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The Ivy Club, often simply Ivy, is the oldest eating club at
Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...
. It was founded in 1879 with Arthur Hawley Scribner as its first head.


Club culture

The club is described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in '' This Side of Paradise'' (1920) as "detached and breathlessly aristocratic". A more recent account described Ivy as the "most patrician eating club at Princeton University" where members "eat at long tables covered with crisp white linens and set with 19th-century Sheffield silver candelabra, which are lighted even when daylight streams into the windows."


Membership

The club was one of the last to admit women, resisting the change until spring 1991 after a lawsuit had been brought against the Ivy Club, Tiger Inn, and Cottage Club by the Princeton student Sally Frank and her lawyer Nadine Taub. The members of each class are selected through the '' bicker'' process, a series of ten screening interviews, which are followed by discussions amongst the members as to whom of the remaining to admit. Current undergraduate members host regular "Roundtable Dinners" featuring talks by faculty and alumni.


Clubhouse

The first clubhouse was Ivy Hall, a brownstone building on Mercer Street in Princeton that still stands. It had been constructed by Richard Stockton Field in 1847 as the home for the Princeton Law School, a short-lived venture that lasted from 1847 to 1852. From the time of its founding until its incorporation in 1883, the club was generally known as the "Ivy Hall Eating Club." In 1883 the club purchased an empty lot on Prospect Avenue, which was a country dirt road at the time. Ivy erected a shingle-style clubhouse in 1884 on what is today the site of Colonial Club. The clubhouse was remodeled and extended in 1887–88. Following Ivy's move to new quarters across Prospect Avenue some ten years later, its second clubhouse was used by Colonial before being sold and moved to Plainsboro Township, New Jersey. Ivy's third and current clubhouse was designed in 1897 by the Philadelphia firm of Cope & Stewardson. In 2009, the club completed its most significant renovation to date. The expansion added a second wing to the facility, changing the club's original L-shaped layout to a U. Designed by Demetri Porphyrios, the new wing includes a two-story Great Hall and a
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to provide additional study space.


Notable alumni

The following is a list of some notable members of the Ivy Club: * Hobey Baker (1914) –
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* Lem Billings (1939) – confidante and "first friend" of President John F. Kennedy who was Kennedy's freshman-year roommate at Princeton * Joshua B. Bolten (1976) –
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director under
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* Philip Bobbitt (1971) –
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scholar and author of '' The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History'' * Lauren Bush-Lauren (2006) – fashion model and niece of
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* Joey Cheek (2011) – speed skater who won gold and silver medals in the
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and co-founder and president of Team Darfur * Leonard S. Coleman, Jr. (1971) – president of the
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* Frederick Hitz – Inspector General of the
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(2002) - American actress, comedian, and writer * Arthur Krock – four-time
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* A.B. Krongard (1953) – executive director of the
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whose Marquand diagram was a forerunner of the
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* Richard King Mellon – financier, banker, and philanthropist who led the
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(1978) – president and CEO of the
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* Saud bin Faisal bin Abdul Aziz (1964) –
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* Arthur Hawley Scribner (1881) – first head of the eating club and president of publisher
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*
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(1893) –
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–winning novelist * Jim Thompson (1928) – OSS officer and Thai silk entrepreneur who famously and mysteriously disappeared in
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in 1967 * Terdema Ussery – president and CEO of the
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– arts patron, aviation pioneer, and founder of the
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(PGA) *
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, 1913–1921 (Associate Graduate Member) * John Gilbert Winant
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New Hampshire New Hampshire ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Gulf of Maine to the east, and the Canadian province of Quebec t ...
and U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom * Frank G. Wisner (1961) – public servant and diplomat who served as U.S. Ambassador to
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,
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, the Philippines, and
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. * Jacob Candelaria -- New Mexico state senator, first openly gay man elected to the New Mexico Legislature and civil rights attorney.


References


Bibliography

*


External links


Official Ivy Club Website


of the clubs, at Princeton's official site.

from James Bradberry Architects website

from the New York Times {{Princeton Eating clubs at Princeton University Jacobean architecture in the United States Jacobethan architecture Historic district contributing properties in Mercer County, New Jersey Secret societies in the United States