The club was founded in 1877 and started with three dozen men, eventually increasing to hundreds, with women allowed as members from 1938.
[4] Players who developed their skills at the club include Arnold Denker, Arthur Feuerstein, Bobby Fischer, I.
A. Horowitz, William Lombardy, Samuel Reshevsky, and Gata Kamsky, who played in numerous tournaments at the club after his defection from the Soviet Union at the 1989 New York Open.
[6][7] Former world chess champion José Raúl Capablanca was watching a casual game in the club on 7 March 1942 when he suffered a stroke; he died the next day.
Its "Four Rated Games Tonight" Thursday evening tournaments in the late 1980s drew large fields that included many titled players, and its overnight "insanity" tournaments, held a few times a year, drew dozens of Saturday night-owls and finished well after dawn on Sunday.