In the autumn of 1870 the first president, De Witt Van Buren, died, and was succeeded by A.Oakley Hall, then the Mayor of New York, who assumed the office entirely in his social capacity, as a journalist, dramatist, and patron of the arts.

It was he who suggested the famous "Lotos Saturday Nights." There is a flavour of high Bohemia in the list of members of that period.

Among the artists were Beard, Reinhart, Burling, Lumley, Chapin, Bispham, and Pickett; there were such pianists as Wehli, Mills, Hopkins, Colby, and Bassford; singers like Randolfi, Laurence, Thomas, MacDonald, Perring, Seguin, Matthison, and Davis; and actors like Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett, Mark Smith, John Brougham, and George Clark.
Some one has said that every generation must express itself in a new club.

The decade from 1861-1870 expressed itself in several.

To those years of New York date the Columbia Yacht (1867), the Harvard, first of the college clubs (1865), the Manhattan (1865), the New York Athletic (1868), and the Union League (1863).