From Bad Baldies to Frozen Food: The Upper West Side Kind of Fancy

By Yvonne Vávra

I found myself sneaking around the corner of 72nd Street and Broadway more often than I had any business doing this week. It was the whole will-they-won’t-they that was keeping me hooked. The rumors were rumoring about an imminent Trader Joe’s reopening, but every time I looked, it was still closed as closed can be. By the time this column is published, we’ll know more. We might already be elbow-deep in the freezer bins. Or not. Oh, the delicious drama!

But even if I never get to ride that diva of an escalator again (though perhaps the renovation has finally won her over to the joys of working), I’ve already scored a big win. Because once that corner got me curious, I started digging into its history. Turns out, the urge to get into that corner building is something we have in common with 19th-century Upper West Siders.

The neighborhood was still very rocky, muddy and dusty, but it was about to enter an era of sweeping change, with rickety huts sharing space with mansions and luxury apartment buildings. More and more affluent New Yorkers were moving in, seeing the promise in the dirt. But their problem was that it was all still a little out there, far from where elite life was happening. Then word spread of an exclusive private social club opening.

Established in 1889, the Occident Club, almost immediately renamed the Colonial Club, promised the wealthy elite a place to socialize right in the no man’s land they had just moved into. A spectacular building would rise on the corner of 72nd and Broadway, with construction beginning in 1891. Everything had been thought of: a garden and observatory on the roof, an opera house, and rooms for bowling, smoking, dancing, reading, dining, and all sorts of other shenanigans the rich enjoy. There was even a ladies’ entrance, where wives and daughters could make their way to their designated corner of the club. And here’s the fun part: from a gallery on the upper floors, they could look down on the men and their important manly business.

Membership quickly soared into the hundreds. About the size of a Saturday morning Trader Joe’s crowd. In the fall of 1892, the club officially opened with a grand ceremony, which apparently proved that Upper West Siders were not only attractive, but impressively well-haired. Chauncey Depew, president of the New York Central Railroad, told The New York Times that the crowd at the club had convinced him that the neighborhood was populated “by young men and pretty girls. There were very few bald heads on the west side.”

That might have been part of what brought the club down: the hair gap. Well, generation gap. Soon there would be quarrels between the Roses and the Thorns. Those were the names The Sun gave to the younger members and the older, more conservative ones when it reported on an election of club officers in 1894. The Thorns had planned a dinner to discuss the nominations—and guess who wasn’t invited. When the Roses found out about it, they rushed to the dinner, but the election was already over. One of the Thorns told the Sun reporter: “Oh, the sweet young things. Their papas will have to spank them tonight. Sad, isn’t it?”

Oh, those baldies!

The years that followed were understandably thorny at the club, and word was that it was badly managed. In 1903, the Colonial Club was set to close its doors due to financial trouble. “It is too far uptown for luncheon, and in fact, is altogether out of the way,” wrote The New York Times.

Despite a few attempts to save the club, the building was soon converted into office and retail space, and more than a century later, in 2007, it was razed. A glass tower rose from the rubble, and on September 20, 2010, Trader Joe’s opened for business.

The wealthy Upper West Siders at the turn of the century were certainly trying to shape an elite enclave, but the Upper East Side formula never quite took west of Central Park. Sure, the neighborhood did become affluent and architecturally grand, but it became known for a different kind of prestige: its cultural institutions, its intellectual life, its musicians, writers, actors and academics, and its great lox.

That might be changing. Meanwhile, we can have a good chuckle over a neighborhood that once dreamed of an elite social club and is now getting very excited about a grocery store. Trader Joe’s? I hear it opened today.

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