"Doubles Club New York Member's Navy Silk Tie"
$250
Sz: 56" x 3 1/2"
*BB pink OCBD shirt sold separately*
783 5th Ave #414, New York, NY
Once upon a time in New York there was no Doubles Club. It was a sad time indeed. The Sherry Netherland Hotel was the most gorgeous hotel in New York, and although it was always filled to overflowing with beautiful people, its large and beautiful basement was temporarily empty and lonely.
One day, a Southern gentleman, beloved by all who knew him, changed all that. His name was Earl Blackwell and, aided and abetted by a marvelous man named Joe Norban, who had the good sense to live with his family in the hotel, Doubles was born, thank heavens. New York hasn't been the same since, it has been infinitely better.
The basement had once had a place where people came to dance and dine. A marvelous Russian called Serge Obelensky and an Englishman called Cecil Beaton had tried to make the "in" place to go, but neither had much success with it. Joe Norban was the man who knew exactly why not. "Earl," he said. "All this place really needs is to have a kitchen
of its own, and not to rely on the hotel kitchen that serves upstairs first."
"Right," said Earl. "You get the permissions necessary for the kitchen and I'll get every knockout person I know in New York to become Founder Members and we will start a club and, as everyone plays backgammon now, we could call it "Doubles". "Right," said Joe Norban, and so Doubles was born. They then, of course proceeded to do much more than that. They got Valerian Rybar, the international interior designer who had created some of the most stunning places known to man, and set his talent to work to make the space irresistible. "The reason it has never worked," Valerian said, "is because it's a long skinny tunnel. It should be horizontal. We are going to fix that." He did, and all of us who remember Valerian Rybar remember the initial shock and excitement of the scarlet red stairway that led down to scarlet carpets and walls and the wildly alive atmosphere the vividness of color created. We remember the clack of the dice on the doubles boards and the music and lights and the parties and the men called Charlie or Jimmy or Gerard and the girl called Eileen who have cared for us through the years. Most of Valerian's original work has lasted through the thirty years of Double's life so far, and with Tom Britt's few changes as the years have passed, Doubles remains a red paradise to all of us.
For better or worse, there's little of "Old New York" remains. Yet in what is basically the basement of the august Sherry-Netherland Hotel, time stands still. Just beyond the front entrance, behind a discreet door and down a flight of stairs so redolent in the color red that it suggests Dante's Inferno, is Doubles, the private dining club that has been catering to the Upper East Side's social set for more than four decades.
November and December evenings are peppered with private parties that tend to have that oh, so social, "old home week" makeup—everybody knows everybody else—from boarding school or college, the same Park Avenue co-op, or another club. It's Muffy and Buffy, Mummy and Daddy, Biff and Boo. They're all wearing Hermès and Chanel.
Originally conceived as a more genteel (and Gentile, though no longer) option to the jam-packed fern bars and first-throbbing discotheques of the mid-70s (think Maxwell's Plum and Le Jardin—Studio 54 hadn't opened yet), Doubles had more in common with London's Annabel's or Harry's Bar than the kind of establishments that featured burly bouncers and velvet ropes on the sidewalk.