The Metropolitan Club of the City of Washington

The Metropolitan Club of the City of Washington is a private club at 1700 H Street NW, two blocks from the White House. It was founded in 1863 by Treasury Department officials as a social and literary club and has occupied its present Renaissance Revival clubhouse, designed by Heins and LaFarge and built between 1904 and 1908 after fire destroyed its predecessor, ever since; a two-storey annex was added in 1925. Wikipedia describes a five-storey building containing a library of some 15,000 books, a dining room, squash courts, a steam room and a wine cellar. The club maintains one of the most restricted public presences of any large American city club: its website has exactly two pages, a home page and a visitor page, and carries no history, membership, application, fee or contact information beyond a phone number. What it does publish is conduct. The dress code requires a suit, jacket or blazer with a necktie for men -- string ties, ascots and turtlenecks are explicitly excluded -- and tailored clothing for women, and members in casual or athletic dress must use the side or rear entrance on weekdays. Electronic devices are banned everywhere except the Correspondence Lounge, lobby telephone booths, private dining rooms and guest rooms.

How it works

Members and guests use a single clubhouse near Farragut Square for dining, events and overnight accommodation, with discounted lunchtime parking at two nearby garages and evening valet service. The club appears on other clubs' reciprocal lists -- the Duquesne Club in Pittsburgh names The Metropolitan Club of the City of Washington among its reciprocal clubs -- but publishes no reciprocal directory of its own.

Typical member

Not publicly disclosed. Wikipedia records that the club's historic roster included four US presidents, several secretaries of state and figures such as J.P. Morgan and Theodore Roosevelt, but the club publishes nothing about its current membership.

This is the most opaque club in the batch. Two public pages, no history, no membership information, no fee schedule, no member count: the club has decided that everything except how to dress and where to park is private. That opacity has to shape any assessment, because everything else in circulation comes from secondary sources. Wikipedia's account is the main one and records a difficult record on admissions -- closed to non-white members for its first century, thirty members including Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy resigning in protest in 1961, the first Black member admitted in 1972 and women excluded until 1988 -- along with a five-year waiting list reported in 1983. None of that is confirmed by the club, and the waiting-list figure is more than forty years old. The published rules are strict even by city-club standards: a necktie is required, not merely preferred, and phones are barred from almost the whole building.

Editorial analysis by Peer Group Guide editors. It is separated from the record above and follows the editorial policy.