The Ark of Friendship

CASSIDY MILLER KNEW WHAT IT MEANT when she saw a wooden sawhorse perched on stage at a recent meeting of the Los Angeles Breakfast Club: She was about to be formally inducted in as a member — just as she stepped down from her part-time job as the club’s manager. 

The irony was not lost on her: One of her main job responsibilities had been onboarding new members, and the club was suddenly experiencing a flood of would-be joiners, which had made the gig more overwhelming than she’d expected. “People come a couple times and then immediately want to become a member,” said Miller, who had found a full-time job as an office manager at an animation studio — a position she had learned about, incidentally, through people at the Breakfast Club. 

This rush of membership is a relatively new and surprising development for the 101-year-old club. Even more surprising, it’s part of a trend: Across Los Angeles, century-old organizations that a decade ago seemed to be on their last legs are being inundated with new members in their 40s, 30s and even their 20s. In Highland Park, the Garibaldina Society has more than tripled its membership since 2020. In Lincoln Heights, the Adventurers’ Club shook off a century-old ban on women members and welcomed several in recent months. The Philosophical Research Society, founded in 1934, has drawn in a younger crowd by expanding their programming. 

The Los Angeles Breakfast Club, which was founded in 1925 as a riding club in Griffith Park and meets every Wednesday morning at 7 a.m. for bad coffee, worse puns, and talks on everything from the legacy of Desi Arnaz to the history of the Frisbee, had just 33 members in 2014. Now, it's at 262, with ten more members-in-waiting due to be inducted in the next few weeks. 

The clubs have different traditions and focuses, but for many of the new members, the draw is the same. In a region that recently suffered the calamity of simultaneous urban megafires, where a night out costs $200 no one has to spend, and where many happenings feel designed not for enjoyment but for posting on TikTok, old-fashioned, IRL clubs are powerfully appealing to a subset of the creative middle class.

Of course, it’s on Instagram where many seekers discover these clubs. They show up out of curiosity, but they stay because they encounter the kind of community they have yearned for and didn’t believe still existed. In the lonely, gridlocked sea of Los Angeles, these organizations are arks of a near-forgotten way of socializing — regular, predictable, accessible, and welcoming.

“I feel like I can rely on these 100-year-old traditions. We’re holding hands, we’re singing these songs, we’re doing the secret handshake,” said Eden Hain, 28, another new Breakfast Club member, who runs a gallery in Glendale called Junior High. Hain, who wore an embroidered baseball cap that read “C is for Cummunity” added that, in light of the 2025 fires in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, “Seeing just how much was destroyed, we need to hold on and preserve literally everything that we can.” 

The Breakfast Club is a hub of L.A. joiners. Many newer members say they have thrown themselves into more than one organization, such as the Magic Castle (a private, members-only club for magicians and their fans), or the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles (which advocates for historic preservation and hosts swanky events in period garb.) Kevin Segall said he recently retired from his work as a collectible dealer and appraiser to have more time for clubs. He’s a member of 50, including the afore-mentioned Magic Castle and Art Deco Society, as well as the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, and the Velaslavasay Panorama Enthusiast Society. “L.A. Breakfast Club is sort of the nexus of all my interests in Los Angeles,” he said. “L.A. is very quirky, and it draws people who are pretty quirky.” 

For those who prefer pasta platters to eggs and ham, the Garibaldina Society in Highland Park is, if anything, even more mobbed with newcomers than the Breakfast Club. Founded in 1877 as an Italian mutual aid society and now a nonprofit dedicated to the celebration of Italian American culture, it is so overwhelmed with new member applications it has had to institute a waitlist. Its new and youngest-ever president, Amanda Lanza, 31, said she is “the only president to ever have had Invisalign.” 

Since 1967, the society’s home has been a glamorous midcentury modern clubhouse on Figueroa Street on the edge of now-gentrifying Highland Park. 

The space almost was swallowed into the maw of hipsterization, too. In 2022, the society’s few remaining, elderly members (events ran to about 40 attendees) planned to lease the space to a concert venue. 

Instead, a local resident, Nicole Infante, 51, swept in after reading about the Garibaldina in a local Mount Washington homeowners’ newsletter. Dazzled by the club building and its layers of history, Infante, who is Italian “from beautiful Flushing, Queens” and formerly the creative director for Frederick’s of Hollywood, started an especially stylish Instagram account for the club to revive interest. She also slid into Lanza’s DMs after discovering that the former restaurant cook and writer hosted pop-ups focused on what she calls “Grandma Italian food.” 

On a volunteer basis, Lanza revived the club’s culinary offerings by working with longtime cooks to rapidly expand the amount of meatballs and spaghetti for the burgeoning members-only dinners, and adding her own public-facing aperitivo event called Bar Bene. “People built the Garibaldina with two bars and a two-thousand square food dance floor for a reason. They want you to come here and have a good time,” Lanza said. 

Garibaldina now has more than 500 members and a waiting list Infante estimates it will take them a year to process through all the steps of initiation. (People don’t have to be Italian to join, but they need to have a commitment to preserving Italian culture.) 

One of the things Lanza values most about the Garibaldina is that it’s a genuinely intergenerational space. The oldest member is over 100; the youngest is in his 20s. 

Largely, these eras exist in harmony, perhaps thanks to the broad, mildly sedating appeal of a good pasta dinner. But there is one explosive issue that looms over any large gathering: ballroom dancing.  

The Garibaldina’s dance floor once whirled with waltzing couples. “We had presidents who were incredible ballroom dancers, and that community was a big part of the Garibaldina for a couple of decades,” Lanza said. Infante explained that back when the society had 900 members, older event flyers regularly advertised 10-piece bands. At one point, the Garibaldina was the headquarters of the Los Angeles branch of the National Smooth Dancers, a ballroom dancing non-profit founded in the 1930s in response to the scourge of the jitterbug.

The Garibaldina still hosts monthly dancing events, per tradition, according to Infante. “The demand for ballroom dancing has waned, but as you can imagine, when [the dancers] show up, they want a ballroom dance — it can become challenging,” Lanza said, adding, “Do you know how to ballroom dance? I don’t.” 

The newcomers, who skew toward elder millennials, want to dance to disco and 80’s music (maybe because that’s what feels nostalgic to them?). “We’re trying to mix up the music at different hours. Maybe during one part of the evening we have ballroom hour, another part we have disco hour,” said Lanza.

Navigating the tension between preserving a club’s traditions and ensuring its future is also a major focus for the current president of The Adventurers’ Club of Los Angeles, Rich Mayfield. Founded in 1922, the club meets every Thursday night in their Lincoln Heights clubhouse. On the outside, it’s a forbidding-looking tan-stucco building wedged between a nail salon and a travel agency. Inside, the upstairs dining room is decked out with adventuring paraphernalia. In the meeting room, attendees sit surrounded by taxidermied animals, including a polar bear, to listen to a talk from a guest adventurer. 

Mayfield joined in 2018 on the recommendation of a friend. He valued finding a community of people who saw adventuring as a normal, or at least fun thing to do. “Nobody's asking like, ‘Why do you want to go climb Kilimanjaro?’” Mayfield said. Instead, he explained, Adventurers’ Club members would say, “‘Yeah, climbing Kilimanjaro is cool. I did it 15 years ago.’”

But, in part because everyone was off climbing the world’s tallest peaks instead of doing their volunteer work, Mayfield found that the club’s talks were sparsely attended, the clubhouse was shabby, and the organization’s finances were shaky. A father of young children, Mayfield keeps his adventures closer to home. (His interests include sailing and scuba-diving; he’s currently learning to fly an airplane.) When he became president, he expanded the club’s leadership, scheduled out the talks two months in advance, cleaned up the clubhouse, and transitioned to a 501c3, which made donations tax-deductible. “I want a 200 year old organization. And we have to do things that make it such that if everybody around here sucks for 10 or 15 years, the organization still somehow persists,” he said.

Then, he took on the challenge that had bedeviled the club for decades: women. Until 2024, the Adventurers’ Club was a male-only organization. Women could come to public programming, and even give talks about their adventures, but they could not join. Some female speakers turned them down because of this. 

The main concern of members, according to Mayfield, was that the club would lower its “standards” to admit women. He said the idea confused him. “It’s not like we have to carry someone up upstairs, right? It's not a physical standard. It's an adventure standard.” But since a previous president’s campaign to bring in women had not worked out, Mayfield proceeded as a neutral arbiter.  

To reassure anyone concerned about “standards,” he put the club’s most senior member in charge of reviewing women’s applications. The first wave was stacked with seasoned adventurers. “Like, raise your hand if you can beat this standard,” Mayfield said. “And, you know, most people couldn't.” Every woman was admitted. 

Amy Visser, 46, joined the Adventurers’ Club in 2025. She met a member at a book event, who invited her to a meeting. When she went, she felt instantly comfortable, she said. “It’s not a place where the first thing people ask is, ‘Ok, what do you do for work?’ It’s all about, ‘So tell us about yourself, where have you been recently?’”

She started attending after the club opened membership to women, and doubted she would have gone before that change, calling that type of discrimination “ridiculous.” But the community she’s found there is actually more supportive than other areas of her life. 

An avid scuba diver and solo traveler, Visser says people don’t usually understand her passions. “Especially for anybody over 35, the reaction is a little like, ‘Ohhh, what does your husband think? Ohhh, do you have kids?’’” Meanwhile, at the Adventures’ Club, when she mentions an upcoming trip, “Nobody ever has asked me, ‘Oh, is your husband ok with that?’”

The Los Angeles Adventurers’ Club was started as an outgrowth of an older New York club, but now it’s far outlasted its East Coast parent. There’s a pretty active one in Copenhagen, some blips of life from Honolulu. But New York and Chicago went defunct long ago. 

In general, this boom in century-old volunteer-run, hyper-specific clubs seems to be unique to Los Angeles. New Yorkers love a swank private club, but even Italian American clubs aren’t being revived consistently, outside of one famous example in Philadelphia which became a members-only restaurant. 

The atomization of Covid, of screens, of the higher cost of public life, has shrunk these organizations everywhere. But something about Los Angeles allowed these  bygone institutions to survive until a community-starved generation needed them.

Maybe it’s that Los Angeles is big enough to sustain these clubs, while many of the city’s newcomers are dreamers and weirdos who love a niche subculture. Maybe Los Angeles’s sprawl of micro-communities means a glitzy midcentury banquet hall or auditorium of Friendship can survive, largely unremarked on, for decades, until someone decides to walk in the door.

Karen Tongson, the chair of the department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at USC, has been a longtime member of the Los Angeles Athletic Club, a similarly aged institution that’s also experiencing a renaissance. She sees a complex set of urges pushing people toward these spaces, including “a weird conservative turn in broader American culture that allows people to be curious about and fetishize these places,” she said. But also, at least for some members, there’s a sense of claiming spaces once denied to them. “I would not have been welcome at the beginning days of the club,” Tongson said of the Athletic Club. Now, she’s an eager recruiter, especially of other queer members.

Maybe there’s another reason too. Maybe new members are eager to save these clubs because they can see the Los Angeles that nurtured them fading away. Historic restaurants are closing, and the end stage of every neighborhood seems to be colonization by high-end chains followed by empty storefront blight. Many of the people flocking to these clubs are also less sure of their own place in the city. Los Angeles still attracts quirky people, but Hollywood is offering far fewer of them middle-class jobs. 

There are fewer places to be weird or corny in Los Angeles; the ones that remain need protecting. Lately, the choice often feels stark: You can have a public life of nose-bleedingly expensive, exclusive experiences. Or you can go to the club.

Meghan McCarron is an award-winning journalist and writer based in Los Angeles.

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