There is an old volume, bearing the date 1871, called “The Clubs of New York.”  The author was a Francis Gerry Fairfield, and the chapters that make up the book were originally contributed to the columns of the “Home Journal.”  There is a perceptible smile on Mr. Fairfield’s face as he writes of the town of thirty years before.  To the present generation that smile is irresistibly funny.  He recalls the year 1836, when the Union was founded as one of meteorological oddities.  “Tradition preserves the record of the season under the designation of the cold summer.  Weird auroras did not forbear to lift themselves in mountains of fire along the north, even in July; and more than once the canopy-aurora hung like a mock sun in the very centre of the heavens.  People predicted strange things; but the strange things did not happen.  The hyena of pestilence, the wolf of want, and the red death of war were conjured, but emerged not, nevertheless, from the vasty deep supposed by Shakespeare to be inhabited by their spirits.”  But Mr. Fairfield disclaims any suggestion that “the gestation of the Union Club, then in progress, had any material influence in the evolution of these omens, or that the weather was affected by the parturition of the great social event.”  With the metropolitan sophistication of 1871 he pats 1836 on the head as a year when New York was a bit of a village, of rather more than three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants.  Houston, then North Street, Bleecker, and Bond Streets were particularly uptown, and thoroughfares of fashion and aristocracy.  The old regime was still in its glory; and real counts, in plaid pantaloons, were sensational occurrences to be petted, set up as lions, and finally entrapped into matrimony, just by way of improving the blood of the first families.  He tells of “the little white-faced hotel now termed the Tremont” as having been kept by a real count, expatriated for political reasons, but afterwards restored to titles and estates.  There are those of the Year of Grace 1918 who recall the “little white-faced Tremont.”  But its soul has long since passed to t’other side of Styx.

From the day when the Union first opened its doors at No. 1 Bond Street, it was one of the wealthiest and most exclusive of New York clubs.  The names of its organizers are names associated with the history of the city.  Ogden Hoffman, whom Mr. Fairfield describes as “a bald-headed, dreamy-eyed man, in his day the star of the New York Bar, both for fervid eloquence and profound learning”; Philip Hone, he of the immortal “Diary”; Thomas P. Oakley, Samuel Jones, Beverly Robinson, W.B.  Lewrence, Charles King, E.T.  Throop, and J. Depeyster Ogden.  These were some of the men whose names were appended to the provisional constitution drawn up on June 30, 1836.  C. Fenno Hoffman, “next to Morris the sweetest song-writer America has produced,” later became a member of the association, which from its inception, was the representative organization