A private place for powerful men
The city is thick with elite men’s clubs, but the most secretive, and lore-filled, is the Bohemian Club. The club was founded in 1872 and opened as a private saloon for journalists, then known as bohemians. Most worked in the newsroom at the Hearst-owned newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner. William Randolph Hearst was himself a member, as was poet Ambrose Bierce, who in 1901 wrote a poem, published in “The Ex,” predicting the assassination of President McKinley. Not long afterward, an anarchist did exactly that. There was hell to pay in the club and the Hearst reporters left under a cloud to start another exclusive association called The Family. It still exists.
The Bohemian Club was always linked with artists, particularly musicians, but gradually became a fraternity for patricians from the private and public sector. Oscar Wilde, visiting the club in 1882, said, “I never saw so many well-dressed, well-fed, business-looking bohemians in my life.”
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Address 624 Taylor Street, San Francisco, CA, 94102 | Public Transport Bus: 2, 3 (Post St & Taylor St stop) | Hours Members only| Tip A short walk uphill brings you to the Mark Hopkins and Fairmont Hotel.
Current and past members include Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush Sr. and Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan—whose run for the presidency was decided at the Bohemian Club. Other club ventures include conceiving the Manhattan Project and mapping out the UN. Applicants often wait 15 years for an opening, as the club limits itself to about 2,700 members.
In recent years, the club has become like fine whiskey for conspiracy theorists obsessed by the “illuminati’s” predilections, not the least of which is the club’s annual retreat in Monte Rio, California, which is famously shrouded in mystery.
At the club’s entrance in San Francisco there’s the Bohemian mascot, an owl, symbolizing knowledge, and a plaque with this Shakespearean line, which is also the club’s motto: “Weaving spiders come not here”—an elegant reminder to members not to do business in the clubhouse.
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