John McEnroe, Midtown Needs You!

Somehow the “Core Club” succeeds in coming off as even more pretentious sounding than Soho House. And the Times is refreshingly merciless in profiling them:

It’s a funny time to start a club in New York. Socially, the city seems as wide open and meritocratic as ever. The influence of old wood-paneled clubs of the Upper East Side, with their aging memberships and lobster nights, is at an ebb, in part because of their remoteness from the powerful and vigorous global nomads who fuel the city’s energy.

But on East 55th Street, a team of construction workers is laboring furiously to put the finishing touches on an ambitious act of social exclusion called the Core Club, set to open its doors, for a few people anyway, in mid-September.

While traditional clubs serve to promote homogeneity and to preserve the social order by keeping new and different people away, the Core Club’s pitch – and as a for-profit corporation, it has a pitch – is that it will serve as a place for a geographically and socially diverse set of wealthy people to gather and meet others of the same disparate tribe. As a result, its membership list resembles a kind of Noah’s ark manifest of overachievers from various professional species – politics (Vernon Jordan); finance (John Schneider, a managing director of Allen & Company); real estate (Aby Rosen, the developer, and Steven Roth, the chairman and chief executive of Vornado Realty Trust); the arts (Marianne Boesky, the gallery owner, and Richard Meier, the architect); entertainment (Ari Emanuel, a partner in the Endeavor Agency, and Andrew Lack, the chief executive of Sony BMG Music); music (Roger Waters and Patty Smyth); sports (Dan Marino and John McEnroe); and so on.

Exactly what such a socially disconnected group of people will talk about and do when they gather at the club – what the club is in general – remains a kind of mystery, one that Jennie Saunders, the president and chief executive of the Core Group, the club’s parent company, seems content to perpetuate. For Ms. Saunders the thing is so ambitious as to be almost indescribable.

“Try to get off the idea of a reimagined private club concept, because it’s so much more than that,” Ms. Saunders said. “Our vision and our goal as an organization is to provide the conditions for transformation.” The club, Ms. Saunders added, would be “a hyper-edited collection of people, art, books and ideas – a compelling collage.”

A reporter confessed he still didn’t understand: “Is it a club or a hotel or a spa, a cult or what?”

“It’s all of those things,” Ms. Saunders said.

So, you ask, What does the privilege of breaking up a fascinating tete-a-tete between, say, Richard Meier and Dan Marino (or Roger Waters and Vernon Jordan!) cost one? Sadly, being put in one’s place by the semi-famous does not come cheap:

At a minimum, the club may appeal to wealthy people who’ve run out of novel ways to spend their money. The first 100 members, among them Millard S. Drexler, the chairman and chief executive of J. Crew, and Terry Semel, a former chairman of Warner Brothers Studios and now the chief executive of Yahoo, paid $100,000 each to get the club going. (If it works out, they’ll be paid back their investment, with interest, over five years.) Two hundred additional members have joined by paying $55,000 entrance fees, refundable should they decide to cancel their memberships.