The Brook

The Brook is an exclusive private gentlemen's club located at 111 East 54th Street in Manhattan (New York City).

It was founded in 1903 by a group of prominent men who belonged to other New York City private clubs, such as the Knickerbocker Club, the Union Club of the City of New York, and the Metropolitan Club.^[1] The name is derived from the Alfred Lord Tennyson poem The Brook, whose lines "For men may come and men may go, but I go on for ever" were consistent with the intention that the Club would provide 24-hour service and would never close its doors.^[1] In 1992, the City Journal wrote that the name was "supposed to mean that the Club is always open and the conversation flows on forever," but that "neither is strictly true."^[2] One version of the club's origin holds that The Brook was formed by two young men who had been expelled from the Union Club for trying to poach an egg on the bald head of another club member.^[3]

When the club was formed, it was announced that membership was only by private invitation and would be limited to 100 men. New York City residents who were not club members would not be admitted as guests. Membership, however, was not restricted to New York City residents — some original members came from Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia.^[1]

In 1954 the membership was 400 men.^[3] The Club's building, erected in 1925, was designed by the architecture firm of Delano & Aldrich,^[4] who also designed the houses of the Union Club, the Knickerbocker, and other exclusive clubs.

Summary

In “The Brook,” by the English poet Alfred Tennyson (1812-1889), the Brook named in the title speaks for itself, describing its origins, its travels, and its ultimate union with a large, brimming river. The poem is typical of the interest many nineteenth-century English poets showed in writing poems about the attractive aspects of nature. In the 1800s, England was losing much of its natural beauty, thanks to the growth of huge cities and heavy industry during the so-called Industrial Revolution. It is not surprising, then, that many Romantic poets (such as William Wordsworth) and many Victorian authors (such as Tennyson) celebrated, somewhat nostalgically, the lovely landscapes that were so often threatened by the rise of the new mechanized, industrial culture.

“The Brook” is shaped like the very thing it describes. On the page, it looks long and narrow. Rather than using the common ten-syllable line that had become very conventional in much English poetry by this time, Tennyson instead chooses alternating lines of four syllables and three syllables. The poem thus has a shape that seems appropriate to the appearance and rhythms of a brook, now moving outward, then moving inward, and then back outward again, much as a brook’s waters might move. The poem’s effect would be different if every single line were exactly the same length. Instead, Tennyson makes the work move in a pattern that is at once irregular and predictable, much like the brook itself.

Tennyson’s decision to let the brook describe itself and its routes makes the stream seem almost alive. Rather than depicting the stream from a distanced, objective perspective, he gives the brook a kind of literal vitality by personifying it. Apparently, the brook begins in a kind of lake populated by water birds (“coot and hern” ), but no sooner does the poem allude to this place of origins than the text, like the brook itself, makes a “sudden sally” (2), a noun suggesting a quick movement or leap. The brook moves swiftly, and so does the poem: only eight lines into the work, the stream has already passed twenty villages (or “thorpes” ) and fifty “bridges” , presumably small rural bridges made of wood or stone rather than the kinds of massive, imposing steel bridges being erected elsewhere.

Finally the brook flows past “Philip’s farm” , phrasing that again suggests that the brook is almost alive, almost human: it is aware not only of human dwellings in general (as in the reference to the “thorpes”) but of one human...

About the author

About the Poet Lord Tennyson (1809–92) was born in Lincolnshire. Poet Laureate for over 40 years, Tennyson is representative of the Victorian age. His skilled craftsmanship and noble ideals retained a large audience for poetry in an age when the novel was engrossing more and more readers. Tennyson's real contribution lies in his shorter poems like The Lady of Shallot, The Princess, Ulysses, The Palace of Art etc. His fame rests on his perfect control of sound, the synthesis of sound and meaning, the union of pictorial and musical.

Notable members, past and present

• Fred Astaire - wore a Brook Club hatband in the 1953 film The Band Wagon^[3]
• Michael R. Bloomberg - resigned his membership before becoming a candidate for Mayor of New York^[5]
• Michel David-Weill - French investment banker and former Senior Partner of Lazard Frères
• Admiral James L. Holloway III^[6]
• John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) - Former President of the United States
• William K. Vanderbilt II^[7]
• John Hay Whitney - visited The Brook and was treated as a member, but he was never actually a member of the club.^[8]
• Jerauld Wright
• John Jacob Astor IV - Richest man in America at the time - died in the Titanic
• William A. Chanler - explorer, soldier and US Congressman
• Alejandro Santo Domingo - Billionaire financier

See also

• List of American gentlemen's clubs

References