[6] By the 1950s, urban social club membership was dwindling, in large part because of the movement of wealthy families to the suburbs.

[6] The Knick's current clubhouse, a neo-Georgian structure at 2 East 62nd Street, was commissioned in 1913 and completed in 1915,[7] on the site of the former mansion of Josephine Schmid, a wealthy widow.

[7] Members of the Knickerbocker Club are almost-exclusively descendants of British and Dutch aristocratic families that governed the early 1600s American Colonies or that left the Old Continent for political reasons (e.g. partisans of the Royalist coalition against Cromwell, such as the "distressed Cavaliers" of the aristocratic Virginia settlers), or current members of the international aristocracy.

E. Digby Baltzell explains in his 1971 book Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class: The circulation of elites in America and the assimilation of new men of power and influence into the upper class takes place primarily through the medium of urban clubdom.

Morgan belonged to nineteen clubs in all; Vanderbilt, to fifteen; Harriman, to fourteen.” Allen then goes on to show how the descendants of these financial giants were assimilated into the upper class: “By way of footnote, it may be added that although in that year [1905] only two of our ten financiers belonged to the Knickerbocker Club, in 1933 the grandsons of six of them did.