Shana Farr – actor, singer, jewelry designer and member of the Players Club — gives a tour of the club’s library.

portrait of Helen Hayes, who was the first woman admitted into the club — in 1989!

Life mask of Edwin Booth, the great actor who founded the club in his home in 1888, and continued to live there above the fray until his death five years later.

The skull used by Edwin Booth when he played Hamlet. It sits atop a bookcase in his still-intact bedroom.

longer view of the skull

Edwin Booth’s bedroom. Pictured is reportedly the bed where he died on June 7, 1893, at the age of 59.

The walls of the Players Club are covered with portraits of members (such as Hmphrye Bogart, Ben Gazzara, Spencer Tracy, Dick Cavett) living and dead.

stained glass portrait of 18th Century English actor David Garrick. The Garrick Club in London gave Edwin Booth the idea for The Players Club.

Carol Burnett, Hal Prince, Jason Robards et al

Richard Mansfield, 19th century Shakespearean, whose performance in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was so persuasive that he was briefly suspected of being Jack the Ripper.

The people who formed Actors Equity met in the room behind these bookcases.

Fashionable Players Club members hang out in the Grill, the bar in the basement.

Tony Bennett

The one-person elevator built for Sarah Bernhardt

The Kinstler Club offers dinner to members on Friday nights. Portrait at far left is of Christopher Plummer

Edwin Booth, the most celebrated American actor of the 19th century, had come back from self-imposed exile in Europe after his brother had assassinated Abraham Lincoln, with an idea. He had hung out at London’s Garrick Club, named after David Garrick, the great English actor and producer of the 18th century and wondered why there was not such a social club for theater artists in the United States.

So in 1888, with the help of Mark Twain, General William Tecumseh Sherman and 13 other illustrious men of the day (as the brochure puts it), he turned the mansion built in 1847 at 16 Gramercy Park into The Players Club. He reserved an apartment in the building for himself, where he lived until his death five years later. His bedroom is still intact, a museum exhibit on display — for members and their guests.

Some 600 members — 40 percent people in the performing arts (actors, writers, etc.) and 60 percent “arts patrons” – pay annual dues of $2,000 to drink where Ernest Hemingway did, or sit at the piano surely used by Leonard Bernstein, or gaze at the portraits of James Cagney, Irving Berlin, or Helen Hayes — who was the first woman admitted into membership…in 1989!

Critics from around the country took a tour of the club — the oldest New York City club that’s still in its original location.