Jonathan Club
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Jonathan Club is a prestigious private social club in Los Angeles, California, U.S. It maintains two clubhouses, one in downtown Los Angeles at 545 South Figueroa Street (built in 1924) and one on the beach in Santa Monica. The Los Angeles headquarters has dining and residential facilities, ballrooms, a health club, a library and other accouterments. A University of Southern California geography Web site says of it, "many important decisions have been made within its walls by the power elite,"[1] and the New York Daily News described it on April 18, 2005, as "a place for the rich and well-bred to see and be seen, cut deals and socialize."[2]
Membership in the club is by invitation. For most of its history it was for men only, but since 1987 it has accepted both men and women.
[edit] History
According to a undated but recent publication of the club titled Jonathan: A Very Special Club (available on the Web through the Los Angeles Public Library site at www.lapl.org), the club was founded in September 1895 by a group of men who had been active in a Los Angeles marching society.
From that beginning has evolved today's Jonathan Club, a social organization serving the widely differing needs of its many members. This diversity, combined with the character and spirit of the members make the Jonathan Club unique.
In 1905, the club was headquartered in the monumental new Pacific Electric Building at 610 S. Main Street, which was the transportation hub for Southern California. According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, "the top three floors of the building housed the exclusive and lavishly adorned Jonathan Club, one of the city’s most exclusive private clubs." [3]
The club was a center of Los Angeles business and social life, but its members also engaged in spirited frivolity. A story in the Los Angeles Daily Times of 31 December 1909, reported on an event in which the men of the city dressed as women and ran foot races in the hallways of the Jonathan Club building. [4]
In 1924 a contract was let for what Southwest Builder called a "magnificent new home" for the club (July 11, 1924, p. 47) — its present brick-faced structure at 545 S. Figueroa Street, one block west of the Los Angeles Central Library.
By 1940 the club had evolved into an important institution in Los Angeles, with many activities geared to the male members, their children, and the women in their lives. In the first seven days of December of that year, for example, the club featured a "Key Men's Breakfast, a "Deep South" chicken dinner, "Distinguished Guest Speakers," swimming for both men and women, an "Army, Navy, Marine Round-Table Luncheon," a family night with a buffet dinner, bridge and dancing, a stag football luncheon and a Saturday-night "Informal Dancing Frolic." (Jonathan: Official Publication of the Jonathan Club, December 1940, available at the Los Angeles Public Library Web site. [5])
After the war the club purchased property on the Santa Monica Beach for a satellite building, and in the late 1980s it applied for a permit to add paddle courts and a parking lot on the land, some of which was leased from the state. The Associated Press(AP) reported on May 6, 1988:
But when the club applied for a development permit in 1985, the [California Coastal] commission said it would require a promise not to discriminate against minorities or women. The club refused, saying its membership policies were irrelevant to the issue. But a Superior Court Judge ruled in the commission's favor and was upheld by a state appeals court.
The AP story also stated that the club had admitted its first black and female members only in summer 1987 and that it was claiming that it did not at that time discriminate in its membership practices.
Today the club has many women members, but few African-American or Latino members.[citation needed]
