The Brooklyn Collection is now part of the Center for Brooklyn History! Learn more about this historic partnership here. This post is a collaborative effort of historian Dylan Yeats, Vice President of the Montauk Club and co-chair of its History Committee, and archivist Diana Bowers-Smith, who processed the Montauk Club Collection at Brooklyn Public Library along with librarian and archives volunteer Kreya Jackson.
Founded in 1889, when Brooklyn was still an independent city, the Montauk Club is a social club in the Park Slope neighborhood. Its landmarked Venetian Gothic clubhouse, designed by architect Francis H. Kimball and completed in 1891, still stands today on the corner of 8th Avenue and Lincoln Place, directly across Grand Army Plaza from Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Library.
The Montauk Club has always drawn well-known and powerful members and visitors. Three of the four mayors of Brooklyn from the founding of the club in 1889 to the consolidation of Greater New York in 1898 were members, and every U.S. president from Grover Cleveland to John F. Kennedy visited the Montauk Club at some point.
Preserving historical records for future generations takes a lot of work. Members of the Montauk Club kept materials they considered useful or important despite numerous fires, floods, thefts, and a lack of storage space. But most of the history was lost over the years. Surrounding the Club’s 125th Anniversary in 2014, longtime member Mary Brennan gathered up the surviving records to donate to the Brooklyn Public Library. Since then, the Montauk Club History Committee has been working with the archivists and librarians at Brooklyn Public Library to reconstruct the club’s history.
One of the highlights of the Montauk Club Collection at Brooklyn Public Library is programs and menus from lavish events held at the club. These items were created and saved to commemorate special dinners, but they bear witness to much more than that if we take the time to listen. Like the Montauk Club itself they offer a window into the complex history of Brooklyn over the last 130+ years.
Archivists do their best to offer researchers context about the creation of the collections they use so that they can better evaluate the information contained within them. But many researchers also try to read records “against the grain” of why they were created in the first place or saved for posterity. Archivists Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook encourage looking for evidence and inspiration in the “archival gaps” of what wasn’t recorded and why.1 With this in mind, many items in the Montauk Club Collection reveal stories about the history of Brooklyn that transcend what one might expect from a dinner menu or event flyer.
This is the menu for a Board of Education dinner held at the Montauk Club. T. McCants Stewart, the sole African American BOE member, attended this dinner.2 A year before, Stewart had resigned from his position after being excluded from a BOE dinner at the Montauk Club.
Stewart was an attorney, civil rights activist, and former minister to Liberia who campaigned for Brooklyn Mayor Alfred C. Chapin in 1887 and 1889 and then David A. Boody in 1891, delivering African American votes that tipped the scales in tight races. In return, they had promised him real change, and delivered some too. But Chapin and Boody would not support Stewart’s proposals to integrate Brooklyn’s schools.3
Stewart was already frustrated with Brooklyn’s White leadership when he was the only BOE member not invited to a dinner at the Montauk Club in 1892.4 Chapin and Boody helped found the Montauk Club and four other BOE members belonged as well. While the Montauk Club never officially restricted membership to any group, African Americans did not join until the 1960s.
After Stewart’s resignation, Mayor Boody publically requested a meeting.5 We don’t know what they discussed, but Stewart agreed to stay on the BOE and he attended their next dinner at the Montauk Club. Stewart also convinced the BOE to make P.S. 83 into Brooklyn’s first genuinely integrated school. A decade later, however, a new set of White political leaders re-segregated Brooklyn’s schools and they remain so today.
This is the guest list for a dinner Montauk Club members held to celebrate fellow member William A. Prendergast’s election as NYC Comptroller. Attendees included a who’s who of Brooklyn elites: NYC Mayor William J. Gaynor, Congressman William M. Calder, former Lieutenant Governor Timothy Woodruff, former Borough President Edward M. Grout, tugboat magnate Eugene F. Moran, ink manufacturer Charles M. Higgins, architect Charles Mead, A&S Department Store Vice-President Simon Rothschild, and Coney Island entrepreneur Charles Feltman, inventor of the hot dog.
Notably, no women were invited to William Prendergast’s dinner. Not even his wife Agnes, who was a lead organizer for the Woman Suffrage Party. The Brooklyn branch of the Woman Suffrage Party was founded around the corner from the Montauk Club in the home of famed soprano singer Alma Webster-Powell in January 1910. Suffrage organizers like Agnes Prendergast worked to extend votes to women through a statewide referendum.6
Agnes Prendergast hosted her own luncheon at the Montauk Club in February 1917 to launch the final campaign for Women’s Suffrage in New York.7 Attendees helped collect a quarter-million signatures from Brooklyn women who wanted suffrage and convinced 58% of Brooklyn’s male voters to support the measure on November 6th, 1917. Women’s Suffrage won a big enough margin in Brooklyn and NYC to ensure victory statewide.8
As a founder of the Progressive Bull Moose Party, William Prendergast supported votes for women. But he lost his re-election bid in 1917 and retired from politics.9
This is the program for the Montauk Club’s 80th Anniversary dinner. Famed lawyer James B. Donovan planned and attended the event while negotiating with students on strike at Pratt University, where he served as president.
Donovan joined the Montauk Club in 1955 after he returned from assisting the Nazi war crimes tribunals at Nuremberg. Over weekly games of gin rummy in the Card Room, Donovan plotted out his controversial legal defense of Soviet spy Rudolph Abel and coordinated the $53 million donation of medical supplies to Cuba in exchange for the release of 1,113 CIA-trained soldiers captured at the Bay of Pigs and 8,590 political prisoners.10
Pratt students opposed Donovan’s plan to increase tuition and purchase more of the Willoughby Walk public housing complex. To evade the growing protests Donovan moved Pratt’s Board of Trustees meeting to the Montauk Club. But 200 students followed. They picketed the clubhouse and issued Donovan and the trustees a manifesto explaining their rationale for calling a strike the next day.11
Over April, tensions between Donovan and the striking students deepened, prompting an escalation in tactics. When members of the Black Student Union padlocked the campus gates shut in early May, Donovan called for their arrest. This outraged the faculty, who threatened to strike themselves, prompting Donovan to change course. He agreed to ban the NYPD from campus and put student and community representatives on the Board of Trustees. This ended the strike on May 9th, 1969 – the night before the Montauk Club 80th Anniversary dinner.12
What gets saved in institutional collections is shot through with power dynamics. Considering those power dynamics, and what might be missing from the story as a result, is key to forming a full picture of our collective past. As this post suggests, archival material preserved for one purpose can anchor a variety of different types of stories if approached creatively. The Montauk Club Collection is a window into Brooklyn history generally and even seemingly mundane items such as menus and guest lists can reveal a host of information, especially when contextualized using the other resources at the Center for Brooklyn History and beyond.
Taken together, these items and the stories they tell can remind us that “archives are not passive storehouses of old stuff, but active sites where social power is negotiated, contested, confirmed.” As archivists Schwartz and Cook explain, “memory is not something found or collected in archives, but something that is made, and continually re-made.”13 Here at the Center for Brooklyn History, we embrace that continual re-making of history, and encourage our patrons to do the same. So next time you dive into our collections, don’t forget to read against the grain--you never know what kind of fascinating Brooklyn history you may find.
To learn more about the Montauk Club Collection at the Center for Brooklyn History, explore the collection guide. The Montauk Club is open and always welcomes new members. If you have a memory or information about the Montauk Club you would like to share please email [email protected].
Notes:
[1] Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” Archival Science, vol. 2, nos. 1–2 (March 2002), p. 14.
[2] “Hendrix Dined by Members of the Board of Education,” Brooklyn Standard Union, May 5, 1893, p. 2.
[3] Carleton Mabee, “Brooklyn's Black Public Schools,” Journal of Long Island History 11 n. 2 (Spring 1975), pp. 23-38; Robert J. Swan, "T. McCants Stewart and the Failure of the Mission of the Talented Tenth in Black America,” diss., New York University, 1990, esp. 116-187.
[4] “Stewart is Out,” Brooklyn Citizen, February 13, 1892, p. 1; “T. McCants Stewart Resigns,” New York Sun, February 14 1892, p. 9; “No Place for a Colored Man,” New York Times, February 14 1892, p. 16; “Mr. Stewart’s Resignation,” New York Age, February 20, 1892, p. 1.
[5] “Stewart Stays,” Brooklyn Citizen, February 16, 1892, p. 1.
[6] “Suffragettes Call on Brooklyn Women,” New York Times, January 13 1909, p. 3; Ronald Schaffer, “The New York City Woman Suffrage Party, 1909-1919,” New York History 43, n. 3 (July, 1962), pp. 269-287; Agnes Hull Prendergast, “Nine Reasons Why Women Should Have the Vote,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 7 1917, p. 26.
[7] “Suffrage Luncheon,” Brooklyn Times Union, February 17 1917, p. 17; “Visions of Suffrage Victory Detailed,” Brooklyn Standard Union, February 18 1917, p. 12; “10th A.D. Women’s Luncheon,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 18 1917, p. 7.
[8] The History of Woman Suffrage v. 6, ed. Ida Husted Harper (New York: National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1922), 460-468; Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017).
[9] “Sees Bright Omen in Brooklyn Suffrage Day,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 2 1915, p. 4; “Mr. Prendergast Retires,” Brooklyn Times Union, December 26 1917, p. 4.
[10] James B. Donovan, Strangers on a Bridge: the Case of Colonel Abel and Francis Gary Powers (New York: Atheneum, 1964); Phillip Bigger, Negotiator: the Life and Career of James B. Donovan (Bethlehem: Lehigh University press, 2006); Ryan Stellabotte, “Metadiplomat: The Real-Life Story of Bridge of Spies Hero James B. Donovan,” Fordham Magazine (October 16, 2015). Stephen Spielberg directed a film based on Donovan’s defense of Able entitled Bridge of Spies (2015) that unfortunately did not include the Montauk Club!
[11] “200 Pratt Students Protest $300 Increase in Tuition,” New York Times, March 26 1969, p. 28; “500 at Pratt Boycott Classes,” New York Post, March 26 1969, p. 28; The Prattler 30, n. 18 (April 8, 1969), 4-5.
[12] Bigger, 198-204; “Pratt Asks Police to Stay off Campus,” New York Times, May 10 1969, p. 15; “All Day Conference,” New York Daily News, May 11 1969, p. 26.
[13] Schwartz and Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power,”, p. 1; Terry Cook and Joan M. Schwartz, “Archives, Records, and Power: From (Postmodern) Theory to (Archival) Practice,” Archival Science, vol. 2, nos. 3–4 (September 2002), p. 172.
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