The Detroit Athletic Club (often referred to as the DAC) is a private social club and athletic club located in the heart of Detroit's theater, sports, and entertainment district. It is located across the street from Detroit's historic Music Hall. The clubhouse was designed by Albert Kahn and inspired by Rome's Palazzo Farnese. It maintains reciprocal agreements for their members at other private clubs worldwide. It contains full-service athletic facilities, pools, restaurants, ballrooms, and guest rooms. Members include business professionals of all types as well as professional athletes.

Ty Cobb Tyrus Raymond Cobb (December 18, 1886 – July 17, 1961), nicknamed "the Georgia Peach", was an American Major League Baseball (MLB) center fielder. He was born in rural Narrows, Georgia. Cobb spent 22 seasons with the Detroit Tigers, the ...

is among the athletes to have been a member of the DAC. The building is visible beyond center field from

Comerica Park Comerica Park is a baseball stadium located in Downtown Detroit. It has been the home of Major League Baseball's Detroit Tigers since 2000, when the team left Tiger Stadium. History Construction Founded in 1894, the Tigers had played at the c ...

History

The Detroit Athletic Club was founded in 1887 to encourage amateur athletic activities, and built a clubhouse with a tract in what is now Detroit's Cultural Center.

Reorienting

Henry Bourne Joy Henry Bourne Joy (November 23, 1864 – November 6, 1936) was an American businessman and President of the Packard Motor Car Company. He was a major developer of automotive activities as well as being a social activist. In 1913, Joy and C ...

, son of the man who built the Michigan Central Railroad into one of the nation's most successful large railroads, served as president of the

Packard Motor Car Company Packard or Packard Motor Car Company was an American luxury automobile company located in Detroit, Michigan. The first Packard automobiles were produced in 1899, and the last Packards were built in South Bend, Indiana in 1958. One of the "Thr ...

in the early decades of the last century. He felt that the rich new titans of the booming automobile industry spent too much time in the Woodward Avenue pubs. He thought they needed a club commensurate with this stature. Some 26 years after the club's founding, on January 4, 1913, Joy and 108 other leading Detroit citizens came together to reorient the Detroit Athletic Club. Joy and his colleagues selected Detroit's most accomplished architect, Albert Kahn.

Architecture

Kahn, in 1912, had visited Italy and was inspired by the buildings he saw there. Two of Detroit's most impressive current downtown edifices—the Detroit Athletic Club and the Police Department headquarters on Beaubien—reflect what Kahn saw in Italy. The

Palazzo Borghese Palazzo Borghese is a palace in Rome, Italy, the main seat of the Borghese family. It was nicknamed ''il Cembalo'' ("the harpsichord") due to its unusual trapezoidal groundplan; its narrowest facade faces the River Tiber. The entrance at the oppos ...

in Rome provided Kahn with a model for much of the Detroit Athletic Club, but the idea of using the large impressive windows for the impressive fourth floor dining room—called the Grill Room—came from the Palazzo Farnese.

Remodeling

In the 1990s, the membership devoted substantial fund to a major refurbishing of the attractive building. A. Duncan Carse created paintings to decorate the Detroit Athletic Club. The paintings were covered at the club but they were on show again after a remodeling of the club in 1999.

Athletics

Over the years, the Detroit Athletic Club has provided financial assistance and training opportunities for a number of amateur athletes preparing for the Olympic Games. At the 1956 U.S. Olympic Team Trials, springboard divers Jeanne Stunyo (a native of Gary, Indiana) and Mackenzie High School graduate Barbara Gilders-Dudeck were sponsored by the DAC. Stunyo and Gilders-Dudeck qualified for the Summer Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia. At the Games, Jeanne Stunyo won the springboard diving silver medal, and Barbara Gilders-Dudeck finished in fourth place - less than one point from a bronze medal.

Contribution to Cocktail History

The

Last Word ''Last Word'' is an obituary BBC radio series broadcast weekly on Radio 4. Each week the lives of several famous people who have recently died are summarised with narration, and interviews with people who knew them. The programme is normally pr ...

, a gin-based

prohibition Prohibition is the act or practice of forbidding something by law; more particularly the term refers to the banning of the manufacture, storage (whether in barrels or in bottles), transportation, sale, possession, and consumption of alcohol ...

-era cocktail, was originally developed at the Detroit Athletic Club. The first publication in which the Last Word appeared was Ted Saucier's 1951 cocktail book ''Bottoms Up!''. In it Saucier states that the cocktail was first served around 30 years earlier at the Detroit Athletic Club. A research in the archives of the Detroit Athletic Club by John Frizell revealed later that the drink was slightly older predating the prohibition era by a few years. It was already offered on the club's 1916 menu for a price of 35 cents (about $8.22 in 2019 currency) making it the club's most expensive cocktail at the time.Sam Dangremond
''How Three Classic Cocktails Got Their Names''
Town & Country, 2015-07-20 While the drink eventually fell out of favor, it enjoyed a renewed popularity after being rediscovered by the bartender Murray Stenson in 2004 during his tenure at the Zig Zag Café and becoming a cult hit in the

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

and Portland areas and spread to cocktail bars in major cities worldwide, as well as having spawned several variations.

References

External links

Sanborn map of Detroit Athletic Club grounds, 1897
* {{Authority control Athletics clubs in the United States Clubs and societies in Michigan Organizations based in Detroit Sports in Detroit Gentlemen's clubs in the United States Buildings and structures in Detroit Buildings and structures completed in 1915 Organizations established in 1887 1887 establishments in Michigan Athletic Club football teams and seasons