Historic club seeks secret of youth

For nearly 60 years Wafe Risner has been making his four-day-a-week trek to the Los Angeles Athletic Club. Every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday the 90-year-old Pasadena retired aircraft industry executive hits the sauna, the handball courts, and does a lap on the indoor track. He ends the day with a beer he keeps in the refrigerator in a private dressing area.

Priya Sopori, a 29-year-old corporate lawyer, has a rather different workout regime at the downtown club. Nearly every weekday morning she spends 45 minutes on an elliptical trainer or treadmill, 30 minutes doing weights and occasionally attends a yoga class. After a shower, she heads back to her downtown law office.

This is the membership of the Los Angeles Athletic Club, a 122-year-old private club straddling two worlds and struggling to live in both. Begun by the city’s founding fathers, it has prided itself for years on attracting the best and brightest. Telltale remnants of the past are found in the hunter green carpets, dark wood bars, high-ceilinged banquet halls and hotel rooms. But there’s also a small business center with Internet access, a Pilates studio and high-tech cardiovascular machines.

As the club tries to hang on to the old guard while recruiting the new, a question looms: Is a private club like the LAAC still relevant in the 21st century? Other private athletic clubs around the U.S. are also experiencing growing pains, including the Indianapolis Athletic Club and New York’s Downtown Athletic Club, which has long been mired in financial problems.

“We’re definitely seeing venerable private athletic clubs under siege,” says Bill Howland, director of research for the Boston-based International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Assn., a nonprofit trade group. “They’re facing head-to-head competition from places like the Sports Club/LA, which positions itself as an urban country club. They’re having to not only re-evaluate their physical plant, but the services they offer as well. A few decades ago they were about the two-martini lunch, and now people want to be able to bring their clients to play squash and then have a vegetarian lunch.”

For a club like the LAAC to thrive, suggests Howland, it needs to take a cue from commercial clubs that are carving out a following in a competitive market: “Crunch is edgy, the San Francisco Bay Club is a downtown, white-collar club, and some clubs appeal to families,” he says. “If these older athletic clubs do the same kind of thing, figure out what kind of services they have that meet the market need, then they can achieve relevancy. If you talk to the people behind Sports Club/LA and see how much thought went into the color schemes and the staff uniforms, they don’t leave anything to chance. I don’t know that these private clubs historically have operated this way.”

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Club of power brokers

In 1880 the Athletic Club opened its first location on Spring Street, founded by 40 prominent citizens on a motto of “health, recreation, grace and vigor.” The initiation fee was $5, monthly dues were $1, and gymnasium equipment included a trapeze, flying rings, a long horse and dumbbells. Women were permitted only at social events and exhibitions. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the club’s location changed but its roster always included the city’s power brokers, names such as Huntington, Doheny, Chandler, O’Melveny, Dockweiler and Slauson. And there was an array of celebrities, including Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Charlie Chaplin.

During the 1920s the club expanded along with the city, opening the California Yacht Club in San Pedro, a gun club near Bakersfield and the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades. It also purchased a number of struggling health clubs around town, but when war came in the 1940s membership dropped and some of those acquired clubs were sold.

The LAAC underwent a major overhaul in the 1950s, adding new pools, equipment and strengthening its athletic programs. It became a training ground for Olympic athletes, and the club began to add ethnic members. Membership peaked at about 5,000 in the 1970s, as L.A.’s downtown boomed. But recessions, tax law changes and the flight of corporate headquarters from downtown during the next two decades eroded the club’s numbers. By 1995, it counted only 2,700 members, about the same as it has today.

Not half-a-mile away from the LAAC is a new Gold’s Gym franchise, just over a year old, with a pool, boxing ring, spa services and saunas. It’s competing for the same downtown office workers and loft dwellers as the LAAC, says Ben Amante, Gold’s senior vice president of franchising, who boasts that the gym’s “hip, up-to-date” facility is a draw. Already, Gold’s has 5,200 members -- nearly double the number at LAAC -- including a few defectors from the venerable downtown club, Amante says.

Cory Hathaway knows he has an uphill climb to increase the club’s population, but he doesn’t seem that worried, even with 150 gyms within a 10-mile radius of the Athletic Club. The gangly 26-year-old director of sales and marketing is also a sixth-generation member--his father is Charles Hathaway, president of parent company LAACO -- and he’s got power players like developer Tom Gilmore on his side. Gilmore, a club member for five years, has been buying up downtown property for years. LAAC brochures are distributed in Gilmore’s buildings and others in the area that attract a younger, more affluent resident. Members pay a $500 initiation fee and $140 per month; those under 30 are eligible for a discount.

About 60% of LAAC’s membership are men, and the average age of members is 50, according to Hathaway. Recruiting younger people hasn’t been “terribly tough,” he says, as some who have moved downtown have been receptive to the club’s offerings, which include opportunities for professional networking, plus restaurants, shops and spas -- features not found in every commercial health club. One problem, however, has been the transient nature of downtown dwellers, who may last only one year before moving elsewhere.

New programs designed to appeal to younger members are in the works, including televising Laker games and holding a monthly “younger bar night” for people in the 20s-to-40s age groups.

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Touring the building

Hathaway believes the club’s storied past appeals to a generation that knows Slauson only as a street and Huntington as a museum: “We really emphasize the history,” he says. “It’s like you’ve stepped back in time, and it creates a distinctive style.” A photo from the club’s archives shows men and women dining in a banquet hall decorated with stuffed animal heads. The men are in coats and ties, the women in flowery dresses.

Dress codes today are casual or business casual; business attire is required only for some club events.

Hathaway leads a tour of the 12-story building, which is showing its age in this shabby downtown jewelry district. The main fitness area is in a spacious, open room with skylights and an array of updated cardiovascular and weight machines, rowing machines and free weights. Rusted light fixtures hang above the basketball court and the pools, where a few people are doing laps.

The restaurants, bars and meeting rooms have a men’s-club look and feel dated with decor that smacks of high style -- circa early 1980s. Hathaway says the club is being remodeled, step by step, with plans for a larger business center and a renovated rooftop.

The old guard, like Risner, don’t seem to mind the changes. He describes the club back in 1943 as “more austere. The clothing regulations were closely monitored but the atmosphere wasn’t oppressive.” He finds it “very difficult to imagine” what his life would have been like without the camaraderie of his regular handball games at the club. “In that private locker, we’d do a lot of socializing,” he says. “There were a lot of tall stories. It’s been my home away from home.”

But ultimately, the future of the club will depend on its success at attracting younger members like Sopori, an attorney with the downtown law firm Quinn Emanuel.

Sopori, whose family is from India, says she was initially concerned about whether an exclusive club would welcome people from different backgrounds. “I’m from a typical immigrant family, we never belonged to a private gym,” she says.

“I never heard anything but positive comments from people. I was looking for a place I could go with other professionals, not the kind of place where women wear makeup to work out,” she adds.

Although she hasn’t participated in many of the club’s social functions, she’s happy with the friendships she’s made with fellow members: “You can have incredibly interesting conversations here. Everyone has led a pretty full life.”