If you will listen to the Manhattanite of the older generation, you are likely to derive the impression that club life in New York is a matter of the last half-century at most.  He is rather inclined to fleer at any pretension to American club life of earlier date.  In one sense he is right.  The club as we know it now is essentially a British institution modelled on British lines.  More and more is the British idea being carried to the extreme, until we are associating club life with the vast club-house of spacious lounges and marble swimming pools, and a cuisine rivalling that of one of the great new hotels.  The Fifth Avenue club of half a century ago had little magnificence as we now understand the word.  It was a simpler and more limited hospitality that was offered to the friend or the distinguished stranger from overseas.  Yet that hospitality must have had a rare flavour and atmosphere.  There must have been something about it that went far to make up for mere material deficiencies, if we are to credit the verdicts of those who were in a position to compare American club life with club life in England and on the Continent.  Thackeray was as fine a judge of the matter as any man who ever strutted through St. James’s Park and scowled back at the Barnes Newcomeses and Captain Heavysideses in the club windows along Pall Mall, and there was what he said and wrote about the Century.

It was in the middle of the sixth decade of the last century that the clubs began to find their way into Fifth Avenue.  One of the first was the Union Club.  Writing of that organization in 1906, M. Charles Huard, in “New York comme je l’ai vu,” volunteered the puzzling information that it was “fonde en 1836 par les descendants de Knickerbocker, le plus vieux donc des grand clubs de New York.”  If the Frenchman was to be taken literally he apparently regarded the offspring of Washington Irving’s creation as an exceedingly prolific race.  The Union, in 1855, moved from Broadway near Fourth Street into a house on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-first Street.  That home, which the Union occupied until fifteen or twenty years ago, was described as “a superb structure which cost three hundred thousand dollars.”  It was the first building erected in the city solely for club purposes.  Almost to the day of its demolition, although the neighbourhood about it was changing rapidly, the old house wore an aspect of dignity.  To the corner the habitues of other years seldom come today.  Instead, at the noon hour, the sidewalks swarm with foreign faces and there is excited babble in an alien tongue.  The cloak and suit firm of Potash and Perlmutter is as much at home here now as it was in its East Broadway—­or was it Division Street?—­loft when the present century was coming into being.