CONTEMPORARY NY
New York Architecture Images- Midtown

Century Association Clubhouse  Landmark

architect

McKim, Mead and White

location

7 W43, bet. Fifth and Sixth Aves. 

date

1891

style

Beaux-Arts

construction

stone

type

Club

 

 

images

 

 

notes

Sorry, Old Boy, the Mayor Says 'No Smoking'
    By WARREN ST. JOHN

THEY are as much a part of Manhattan's old private clubs as leather chairs, billiard tables and investment bankers named Winthrop: oak-paneled bars, befogged with cigar smoke.

The oak bars will remain, but as of today, the last acrid skeins of cigar smoke are dissipating into the chandeliers and settling onto the velvet draperies and dark red Scalamandré fabrics of men's lounges in the city's mustiest old clubs. The city council's smoking ban, an effort to protect employees from second-hand smoke, has kicked in, and to the dismay of many members of those clubs, the law applies to cigars — and it applies to them.

"The attitude at every place I know is that this is the most asinine law they've ever heard of," said Michael M. Thomas, a writer and a member of the Racquet and Tennis Club, on Park Avenue. "I know of no more detested law than this."

Mr. Thomas doesn't even smoke cigars, but that's beside the point, club members say. The basic premise of clubs is that members should be able to go to their clubhouses and do as they please, which should at least include the option of lazing in a big club chair with a highball of single-malt scotch and a stinky cigar in hand. Having that option taken away without so much as a vote from the house committee, well, it's just very un-club-like. Steven T. Florio, the chief executive of Condé Nast Publications, a member of the New York Yacht Club and a man known for his love of cigars, actually quit smoking four months ago, but that hasn't changed his opinion of the law.

"This is way over the line," he said. "If you're a member of any private club and they have a designated area where you can smoke a cigar, I think that should be allowed. It's one of those nice things you can do with your buddies."

Part of the dismay over the cigar ban among some club members comes from the fact that it has been championed by one of those buddies — Michael R. Bloomberg. Until he became mayor, and standard bearer for the stogie police, Mr. Bloomberg was on the inside. In 2001, just before embarking on his mayoral campaign, Mr. Bloomberg resigned from four clubs — the Harmonie; the Century Country Club in Purchase, N.Y.; the Brook Club; and the Racquet and Tennis Club — but he kept memberships at 10 others, including the New York Yacht Club and the Harvard Club, both of which are now subject to the cigar ban. (Back in 1998, Mr. Bloomberg, then merely a mogul and not a politician, took a more laid-back approach to the issue, holding his daughter's 16th birthday at a joint called the City Wine and Cigar Company.) The cigar ban hasn't endeared the mayor to his fellow club members.

"I was a little shocked that with everything that's happening in New York City that the mayor has decided that this is how he'll be remembered," Mr. Florio said. "It really, really makes me miss Rudy."

Part of the members' frustration surely also stems from the fact that the law — all 21 pages of it — doesn't give the clubs much wiggle room. The law bans smoking "in all enclosed areas within public places," and among the definition of public places, it lists, explicitly, "membership associations," or clubs. Even covered outdoor spaces of clubs are off limits to smokers. So while it's legal to smoke a cigar on the terrace of the Knickerbocker Club on Fifth Avenue, which is open to the heavens, it is illegal to puff on the loge of the Racquet and Tennis Club, which is recessed into the building, and therefore, technically, covered.

Cigar smoking is a touchy subject for members of many private clubs. In 1998, federal agents arrested a manager of the Racquet and Tennis Club under the Trading With the Enemy Act, for having Cuban cigars in the on-premises humidor. After that incident, which was splashed across the pages of the city's tabloids, members of exclusive clubs learned that in a pinch they could not count on sympathy from the very public they were excluding. So in the spirit of good citizenship, most clubs are quick to report that they plan to comply with the law.

"It doesn't allow smoking in the clubhouse," said Winthrop Rutherford, the president of the Racquet and Tennis Club. "So no smoking in the clubhouse."

There are a few narrow exceptions, though. One is for clubs that have no employees — which gave some members of the Union Club, on East 69th Street, an idea: why not create a special class of membership for the employees, to get around the law? When other members raised the specter of busboys on the squash courts, the idea was quickly scrapped.

Another option seemed to be the creation of a single room for smoking, legal so long as it was sealed off from the rest of the club, vented outdoors and off-limits to employees. The idea of a hermetically sealed smoker's tank had its downsides — it's expensive to build, unsightly and, since no employees could enter the room, members would have to pick up after themselves. But that option was taken away on March 26, when Gov. George E. Pataki signed an even tougher state law banning smoking in public places. The tougher law goes into effect in just under four months. That's too bad for the Century Association on West 43rd Street, which recently spent around $10,000 on duct work to create a smokers' room for its cigar puffers. The room will soon be obsolete.

"What must be, must be," said Louis Auchincloss, the novelist and the president of the Century Association.

The Brook Club, on East 54th Street, recently held a final smoke-out. After toying with letting in the rabble, the Union Club has given up its search for loopholes. The Harvard Club, which designated part of its downstairs lounge for cigar smoking — the area roughly from the oil portrait of President Theodore Roosevelt 40 feet to the head of an elephant mounted on the wall — doesn't see a way around the law and will ban smoking.

But what about all those humidors and private cigar lockers? Most clubs haven't figured out what to do with those yet. Charles H. Townsend, the chief operating officer of Condé Nast and the rear commodore of the New York Yacht Club, recently donated a humidor to the club, "with a brass plaque and everything," he said.

"I don't know whether I get it back," Mr. Townsend said. "I'm not going to go over there and snatch it."

A good, well-sealed humidor might be exactly what Mr. Townsend and his cigar-smoking buddies need to keep their stogies fresh until the anti-smoking fervor subsides. At least, he said, that's the hope.

"The tide goes in and the tide goes out," Mr. Townsend said. "Who knows how long this regulation is going to be around?"

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