Knick) is a gentlemen's club in New York City that was founded in 1871. It is considered to be the most exclusive club in the United States and one of the most aristocratic gentlemen's clubs in the world. The term Knickerbocker arose partly due to the use of the pen name Diedrich Knickerbocker by writer Washington Irving, and was a byword for a New York patrician, comparable to a "Boston Brahmin".
History
The Knickerbocker Club was founded in 1871 by members of the Union Club of the City of New York who were concerned that the club's admission standards had fallen. By the 1950s, urban social club membership was dwindling, in large part because of the movement of wealthy families to the suburbs. In 1959, the Knickerbocker Club considered rejoining the Union Club, merging its 550 members with the Union Club's 900 men, but the plan never came to fruition.
The Knick's current clubhouse, a neo-Georgian structure at 2 East 62nd Street, was commissioned in 1913 and completed in 1915, on the site of the former mansion of Josephine Schmid, a wealthy widow. It was designed by William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich, and it has been designated a city landmark.
Membership Members of the Knickerbocker Club are almost exclusively descendants of British and Dutch aristocratic families that governed the early 1600s American Colonies or that left the Old Continent for political reasons (e.g. partisans of the Royalist coalition against Cromwell, such as the "distressed Cavaliers" of the aristocratic Virginia settlers), or current members of the international aristocracy. Towards the middle of the 20th century, however, the club opened its door to a few descendants of the Gilded Age's prominent families, such as members of the Rockefeller family. E. Digby Baltzell explains in his 1971 book Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class:
The circulation of elites in America and the assimilation of new men of power and influence into the upper class takes place primarily through the medium of urban clubdom. Aristocracy of birth is replaced by an aristocracy of ballot. Frederick Lewis Allen showed how this process operated in the case of the nine Lords of Creation who were listed in the New York Social Register as of 1905: “The nine men who were listed [in the Social Register] were recorded as belonging to 9.4 clubs apiece,” wrote Allen. “Though only two of them, J. P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt III, belonged to the Knickerbocker Club, the citadel of Patrician families (indeed, both already belonged to old prominent families at the time), Stillman and Harriman joined these two in the membership of the almost equally fashionable Union Club; Baker joined these four in the membership of the Metropolitan Club of New York (magnificent, but easier of access to new wealth); John D. Rockefeller, William Rockefeller Jr., and Rogers, along with Morgan and Baker were listed as members of the Union League Club (the stronghold of Republican respectability); seven of the group belonged to the New York Yacht Club. Morgan belonged to nineteen clubs in all; Vanderbilt, to fifteen; Harriman, to fourteen.” Allen then goes on to show how the descendants of these financial giants were assimilated into the upper class: “By way of footnote, it may be added that although in that year [1905] only two of our ten financiers belonged to the Knickerbocker Club, in 1933 the grandsons of six of them did. The following progress is characteristic: John D. Rockefeller, Union League Club; John D. Rockefeller Jr., University Club; John D. Rockefeller 3rd, Knickerbocker Club. Thus is the American aristocracy recruited.” Christopher Doob wrote in his book Social Inequality and Social Stratification in U.S. Society:
Personal wealth has never been the sole basis for attaining membership in exclusive clubs. The individual and family must meet the admissions committee's standards for values and behavior. Old money prevails over new money as the Rockefeller family experience suggests. John D. Rockefeller, the family founder and the nation's first billionaire, joined the Union League Club, a fairly respectable but not top-level club; John D. Rockefeller Jr., belonged to the University Club, a step up from his father; and finally his son John D. Rockefeller, III, reached the pinnacle with his acceptance into the Knickerbocker Club (Baltzell 1989, 340).
Selected notable members
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