History

The history of the Montauk Club is inextricably linked to the history of Brooklyn. The Club was founded in 1889 in the midst of the economic boom that followed the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge six years earlier. As the population of the borough surged (from 570,000 in 1880 to almost 900,000 by 1894), construction of residential buildings in the borough accelerated. Many of the area’s most prominent families settled in newly-fashionable Park Slope. The founding members of the Club included Charles Pratt, the founder of the Pratt Institute, Richard Schermerhorn, who oversaw the construction of the Prospect Park and Coney Island Railroad and Edwin C. Litchfield, the lawyer and railroad developer who owned much of the property that became Park Slope. Many of the people whose names now identify Brooklyn neighborhoods and streets were founding members, including Dean, Lefferts, Montgomery and Underhill.

At the time the Club was founded, most of Brooklyn’s leaders favored consolidation of Brooklyn with Manhattan. Shortly after the completion of the Club House in 1891, the prominent Brooklyn lawyer and politician William Gaynor gave a speech at the Club intended to rouse pro-merger business and political leaders to action. Gaynor’s speech led to the creation of the Brooklyn Consolidation League in 1893, which was founded to support and facilitate municipal ties with Manhattan. That same year, Gaynor lead a two hundred man delegation from the BCL to Albany to lobby for consolidation. In 1894, Brooklyn voters narrowly passed the consolidation referendum (by 277 votes out of the 129,000 cast). After several more rounds of wrangling, the five boroughs were consolidated in 1897. The result was due, at least in some small part, to Gaynor’s passionate speech at the Club.

In the century since Gaynor’s speech, the Club has hosted many prominent political figures including Grover Cleveland, Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.