Manhattan Institute Makes an Apology, After Club Expels Press From a Lunch

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The New York Sun

There were red faces at the Manhattan Institute, after the Union Club ejected reporters from an awards lunch in its Upper East Side clubhouse where they had been invited to hear Mayor Bloomberg and the former governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, speak yesterday.

After guests were served a lunch of roasted potatoes, stuffed chicken, and mixed vegetables, staff members of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which was hosting the event and publicized it to members of the press, told reporters they needed to leave at the behest of club officials.

“The police are right outside. If you don’t leave we’re going to call them in,” a woman who appeared to work at the club, but would not give her name, said as she blocked the door to the speech.

When reporters from five publications, including The New York Sun, later left the building, there were no police outside. Union Club employees said reporters are not allowed at events.

The Union Club was founded in 1836 and is considered the first men’s social club in New York. The club’s membership split over the Civil War, and abolitionist-minded members left to start the Union League Club in 1863, an associate professor of art history at New York University, Mosette Broderick, said.

By the 1870s the club had a 10-year wait list, prompting a flurry of new clubs to open, according to “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898” by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace. The Union Club’s reluctance to admit nouveau riche members led to the formation of the Metropolitan Club in 1894, the book says.

The no-press rule may be Union Club policy, according to a co-founder of the New York Social Diary, David Patrick Columbia, but, he said “They make exceptions when they want to.”

“I’ve been there, and I am who I am, and I do what I do,” he said.

Membership in at least some private social clubs can be a liability for public officials. When Governor Spitzer picked Dale Hemmerdinger, a member of another private club on the Upper East Side, the Harmonie Club, as chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, some Albany lawmakers said it wouldn’t be appropriate for him to remain a member of a club they said is racially exclusive. Mr. Hemmerdinger subsequently resigned his membership, though he insisted the Harmonie welcomes minorities.

Mr. Bloomberg resigned from Harmonie Club and three other private clubs before running for mayor in 2001.

A spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg, John Gallagher, wrote in an email message that the decision to bar press at the Union Club was based on Union Club policy, “not the policy of this office or the Manhattan Institute.”

A deputy director of communications at the Manhattan Institute, Clarice Smith, wrote: “We apologize for the confusion, with all due respect to the Union Club’s press policy.”


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