The Year That New York City’s Private Clubs Boomed—And Potentially Peaked

For a Halloween party this year, The Ned NoMad, a hotel and members’ club that opened in New York in June, put together a haunted house. The $250 general admission tickets afforded guests access to a range of themed rooms and holiday celebrations. Upstairs, one man got a lap dance in a space made up as an homage to Psycho, and a woman took a selfie video with little people who had been hired as actors for the evening. Downstairs, around 11:30 p.m., guests in a lightly packed room listened to the Black Eyed Peas. Eventually, Emily Ratajkowski, Irina Shayk, G-Eazy, and Giancarlo Stanton showed up. 

In the middle of this all, presiding over a VIP table and signing off on paperwork that an employee brought over, was Richie Akiva, the creative director of The Ned. Since the ’90s, Akiva has made a name for himself as one of New York’s foremost ringleaders of celebrity-flecked nightlife: parties at clubs where a line competes to get past a doorman. Guests at the Halloween proceedings were under different circumstances, either belonging to The Ned as a member or paying to come by for the night. But as he stepped away from his table, Akiva pointed to parallels. “It’s like having that without the door guy,” he said. “You come here and find your people.”

In New York over the past year, at least six members-only clubs have opened or planned an opening, but the cascade began with Zero Bond in 2020. The club has become known as one of the focal points of Mayor Eric Adams’s nightlife, and Adams appointed its proprietor Scott Sartiano to the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Sartiano and Akiva were nightlife partners for years until they split in 2014.) Chapel Bar opened in 2021, and, in addition to Akiva and The Ned, joining the fray this year: Casa Cipriani, Casa Cruz, Aman, Central Park Club, and, soon, a New York branch of the San Vicente Bungalows.

Amid New York’s continued rebound from the coronavirus pandemic, private clubs have offered insulation from a city reshaping itself, especially for the segment of the population willing to spend money on exclusivity. Central Park Club sits on the 100th floor of Central Park Tower on Billionaires’ Row and is open to residents of the building as well as a group of members coordinated by the events business Boldface Partners. “It’s a great place to keep a low profile,” said Jane Sarkin, who co-founded Boldface along with fellow former Vanity Fair staffer Matt Ullian in 2018. 

In some ways, the movement has quickly entrenched itself. A few of the new private clubs have become tabloid and gossip page staples, with Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson going on a date at Zero Bond and Leonardo DiCaprio and Gigi Hadid doing the same at Casa Cipriani. The latter has played host to an Akiva-orchestrated Met Gala after-party and the CFDA Fashion Awards. 

Akiva is a natural booster, whether for parties at which his high school friend Mark Ronson was DJ’ing in the 2000s or for NFT-adjacent pop-up events at Art Basel in Miami last year. And now, theoretically, he has another wave to promote. But the month after the Halloween party, as he sat in the same space on a Friday afternoon, The Ned was quieter, and so was the face of it. “The membership thing is gonna implode at some point,” Akiva said, sitting in black Nike skateboarding sneakers and a black Alo beanie. “No one thinks that, but I think that.” (Though he quickly clarified that this didn’t include The Ned: “My thing is better.”) The trend, in his view, had already escalated too far, plus he’s worried about a recession.

“You’re gonna look at your bills, and you’re gonna say, ‘Oh, my God, I’m a member at Casa Cipriani, I’m a member at Aman, I’m a member at Zero Bond, I’m a member at The Ned, I’m a member at Casa Cruz,’” he said. “‘Why am I a member in all these places, and paying all this money, just to be a member at a place that I don’t even go to?’ So some are gonna fall to the wayside.”

One member of private clubs around the world, requesting anonymity in order to preserve their standing at them, maintained that “I only go to these places when I’m in New York.”

Still, they could understand possible objections to the whole phenomenon: “I saw a lot of finance guys who spent money because they wanted to be part of this world.” Membership at The Ned costs $5,000 a year; at Zero Bond, between $2,500 and $4,000. Technically speaking, Casa Cruz calls itself not a members’ club but an investors’ club, with a minimum investment (coming with membership to the club) starting at $250,000. 

In September, a New York Post headline described the “private club craze” as “a cancer on the city.” “Members-only places catering to global carpetbaggers are clogging the pages of Page Six,” Post real estate columnist Steve Cuozzo wrote. For all the appearances of a new appetite for these clubs, Soho House opened a new members-only chapter in New York in 2003. But it has become dated enough that the duo behind it, billionaire owner Ron Burkle and founder Nick Jones, started over in the city with The Ned.

Akiva also just seemed to be in a reflective mood when we spoke. The rise of private clubs had mirrored some broader post-pandemic developments in Manhattan: more expensive, more stratified, and harder to access. In February, three former investment bankers explained to Eater how they devised an online system to secure elusive restaurant reservations. 

“When COVID hit, I lost everything and everything was shut down,” Akiva said. “And then I started dealing with headaches, partners, landlords, lawyers. It’s like the worst thing that ever happened to me.” In 2018, Akiva sold half of The Butter Group, the company overseeing his clubs 1Oak and Up & Down, to the Canadian billionaire Daryl Katz, who owns the Edmonton Oilers. “He didn’t make that money back in the two years the pandemic hit,” Akiva said, “so he got very shrewd.” (He said it’s since been sorted out.)

Between those pressures and plain nostalgia, he had reason to reminisce. “The door guy was the quarterback,” Akiva said. “And it’s not like that anymore.” Clubs—like the one he’s overseeing—replaced the process with a fee and an application. But for now, this is the landscape, and Burkle, a longtime friend of Akiva’s, had tapped him to do this. The Ned, which opened its first location in London in 2017 and one in Doha, Qatar, last month, plans to open another New York outpost in 2024 at the former American Stock Exchange. 

“I don’t really promote anything anymore,” Akiva said. “Sometimes I’ll just go on my Instagram and say, ‘I’m activating.’ I won’t even say where. And then they’ll have to figure it out.” It’s a minor version, perhaps, of the old thrill. The Post reported in October that 1Oak had been evicted, but Akiva insisted he’s close to bringing it back. “The landlord called us,” he said. With the decline of office use and Meatpacking District clubs, “they can’t get rid of that building if they wanted to.” And so he thought, while he had a foot in the new world, he could still try to put the other back in the old one. “I think I’m gonna reopen it,” Akiva said. “I just had a meeting today with my Canadian partners.”

Everyone’s invited, so long as the quarterback approves.