Telluride Inside … and Out in New York: lunch at the historic Coffee House
Unrecorded in the annals of the Knickerbocker Club is an event which might be called the Great Coffee House Rebellion. One day in January, 1914, two members of the Knickerbocker—Frank Crowninshield and Rawlins L. Cottenet—met for lunch at a midtown hotel and agreed that they were fed up to the tops of their Arrow collars with the Knickerbocker and its brass-buttoned flunkies, silver duck-presses, and gold-plated table conversation. According to Crowninshield’s recollections, they decided that “it would be agreeable and desirable to found a small dining club composed of such members of the Knickerbocker Club as had no sympathy with business or wealth or with such things that business and wealth produced or implied.”