Social Clubs, Long Gone, Left Their Meeting Places Behind By CHRISTOPHER GRAY THE five-borough consolidation of 1898 was a bitter pill for many in Brooklyn, who correctly foresaw the eclipse of their influential city by the powerhouse of Manhattan. Few things document that change as well as the collapsed network of men’s social clubs in Brooklyn, at least four of whose clubhouses survive. Three of the four were built within two years of one another. So competitive were the Brooklyn clubs that the Carlton (a k a Carleton) put up a headquarters in 1890 at Sixth and St. Marks Avenues in Park Slope simply because of rumors that another club was organizing to build nearby. The Carlton had been dry, but after an 1889 meeting at which the membership voted, 38 to 11, to serve beer and wine, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that it had “stepped to the front rank of Brooklyn clubs at a strike.” This momentously fermentative change was thus in effect for the opening of the clubhouse, attended by 1,500 guests, including the mayors of Brooklyn and Manhattan. The club served a 10-course dinner, and members lent paintings by Jervis McIntee, George Inness and Eastman Johnson for the event. The Carlton was apparently designed by Mercein Thomas, and it is a mild, even modest, essay that could just as easily be a small apartment house, which indeed it has become. Not so the Union League Club. Founded in the 1860s to support the Union cause, it built an elaborate clubhouse in Crown Heights at Dean Street and Bedford Avenue in 1890. The architect, Peter Lauritzen, chose the Romanesque style, in dark brownstone and a peculiarly tepid light-brown brick that gives it a provincial air. The two facades hinge on an octagonal corner tower that culminated in a lookout within an eight-sided belfry, the flanking mansard roof topped with eagles and lions. At the entrance, the busts of Lincoln and Grant are still crisp, although the roof has been stripped of its majesty, like a tree that has lost its leaves in a hurricane. Hundreds waited at the club for results of the presidential election of 1900, and pandemonium followed the announcement that the Republican McKinley-Roosevelt ticket had won. “Bryan shouters seemed to be in the extreme minority,” The Eagle reported. Another group of Republicans opened the Lincoln Club, also in 1890, on Putnam Avenue, between Irving Place and Classon Avenue, in Clinton Hill. Although somewhat fallen, this is one of the great club buildings of New York, a wild, chunky Queen Anne fantasy of turrets, buttresses, monograms and custom-shaped brick. The architect was the Mexican-born, Paris-trained Rudolph Daus, and his masonry is something to marvel at. Over the main-floor windows run half-round arches of delicious ribbon-pattern terra cotta. Above the fourth-floor windows on the left are perhaps the largest splayed arches in New York, at least five feet high. And the terra-cotta monogram at the top, “LC,” is the size of a Mini Cooper. There was plenty of nuance in the temperance issue — the Lincoln served ale, but not wine. The Eagle reported that the billiard room was the largest at any club in Brooklyn, nine tables in all, the interior in quartered oak. Two ensembles played at the opening night, Cappa’s Seventh Regiment Band and Hazay Natzy’s Hungarian Band. The final work in this quartet stands at Clinton and Pierrepont Streets, in Brooklyn Heights, built in 1906 as the Crescent Athletic Club. With 12 stories, the Crescent was larger than most clubs in Manhattan, with a swimming pool, a rifle range and a 3,000-square-foot wine cellar. In 1918 the club opened up the range to nonmembers to improve military preparedness. “American youth takes naturally to shooting,” said Montaigu Sterling, the member in charge. But Brooklyn’s clubdom was peaking just as the Crescent opened its magnificent high-rise palazzo. The Carlton Club left its building in 1907, and the Union League lost its house a few years later. The Lincoln Club dissolved in 1931, and in 1939 foreclosure overtook the Crescent. It had been a brief, shining moment. The Crescent is now St. Ann’s School; the Carlton has been converted to apartments; and the Union League houses a senior center and offices. In each case, very little of the interior appears to survive. But the musty old Lincoln has the air of a place that has seen little change, even though the facade is covered in paint. It is now the headquarters of a fraternal group, the Independent United Order of Mechanics, Friendly Society, Western Hemisphere. Multiple e-mail and telephone inquiries beginning in June were not returned. There is no doorbell, and on two recent visits the building looked absolutely vacant, although not in any way abandoned. The architectural historian Andrew Dolkart, who examined the building in the 1980s for the Landmarks Preservation Commission, says he recalls “lots of oak,” and it seems likely that the interior is still impressive, a time capsule waiting to be pried open.