Davina Weinstein was selected by the Board of Governors of the 166-year-old club, the second-oldest private club in New York City, to move up from her Assistant GM position. The move is seen as part of how the club is “joining the 21st century,” along with a more family-friendly social calendar and allowing jeans at Saturday brunch, which has boosted attendance from under 30 to more than 200.
Davina Weinstein has been named as the first female general manager in the 166-year history of The Harmonie Club, The New York Times reported, in a move that signals how New York City’s second-oldest private social club is “joining the 21stcentury.”
Formerly Harmonie’s Assistant General Manager, Weinstein, 52, is also one of the first female general managers of a social club in New York that started for men only, the Times reported. 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, the Times reported.
“It’s a major accomplishment,” 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, told the Times.
“Social clubs are traditionally playgrounds for men who are part of old-money New York,” Dorn said. “Davina has broken that stereotype by becoming a leader of one.”
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 Times reported.
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, the Times reported, and Harmonie’s President, Robert Werbel, said that out of 950 current members, approximately 30 percent are female.
“Women are an important part of who we are,” Werbel told the Times. “Davina’s promotion reflects that.”
Weinstein grew up in Amherst, Mass. and worked in restaurants while attending the University of Massachusetts and Lesley University, where she earned her undergraduate degree in management, the Times reported. She got interested in social clubs after getting a job as a bartender at the Harvard Club of Boston in 1990.
She eventually became the General Manager of The College Club of 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 told the Times.
Later that year, the Times reported, 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, Weinstein decided that she needed a break and moved to central Mexico for six months.
When she was back in New York, Harmonie had a new General Manager, Christopher Carey, who asked her if she would be interested in becoming the club’s Director of Catering, the Times reported. She accepted and eventually became the Assistant General Manager—for real—this time.
After 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, The Harmonie Club’s Board of Governors elected Weinstein to replace him in September, the Times reported.
That didn’t follow the typical way that private social clubs pick managers, Dorn noted. “Most clubs find new general managers through search firms and don’t look to their employees,” he told the Times. “So it’s even more of a big deal that Davina was chosen.”
Like many old-school social clubs, The Harmonie Club has lost some luster in the last decade, the Times reported. Many of these organizations suffered a decline in membership after the 2008 stock market crash, Dorn noted. “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.”
Harmonie had challenges after the crash, Weinstein acknowledged, and in her new role, she is determined to make the establishment more contemporary and accessible, the Times reported. 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,” Weinstein said. “The club overall is not nearly as stuffy and formal as it was 20 years ago.”
Becoming a member is easier, too, the Times reported. 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 can now be conducted 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, the Times reported. (Full-time membership costs $1,500 to $6,000 annually, depending on a member’s age.)
Social clubs need more diverse managers, as well as members, if they’re going to survive, Dorn told the Times.
“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.”
Photos of Weinstein and The Harmonie Club that were included with the Times report can be viewed at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/style/harmonie-club-new-york.html