The Club
What has ever become of the Club? No, I do not mean that kryptonite steel bar that we used to use to secure our steering wheels so that when we parked on the streets of New York, perpetrators could not easily steal our cars. I checked and those contraptions are apparently still available for about $40, so I assume that they still work. Old school, but, I guess, pretty effective. No, I am talking about a different kind of Old School. In my case, I am talking about The Cornell Club, where we are staying in NYC this week. Founded in 1989 (I think I already told you that I am a founding member for whatever that’s worth). As a non-resident (NYC Metro area) member, I pay about $1,500 per year (that totals to over $50,000 since I began) to have access to a pied-à-terre of sorts here in midtown Manhattan. I have actually used the Club enough over the years so that I feel I have gotten fair value from those membership fees. When I worked here in midtown (48/49 and Park for 23 years and 47 and Madison for 4 years), I came here often for lunch or to meet people for a drink in the Pub Room. When I was in my in-between or post-institutional stages of my career, I would use the place as my base of operations, especially when I was hunting for my next opportunity or in need of a midtown meeting venue. Now that I am gone from New York, I am quite happy to use it as my base of operations for our visits here. Midtown hotels are plentiful and I can get one for more or less the same price per night as this place, but the smaller, more familiar and less insecure nature of the Club makes it ideal for both Kim and me, so this is now our home away from home in NYC.
As an example of the benefits of staying here, yesterday my pal Rob finally called me back after a day of my reaching out to him. He had the usual array of “my life is so complicated right now” excuses that we have all felt at one time or another…particularly when one lives and/or works in NYC. After a minute of making excuses, he asked me where I was at that moment and I said I was in my Cornell Club room, racked on on my King Size bed. He said he was downstairs in the business center. Voila, one of the advantages of staying at the Cornell Club. I had an instant meet-and-greet opportunity for just the cost of slipping on my loafers and heading down to the bar. It doesn’t get easier than that. With Rob, who is a Cornellian who works in midtown and lives on the Upper East side, the Cornell Club is for him exactly what it has been and is for me, a base of operation, so that coincidence is not really all that strange, even though it was admittedly convenient.
But even if people are not Cornellians or work in midtown or even live in Manhattan, meeting at the the Club is still extremely convenient. First of all, it is a stone’s throw from Grand Central, which, as the name implies, is a central transportation hub that everyone knows and that provides a convenient point of demarcation as well as an easy place from which to get a subway or cab almost anywhere you want to go in NYC or beyond. If you’re heading north of the City, you go through Grand Central. If you are heading East, West or South of the City you can jump on the train to Penn Station where you can get to another train out in any of those three ordinal directions. It really is the grand central hub.
It’s also more than that. Whenever you want to meet up with someone in NYC, there is always the issue of where. Needless to say, there are countless bars and restaurants in this area, but choosing one is always challenging. One never knows when one is open or closed. Sometimes these places just go away in the middle of the night…you would be surprised. At this time of year there is always the likelihood that someone has booked the place for a holiday party. And then there is the issue of reservations…fuggetaboutit! But if you say, let’s meet at my Club, that has a certain way of being very soothing and very convincing. The other person immediately says to themselves, “Damn! Why didn’t I suggest that and then we could have gone to the Yale/Harvard/Penn/University Club instead of the puny Cornell Club”. They also know that you are likely to be more insistent, if not for graciousness as for personal convenience, so they tend to cave in more easily than if you said, “Let’s meet at Nobu.” They also know that at least they won’t have to pay because whoever’s Club wins out, they get to pay on account and do that very Old School thing of signing their house account to a little paper tab and saying “Thank you, George”, knowing that George cannot take a tip, but instead just lives on his Christmas tips. So, off to the Club you go.
I have a question for you, do you ever sit in the lobby of the hotels you stay at? Maybe if you are waiting for someone, but otherwise, not likely. Every morning, I come down to this Club’s lobby and sit in the nice comfortable tufted sofas, like I am right now, and happily and warmly type away or do some online chore or other. It’s comfortable and homey and if I were a coffee drinker, I could get a cuppa over at the sideboard in a nice china cup. Not being a coffee drinker, I don’t know if that beats a Starbucks Vente Latte from around the corner, but you certainly can’t beat the fine china with a Starbucks cardboard cup…even if it does have a corrugated insulating sleeve.
I spent a lot of years being slightly embarrassed by the Cornell Club. It was neither as well-positioned or grand as the Yale Club with its open-air rooftop terrace (quite the luxury in midtown, even with the pigeons), or as somber and stately with its triple-height ceilings and gothic architecture as the Harvard Club. The Penn CLub is not so much grander, but at least it does it across from the Harvard Club. And the University Club uptown is really the grandest of them all and is both less exclusive in terms of school heritages, but more exclusive in that one has to be proposed and is not simply granted admission as a graduate right. So, what seemed like a stinky little hole-in-the-wall Club to my inflated and dubious sensibilities over the years, now seems to me to be a friendly, understated but comfortable home-away-from-home which has a very nice feeling of familiarity.
I do see people here in the lobby that I know, especially during those busy moments twice a day when the Ithaca bus is coming or going. That bus station thing alone makes this a unique club in that it brings everything down to earth on a very practical basis. The Cornell Bus is literally the most efficient way to get to and from Ithaca and the main Cornell campus from midtown. If you add the cost and hassle of getting to LaGuardia for a flight that may or may not leave on time or at all, leaving you out at the Tompkins County Airport to take a communal taxi to campus, the bus compares very favorably and cost-effectively. The bus is comfortable and totally wired. It makes the trip in 4 hours non-stop, which is pretty hard to beat, even with your own car. But you know, its still the bus and in America, taking the bus is something akin to slumming it. The only thing worse is hanging out at the bus station. Well, the Club it the Cornell bus station and as for me, the older I get, the wiser I get, and the more I like the bus station.