The idea of a social club or “clubbing” — in this case, meaning a select group of men getting together to dine and drink — dates back as early as the 1660s. But as with many staid institutions, it arrived in Pittsburgh by way of the region’s industrial elite.
In the 1860s and ‘70s, the club movement, borne from benevolent societies, fraternal organizations, and post-Civil War groups, proliferated in Pittsburgh. Private gentlemen’s clubs opened, modeled after those created by British aristocracy, situated away from industrial centers. They offered camaraderie, a convenient place for like-minded professionals to talk business, and a refined Downtown lunch. The trend became so widespread among wealthy industrialists that, by 1912, Henry Clay Frick belonged to 27 different Pittsburgh clubs, even founding his own private club (located on the top floor of the Frick Building on Grant St.).
A couple members-only city clubs remain in downtown Pittsburgh today, only blocks away from the Pittsburgh City Paper offices. They tout a suite of amenities tucked away above street level, and because of their exclusivity, retain an air of mystery. Given cultural shifts toward greater inclusion, the rise of remote work, and plans to transition Downtown into a more residential neighborhood, we were curious to see who still frequents these clubs and what appeal they hold for their members.
The Duquesne Club
The Duquesne Club was not Pittsburgh’s first club, but stands as the oldest operating private membership club in the city, established in 1873. Long reputed for its secrecy, asking about its happenings is apparently evergreen at City Paper; in 2003, a reader wrote to Chris Potter about what goes on inside “that mysterious hulking building on Sixth Ave. with well-dressed people going in and out.”
“Human sacrifices,” Potter joked in reply.
The quip touches on the nature of the club’s founding by a “who's-who” of 19th-century industry captains and the outsized influence they exerted on Pittsburgh’s development.
“The big picture is that Pittsburgh was building wealth and industry at a scale that had never been seen before,” Duquesne Club historian and archivist Rachel Colker tells CP. “That was incubated at the Duquesne Club through conversations and poker games and lunches and dinners. And there's no denying that while it was a social club, that kind of activity impacted the city, which, in many ways, impacted the world. It’s kind of lofty, but I don't think it's far from the truth.”
Founding membership, says Colker, was mostly younger men in their 30s, along with a few seniors, largely of Scotch-Irish, Scottish, and Presbyterian heritage. Black, Jewish, and Catholic members were excluded into the 20th century, and though women frequented the club and a designated ladies dining room as guests, they were not admitted as members until 1980.
Original Duquesne Club members with names still recognizable around town include John Weakley Chalfant, vice president of Etna Iron Works and later a founder of Allegheny General Hospital; Thomas Chalmers Clarkson of Farmers National Bank; Maxwell K. Moorehead, president of the Monongahela Navigation Company, a lock and dam engineering firm that opened the way for transportation on the rivers; and several prominent attorneys, including the club’s first president.
A 38-year-old Andrew Carnegie was an early club member, as was Frick — who’s commonly misremembered as a founder, but was later written into the club’s charter — who dined at the Duquesne Club with banker Andrew Mellon.
Given this roster, one can only imagine the machinations behind closed doors (the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, which reshaped the city through Renaissance I, formed there). The building has historically been the site of protests due its proximity to the wealthy and powerful.
“The club definitely has a mystique to it because of that and a reputation,” says Duquesne Club’s director of communications Gregg Liberi. In 2016, when Liberi created the then-143-year-old club’s first social media accounts, “we got a lot of feedback from people saying, ‘What, they have a culinary society? There are families there at Christmas? It’s not just a bunch of old white men sitting reading a newspaper in the front room?’ Even other employees were surprised.”
The Duquesne Club rarely gives public tours, and Liberi tells CP that it doesn’t receive many media requests. The club of approximately 2,300 members remains invitation-only. Admission requires recommendation by three current members, a one-time entrance or initiation fee topping $10,000, and annual dues (reportedly $4,000-$5,000) corresponding to different levels of membership.
Even getting past the front door as a non-member, it’s difficult not to feel awestruck.
“The history is palpable, and there's no denying that,” Colker says. Liberi states it’s the reason some members join.
“There's a sense of tradition that does appeal to a lot of people,” Colker adds. “As the world changes so rapidly, it is a place [where] there's a reverence for tradition.”
The castle-like Duquesne Club has six stories for its clubhouse alongside a 12-story hotel, and its grandeur eclipses even Pittsburgh’s Gilded Age mansions. Inside the clubhouse, there’s an oak-paneled cigar bar, billiard room, reading room dotted with luxe wingback chairs, executive lounge, library with 1,500 books on regional history and culinary arts, a world-class wine cave, and a Founders Room with portraits of Carnegie and Frick that face each other, their placement rumored to be a nod to the pair’s deathbed feud (though Liberi and Colker couldn’t find any archival evidence of this).
The Duquesne Room, formerly named the Crystal Room after its collection of chandeliers that were recently taken down and “meticulously cleaned” piece by piece, Liberi says, is sought after for its formal dining with a live pianist and views of the Trinity Cathedral churchyard across the street, home to some of the oldest marked graves on the East Coast.
Arguably the heart of the club is its 25 private dining rooms, including an all-season garden patio that looks like an Impressionist painting. Membership has “always kind of reflected the business profile in Pittsburgh,” Colker says — in other words, people who lunch — and at the height of the post-World War II era, the club served 1,200 lunches per day.
To mark the Duquesne Club’s 150th anniversary last year, Colker wrote a book, An Illustrated History of the Duquesne Club, giving the most comprehensive look inside since a sanctioned 1989 history.
Part of the club’s legacy for her was uncovering the history of its staff, many of whom worked and have stayed working at the club for decades. (Staff currently numbers around 260, with more, including local college students, hired on for holidays.)
Membership coordinator Theresa Hopkins tells CP, “In a private club, I think it does become like a very family situation, where [members] feel attached to us and we feel attached to them.”
“[There] is this kind of upstairs-downstairs story [that is] also a really interesting, truly Pittsburgh kind of narrative that I’m trying to uncover,” Colker says.
The club did not employ an American chef until the 1980s, “so it was always this European-trained, highly sophisticated, exceptionally elegant culinary experience,” she adds, and “the club built a reputation on that. It was these chefs that really had an imprint.”
Its signature macaroon cookie, made with specially sourced almond paste and without coconut (which CP staff got to try, and one rightly described as “fire”) was created by French chef Abel Bomberault, employed at the Club from 1931 to 1961. Bomberault also introduced Pittsburgh to shepherd’s pie, vichyssoise (soup), and Virginia spot, a fish dish and still a Club favorite.
There are some modern touches. Today’s club has corporate suites — cubby-like nooks where you can take video calls, because even the Duquesne Club futzes with Zoom — and perhaps, most notably, a gym. The state-of-the art health and fitness club was added in 1994, today equipped with a cardio floor, pilates studio, hair salon, massage rooms, full-room golf simulator, and a dining area.
“For some [members], THIS is the Duquesne Club,” Liberi says.
Asked if he feels the Club’s 151-year history, health and fitness director Ryan Kostura points out he’s the only member of the executive staff who gets to wear shorts.
“I feel [it] talking about the history and how prestigious this place is, but I get a little bit of the New Age vibe as well,” Kostura tells CP.
In addition to pioneering the Club’s social media, Liberi also added a digital sign displaying upcoming activities — sushi and Mexican food nights — resembling something you’d see at the convention center or a run-of-the-mill conference hotel.
Initially thought to be vulgar and modern, the sign is “completely useful,” Liberi tells CP. “Nobody complains. It’s just that's the value of tradition, an example of how [these changes] are all sort of considered and methodically plodding along.”
Rivers Club
Sitting three blocks away from Duquesne Club, the Rivers Club prides itself on its accepting culture.
The private business and social club, owned by Dallas-based lifestyle company Invited (formerly ClubCorp), opened at One Oxford Centre in 1983. In a sense, its fate was tied to the Duquesne Club: while those members had steered Pittsburgh’s industrialization for the century prior, steel had reached an economic crisis point. Renaissance II, the follow-up to the Allegheny Conference’s original project, launched in response to rediversify the region’s economy, redevelop Downtown, and construct the 45-story tower on Grant St. that would house offices, upscale shopping and dining, and the Rivers Club. Today’s club still occupies the same location, sitting atop the Centre’s parking garage with three stories including a lobby level, an athletics floor and cafe, and a social and dining floor with event spaces and boardrooms.
“Hidden surprises: Oxford Centre’s plain exterior deceiving,” reads an April 1983 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette headline. The article goes on to say, “One Oxford Centre’s answer to Monroeville Mall’s ice skating rink is The Rivers Club, complete with a pool, jogging track, racquetball and squash courts, and Nautilus equipment.”
Initially, the new members-only health club was advertised as “recreation for the rich,” inviting a select list of people to join for a $1,700 initiation fee and $70 monthly dues ($5,368 and $221 today). There was talk of “sweating in style” in oak-paneled locker rooms and “neo-deco decor.”
More than 40 years later, Rivers Club is still membership-based, but not invitation-only, and, in contrast to its neighbor, leans heavily into its profile as an ultra-sociable city club.
“We're just very laid back,” says Rivers Club general manager Rosie Fisher. “I had heard different connotations of the club and how it was kind of an uppity, stuffy feel, and at first I wasn't sure if I would fit in. But then the moment that I walked [in], I knew that this wasn't what people think it is.”
Fisher says that a point of pride, touted on the Rivers Club website, is that it was the first private club in Pittsburgh to admit women and people of color as members. (The Duquesne Club also admitted its first Black member in 1983.)
“We want everybody to feel accepted when they walk in the doors, no matter what they're wearing, no matter where they came from,” Fisher, who became the Club’s first female general manager in January, tells CP.
The club also puts on a roster of very 21st-century-sounding events like a Bridgerton charity ball, wine dinners, and soul food and jazz food nights, some of which are open to the public.
At the entrance to the Rivers Club sixth-floor restaurant, Yolanda Wingate-Wheaton has worked as a concierge since 2004. She’s the first person club members see, starting at 5 a.m., and apparently, many of them say they’ll quit the club when she does.
“They have my cell phone number,” she says. “I've known some of [them] for over 20 years, and they know me.”
“She knows not only their names, but their spouses’ names, their birthdays, their grandchildren's names,” says Fisher.
“I’m their psychiatrist when they're here,” Wingate-Wheaton explains. “[And] I'm one of those people, what they talk to me about stays with me.”
Truly a family affair, Wingate-Wheaton’s husband has worked at Rivers Club as a banquet manager since 1999, and their 28-year-old daughter, who works at PPG Plaza, is also a club member, along with her boss.
“Yolanda is a staple,” Fisher emphasizes, “We cannot operate without her … [and it’s] because she treats everyone the same, no matter whether she has met you one time or 100 times. You get Yolanda [as] the same person every single day.”
In her 20 years at Rivers Club, Wingate-Wheaton says she’s hobnobbed with the elite as much as “regular people.” When she first started, members invited her to the club’s parties and she’d work double shifts to attend.
Private clubs are common stops for U.S. presidents (the Duquesne Club once welcomed Ulysses S. Grant), Wingate-Wheaton has helped host former president Barack Obama several times, and took a photo with Chelsea Clinton. Pittsburgh Steelers president Art Rooney II was a Rivers Club member, and once scolded Wingate-Wheaton, originally from Maryland, for her Baltimore Ravens screensaver.
“I don't get all wishy-washy when famous people come,” she says. “They're people, and you just have to learn how to talk. That’s just my personality.”
Proximity to the courthouses always led me to assume Rivers Club was frequented by judges, and while there are several, alongside lawyers, the membership of 2,200 encompasses a cross-section of Downtown workers looking for a “convenience factor,” as well as some college students, Fisher says. That morning, she overheard one of the club’s 96-year-old regulars giving job advice to a 21-year-old Duquesne student.
Adjusted for inflation, Rivers Club membership costs less than it did in 1983, averaging $165 per month for a household with discounts for Oxford Centre tenants, university staff, Downtown residents, and young executives.
The gym remains a huge draw, and the club’s fitness floor is packed with workout rooms, a yoga studio, basketball and racquetball courts, an indoor track, and one of Downtown’s only lap lane pools with skyline views five stories up.
The “million-dollar question” says Fisher is are members still joining for gym access or for what they view as a social club.
“I do believe what people find is they come here for the gym, and then they realize we're not a gym, and then they get acclimated into the whole club and into the community,” she says.
She notes the club’s demographics have skewed noticeably younger in the last couple years, with members aged 35-49 recently overtaking 51-65, and Downtown and remote workers who use the club more often.
“They work Downtown, they live Downtown, [and] they come here on the weekends, evenings, mornings,” Fisher says. “But [the] more universal effect is, ‘I want to be a part of a community in every aspect.’”