Core values?

Not since 1871, when members of the Union Club of New York left to form the Knickerbocker Club because they were less than thrilled about the rift-raft being admitted to membership has there been much change in the order of things in the New York City club scene.

Enter The Core Club, owned by the Core Group, a for-profit corporation. The key qualifier for Core Club membership appears to be that you be somebody ... the biggest qualifier being the size of your bank account. One hundred charter members paid $100,000 each (refundable) to join the club, and 200 additional members have joined them at $55,000 each. Unlike traditional clubs, where the Names You Would Know would prefer that you not know they are members, Core Club's members seem to have no such compunction.

To give this disparate "membership" something to talk about, the club has hired a staff of "curators"--the former publisher of The Paris Review curates the library, for example--to sort through the cultural detritus for the members. Members are provided access to galleys of coming books and screenings of not-yet-released movies, putting them on a par with an overworked NYC editorial intern. Entering the club using a biometric scanner, members encounter a decor that The New York Times described as "a tangle of plywood slats, coils of Ethernet cables, and dangling light fixtures ... like an old club done by the design department of Ian Schrager hotels."

Jennie Saunders, president and CEO of Core Group was asked by the Times if the Core Club is "a club, or a hotel spa, a cult, or what?" She replied, "It's all of those things." P.T. Barnum would have felt right at home at the Core.