breakthroughs: The Harmonie Club Joins the 21st Century

The new general manager of the Harmonie Club, Davina Weinstein, stood in its gleaming marble lobby on an early October evening and mingled with members who congratulated her on landing the job.

“Davina, you deserve it,” said a woman in her 60s with immaculately coifed hair and a Chanel jacket. Another woman, this one far younger and wearing a string of pearls, reached over for an embrace.

The appointment of a new general manager at the storied organization, founded in 1852 and New York’s second-oldest private social club, wouldn’t usually be noteworthy, but Ms. Weinstein, 52, is the first woman to hold the post.

Formerly Harmonie’s assistant general manager, Ms. Weinstein is also one of the first female general managers of a social club in New York that started for men only. And even though there are more than 40 longtime private clubs in the city, she is the only female general manager of one.

Even women’s clubs such as the Cosmopolitan Club, the Colony Club and the Women’s National Republican Club have male managers.

“It’s a major accomplishment,” said Charles Dorn, a consultant and recruiter for private clubs who used to be the general manager of the Union Club of the City of New York, the oldest private social club in the city, which is still all male. “Social clubs are traditionally playgrounds for men who are part of old-money New York. Davina has broken that stereotype by becoming a leader of one.”

Archaic in the age of #MeToo and at a time when women in top political and corporate jobs aren’t an anomaly? Maybe, but New York’s social clubs are a historical and significant part of the city’s power structure.

Situated in an eight-story Beaux-Arts building designed by Stanford White on 60th Street off Fifth Avenue, the Harmonie Club was started by a group of six German-American New Yorkers for other male German immigrants who enjoyed singing and debating together.

The club moved from the Lower East Side to its current home in 1905 and became a gathering spot for elite Jewish-American industrialists, financiers and businessmen including those from the Guggenheim and Bloomingdale families, Andrew Saks and Adolph S. Ochs (a former publisher of The New York Times).

Members today include Carl Icahn, several from the Tisch and Nederlander families, and Mortimer Zuckerman. Women were first admitted as members in 1986. Harmonie’s president, Robert Werbel, said that out of 950 members, approximately 30 percent are female. “Women are an important part of who we are,” Mr. Werbel said. “Davina’s promotion reflects that.”

Ms. Weinstein, who grew up in Amherst, Mass., worked in restaurants while attending the University of Massachusetts and Lesley University, where she earned her undergraduate degree in management, and got interested in social clubs after getting a job as a bartender at the Harvard Club in Boston in 1990.

She eventually became the general manager of the College Club, also in Boston and came to New York in 1999 to take on the interim role of operations manager at the Union Club. “I always wanted to live in the city, and that temporary job was my way in,” she said.

Later that year, Ms. Weinstein applied for what she thought was the assistant general manager job at the Harmonie Club, under Frank Saris, the general manager at the time.

“It turned out that I was the assistant to the general manager, not the assistant general manager,” she said. After sticking it out for a few years, Ms. Weinstein decided that she needed a break and moved to central Mexico for six months.

When she was back in New York, Harmonie’s general manager, Christopher Carey, asked if she would be interested in becoming the club’s director of catering. She accepted and eventually became the assistant general manager for real this time.

Mr. Carey decided earlier this year that he wanted to step down from day-to-day management and focus on long-term strategic issues such as raising money to restore the club’s facade, and on Sept. 12, the club’s board of governors elected Ms. Weinstein to replace him.

This isn’t the typical way private social clubs pick managers, according to Mr. Dorn. “Most clubs find new general managers through search firms and don’t look to their employees, so it’s even more of a big deal that Davina was chosen,” he said.

Like many old-school social clubs, Harmonie has lost some luster in the last decade. Mr. Dorn said that many of these organizations suffered a decline in membership after the 2008 stock market crash. “The clubs were expensive to join and seen as out-of-touch and irrelevant,” he said. “The longtime members were getting older, and the clubs weren’t attracting new ones.”

Ms. Weinstein acknowledges that Harmonie had challenges after the crash and said that she is determined to make the establishment more contemporary and accessible. The club has already become more family=friendly, with a social calendar filled with events for children such as music and sports classes and the Saturday family brunch, at which jackets were once mandatory for men

“Now, you can come in jeans, and we have seen attendance go from less than 30 people to more than 200,” Ms. Weinstein said. “The club overall is not nearly as stuffy and formal as it was 20 years ago.”

Getting in easier, too. An application process that formerly involved an eight-page form, a dozen references and several rounds of in-person interviews stretching over more than six months has been streamlined to a four-page application, with fewer references required; and interviews possible over Skype.

And, in what would have been a gasp-inducing proposition several years ago, Harmonie is offering a four-month, $1,000 guest membership. (Full-time membership costs $1,500 to $6,000 annually, depending on a member’s age.)

Mr. Dorn said that social clubs need more diverse managers as well as members if they’re going to survive. “Harmonie was smart to pick Davina because she wanted to push the club into the future,” he said. “The people joining social clubs today aren’t interested only in whiskey nights and jacketed events, and she gets that.”