Private Clubs Just Aren't What They Used To Be
I recently met a man who's lived in New York for about 25 years. Like most people who've been here that long, he was lamenting that the city isn't what it used to be. Back in the 2000s, he told me wistfully, you could go to some random event — and he knew whereof he spoke, he is an events planner — and meet someone who could change your life, or at least your career. Now things are much less organic: Instead of crashing a fashion party in a Soho loft, he said, people are just retiring to their private club.
I nodded sympathetically, though in my New York of the 2000s, a Soho fashion party may as well have taken place on Jupiter. I spent most of those years alone in a library working on my economics PhD dissertation. I would never have known about such a party, let alone had the social capital or wherewithal to go.
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