The Knickerbocker Club (known informally as The Knick) is a gentlemen's club in New York City that was founded in 1871. It is considered to be the most exclusive club in the United States and one of the most aristocratic gentlemen's clubs in the world. The term "Knickerbocker", partly due to writer Washington Irving's use of the pen name Diedrich Knickerbocker, was a byword for a New York patrician, comparable to a "Boston Brahmin". History The Knickerbocker Club was founded in 1871 by members of the Union Club of the City of New York who were concerned that the club's admission standards had fallen. By the 1950s, urban social club membership was dwindling, in large part because of the movement of wealthy families to the suburbs. In 1959, the Knickerbocker Club considered rejoining the Union Club, merging its 550 members with the Union Club's 900 men, but the plan never came to fruition. The Knick's current clubhouse, a neo-Georgian structure at 2 East 62nd Street, was commissioned in 1913 and completed in 1915, on the site of the former mansion of Josephine Schmid, a wealthy widow. It was designed by William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich, and it has been designated a city landmark. Membership Members of the Knickerbocker Club are almost-exclusively descendants of British and Dutch aristocratic families that governed the early 1600s American Colonies or that left the Old Continent for political reasons (e.g. partisans of the Royalist coalition against Cromwell, such as the "distressed Cavaliers" of the aristocratic Virginia settlers), or current members of the international aristocracy. Towards the middle of the 20th century, however, the club opened its doors to a few descendants of the Gilded Age's prominent families, such as the Rockefellers and Stillmans. E. Digby Baltzell explains in his book Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class: "The circulation of elites in America and the assimilation of new men of power and influence into the upper class takes place primarily through the medium of urban clubdom. Aristocracy of birth is replaced by an aristocracy of ballot. Frederick Lewis Allen showed how this process operated in the case of the nine "Lords of Creation" who were listed in the New York Social Register as of 1905: ‘The nine men who were listed [in the Social Register] were recorded as belonging to 9.4 clubs apiece,’ wrote Allen. ‘Though only two of them, J.