Yale Club

The Yale Club of New York City, commonly called the Yale Club, is a private club in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States. Its membership is restricted almost entirely to alumni and faculty of Yale University. With a clubhouse comprising 22 stories and a worldwide membership of over 11,000, it is the largest private clubhouse in the World. As a Platinum Club of America, it is considered in the elite 1% of all private clubs in the world.

Clubhouse:
The club is located at 50 Vanderbilt Avenue, at the intersection of East 44th Street, across Vanderbilt Avenue from Grand Central Terminal and the MetLife Building. Four other clubs affiliated with Ivy League universities have clubhouses in the surrounding neighborhood: the Harvard Club of New York, the Princeton Club of New York, The Penn Club of New York City, and the Cornell Club. The neighborhood also includes similar clubs not affiliated with universities, like the New York Yacht Club and the University Club of New York, as well as the flagship stores of Brooks Brothers, J. Press, and Paul Stuart, which traditionally catered to the club set.

The 22-story clubhouse contains three dining spaces (the "Tap Room," the "Grill Room," and a rooftop terrace), three bars (in the Tap Room, Grill Room, and Main Lounge), banquet rooms for up to 500 people, 140 guestrooms, a library, an athletic center, and a barber shop, among other amenities. The heart of the clubhouse is the main lounge, a large room with a high, ornate ceiling and wood-paneled walls lined with fireplaces and portraits of the five Yale-educated U.S. presidents, all of whom are or were members of the Yale Club: William Howard Taft; Gerald R. Ford; George H.W. Bush; Bill Clinton; and George W. Bush. Outside the lounge above the main staircase hangs a posthumous portrait of Elihu Yale by Francis Edwin Elwell.

In Popular Culture:

• In the third chapter of the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the narrator, Nick Carraway, mentions that he "took dinner usually at the Yale Club", when describing his life as a bonds broker in New York.
• In his weekly column titled "My Turn," author John O'Hara once lamented, "If Yale had given me a degree, I could have joined the Yale Club, where the food is pretty good, the library is ample and restful, the location convenient, and I could go there when I felt like it without sponging off friends. They also have a nice-looking necktie."
• Frank Mankiewicz described John Lindsay as "the only populist in history who plays squash at the Yale Club."
• In the 1991 novel American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis, Patrick Bateman gets up to use the restroom during lunch at the Yale Club, where to his chagrin he discovers that his coworker Luis Carruthers is in love with him. The chapter is titled "Yale Club."
• In the 5th season (1993) episode of the CBS television sitcom Murphy Brown titled "The Egg and I," when recounting the events that led to George H.W. Bush banning Murphy Brown from the White House, colleague Jim Dial mentions an "unfortunate incident in the steam room of the Yale Club."