But those days are over. Now 47 and married to Allie Rizzo, a Wilhelmina model, with a 4-year-old son, Henry, he not only runs one of the city’s hardest-to-join social clubs (some, he said, have attempted five-figure bribes), he was recently appointed by the mayor to one of the city’s most influential and coveted social positions: the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
As for his old life? He no longer wants to stay up until 4 a.m. six nights a week, coddling V.I.Ps.“Nightclubs can suck the life out of you,” he said. As an old mentor once told him, “a club is a baby forever and you’re always going to be changing its diapers.”
Cashing Out of Clubs
“I was blown away,” Mr. Sartiano said, recalling the moment in 2017 that he first toured the 19th-century Victorian Gothic building at 0 Bond, its actual address, that long ago housed Brooks Brothers. “I thought it was the coolest address on the coolest street.”
He was considering a hotel, but the property was too small, so he pivoted to a “urban lodge and social workplace” for people like himself. “There was a void of places to go for people who are sophisticated and successful and still want to be social at night,” he said. “The business model with most clubs is basically, ‘How many people can you pile on top of each other?’ I wanted to do the opposite.”
Judging by the half dozen or more private social clubs opening in New York City these days (see Casa Cipriani, Casa Cruz and the Ned), he was clearly onto something.
Mr. Sartiano is coy about the club’s membership, except to say there is a waiting list of 8,000. Annual dues range from $2,500 to $4,000 (plus an initiation fee of $750 to $5,000), but money alone will not guarantee entrance to the club’s two floors of plush lounges, private dining rooms, omakase restaurant, screening room and library.
