The ability to form bonds, to connect and create communities, is what set us human beings on a course to becoming the dominant species on earth. At some point, a group of us within a larger community formed a smaller, secondary community based on shared interests: this was the first club.
Clubs appeal to our innate need to be around like-minded people, to feel wanted, part of a tribe, in the comfort and safety of community. The power of inclusion. Then there’s the flip side: the power of exclusion. We’re also a deeply insecure species. Being on the inside looking out doesn’t mean much unless there are people on the outside with their noses pressed up against the glass, peering in. Hence the art market, super-yachts, private islands, Richard Mille watches, private space travel—and clubs.
In the 19th century, during the Gilded Age, clubs became popular in New York among the city’s elite, when places like the Union Club, the Knickerbocker, the Metropolitan, the Players, the Century, and others came into existence. The city is still dotted with these clubhouses, many of them Beaux-Arts masterpieces.
By the turn of the century, there were almost 120 such clubs in New York. A number of them are still around, although they haven’t been a vital part of New York’s social fabric for decades. Members aged, and younger generations didn’t warm to the idea of spending their evenings talking about the markets with Randolph and Mortimer over a sherry.
Then, in 2003, London’s Soho House opened an outpost in the Meatpacking District, giving downtown New York’s creative community, such as it was, a place to network while getting properly drunk. You could even smoke there in the early days, which was a major draw in the wake of Mayor Bloomberg’s 2002 smoking ban.
Soho House proved that private clubs can be big business; there are now more than 10 branches in America, including 3 in New York, and more than 40 around the world. Its success inspired others, among them the Core Club, in Midtown, which caters to a more business-minded and financially ravenous clientele than Soho House; and the now shuttered Norwood Club, in a five-story town house on West 14th Street, for thirtysomething creatives and trust-funders looking for a dimly lit place to do cocaine and babble incoherently over LCD Soundsystem. There was even a membership club in SoHo for new parents and their offspring, called Citibabes.
NeueHouse opened in 2011, merging the shared-workspace concept with a private club, followed by the Wing a few years later, aimed at striving millennial women. Suddenly, there were so many buzzy clubs it was hard to keep them straight. Before you knew it, you were accidentally bringing your cocaine to the baby club and your baby to the cocaine club.
Now there’s Zero Bond in NoHo, which is the semi-official residence of New York mayor Eric Adams; the Normandie-like cold elegance of Casa Cipriani in the beautiful old Battery Maritime Building on the southern tip of Manhattan; the Ned Nomad; the Central Park Club, floating 100 stories above Central Park; and West Hollywood’s San Vicente Bungalows, which will soon occupy the former Jane Hotel. The king of aristocratic London clubs, Robin Birley, who founded 5 Hertford and Oswald’s, is planting his flag with a new place on Madison Avenue in the mid-60s.
Being on the inside looking out doesn’t mean much unless there are people on the outside with their noses pressed up against the glass, peering in.
Most of these clubs cost a few thousand dollars in annual dues. The Core Club, at around $15,000 a year, was always pricier than the others. Then the owners of the upscale Aman Resorts opened their private-membership club in New York last year, with an eye-popping $200,000 initiation fee. Not to be outdone, Casa Cruz, a London import, charges $250,000. The private club has officially entered a new Gilded Age.
I was curious to see what all the fuss was about, so I called around to a few socially connected friends, hoping someone was a member. No luck. Becoming a member myself wasn’t an option; I can barely scrape together $250, let alone $250,000. Then I went to the Web site and discovered a button marked “Reservations.” I clicked on it, put a credit card down for a $50-per-person non-refundable deposit, and booked a table for two.
After some digging around, I discovered that Casa Cruz, named for its founder, Juan Santa Cruz, a dashing former investment banker turned restaurateur, isn’t really a members-only club after all. There’s a restaurant and bar on the second floor, which is open to the public—or the portion of it that can afford to eat and drink there, anyway—while the private dining rooms and lounges on the upper floors are reserved for members, who are referred to as “partners” or “investors.” There are 99 of these partner-investors, according to an interview Cruz gave when the club opened; each paid between $250,000 and $500,000 apiece for the privilege, reportedly. Math is admittedly not my strong suit, but that comes out to roughly a lot of fucking money.
Casa Cruz is housed in a six-story Beaux-Arts mansion on East 61st Street between Park and Madison Avenues. The last recorded sale for the de Berkeley Parsons Mansion, as it’s known, was in 2017, when it sold for $32,000,000, I’m assuming to its current occupant. It was built for a man named Harry de Berkeley Parsons by the noted architect C. P. H. Gilbert and completed in 1910.
The building stands out on what is an otherwise unremarkable block, an ornate throwback to a different age. Its bowed façade is elegantly lit from below, with thickets of ivy cascading down from its cornices, over a mix of red brick and white stone. As you enter, you pass through two beautiful old marble columns underneath the club’s discreetly branded orange awning.
Every surface inside Casa Cruz is polished and shiny like new money. The brass doorknobs and banisters. The Brazilian-cherrywood wall paneling. There are mirrors everywhere and so many competing colors and patterns and textiles and incongruous swaths of bold statement wallpaper that there should be a warning for epileptics posted on the front door. This cacophony of color and chaos was once the height of a certain kind of louche London aesthetic, but now it’s ubiquitous. There are glowing marble cocktail tables in the bar because of course there are. Casa Cruz has all the charm and aesthetic goals of a first-class airport lounge in a petro-state.
There are two identical black-and-white Andy Warhol self-portraits on the wall of the second-floor landing that separates the bar from the dining room. Maybe they’re originals, maybe they’re photocopies, but it doesn’t matter, because they’re a cliché. So is the Keith Haring, which hangs sadly and alone in the dining room. Nothing against either artist, but putting Warhol or Haring on a wall in a New York restaurant is like hanging Elvis on a wall in Memphis or Che on one in Havana.
Food isn’t the draw for the clientele here. So it was a nice surprise that the food was good. In fact, it was much better than it needed to be. The menu, a vague fusion of South American and Mediterranean cuisines, was refreshingly unpretentious. The octopus was tender and flavorful; the beef tartare, clean and tangy; the hamachi crudo, fresh and bright. The branzino for two, baked under a black-salt crust, tasted as good as it looked when they presented it tableside. Nothing was overcooked or under-seasoned. The presentation was neither whimsical nor pompous.
Becoming a member myself wasn’t an option; I can barely scrape together $250, let alone $250,000.
I can’t remember the last time I walked out of a New York restaurant without someone noting how expensive the meal was, or complaining about the noise level. And Casa Cruz was expensive: the check came to $675. It was, however, pleasantly quiet. That might have been my favorite thing about the place. But it was quiet because it was empty.
O.K., in fairness, it was a Sunday night. But when we sat for dinner, we were the only two people in the dining room. By the time we left, there were two other tables, a four-top of bored-looking Russian women and a pair of art-world types with matching thick-framed square black glasses like Velma from Scooby-Doo. Curious to see what a typical crowd is like on most evenings at Casa Cruz, I checked Instagram and was immediately grateful it had been empty.
I naturally assumed the real action was happening upstairs, where the members—excuse me, investors—were frolicking unmolested by the downstairs riffraff, eating and drinking their R.O.I., so on my way out I snuck upstairs to catch a glimpse. But the upper floors were pin-drop quiet, too. Not a soul in sight.
And maybe that’s the genius of Casa Cruz. Charge a handful of insecure rich people a ton of money to be part of something expensive, exclusive, and out of reach for most, then open the doors to everyone, making it just another unbearable and fleeting hot spot, ruining the whole point of their dropping half a million dollars in the first place. Then grab the bag and turn off the lights. Could Casa Cruz be the cleverest con ever played on the upper class?
Maybe it’s a symptom of age, a general disdain for the current cultural state of affairs, or anguished nostalgia for a simpler time, but I find myself increasingly more interested in the past than in the present. Curious about the building’s original owner, I started reading about Harry de Berkeley Parsons.
Not only was he descended from several prominent colonial American families, but one of his ancestors was Robert the Bruce, king of Scotland. Parsons was born wealthy but made his own fortune disposing of the city’s sewage. A professor of engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York, he then worked his way up the city’s waste-management ladder, eventually landing at the Metropolitan Sewerage Commission. This is the house that shit built.
Dana Brown is a writer and producer and a former deputy editor at Vanity Fair. His memoir, Dilettante: True Tales of Excess, Triumph, and Disaster, is out now