Wms. Club Operations Move to Princeton Club

The 97-year-old Williams Club moved its membership program and related activities to the Princeton Club of New York on June 1, ceasing its own hospitality and restaurant operations.

In a letter to the campus community in May, Mike Reed ’75, VP of strategic planning and institutional diversity and acting VP of alumni relations and development, wrote that maintaining the Club’s East 39th Street location as “an independent facility … has become financially impractical.” The College, which last year received the two connected brownstones as a gift from the Club, plans to sell them when the time is right.

Like most of the university clubs in New York, the Williams Club was established and maintained as a separate entity, legally independent of the College.

Through a special arrangement, Williams Club members who renew their memberships will have the full rights of regular members of the Princeton Club, which is already the base for Columbia and NYU alumni clubs. Located at 15 West 43rd St., between 5th and 6th Avenues, the Princeton Club has newly remodeled hotel, dining, meeting and athletic facilities.

“For many years Williams has been the only school of its size whose alumni maintained a separate club, but the Williams Club was too small to survive independently,” says its president, Jeff Urdang ’89. “There is a sense both of sadness and the end of an era, but the move to the clubhouse of the Princeton Club will allow us to focus on the core elements of our mission.”