A postgraduate pilgrimage to New York City is composed of the same properties as any magnetic vice: there are guaranteed repercussions (in the form of unspeakable hours for the financiers and excessive rent for just about everyone else), but none strong enough to dissuade you from the allure of the buzz. The intangible intrigue-the lifestyle-rests in the city, where a fresh collection of like-minded savants take up their ambitious careers.
Whether you look to New York with an affectionate gaze or apathetic sidelong glance, you must acknowledge that there is an undeniable relationship between Duke University and the metropolis 491 miles north.
For nearly a century, the graduates from a young school in a tobacco town have made their presence felt-even on the island historically reserved for the old boys from the institutions within distance of a late afternoon train ride.
The Cornell Club is quietly fixed into generic Midtown concrete, three-dozen strides down 44th Street, east of Fifth Avenue. A red awning and a matching Big Red banner welcome visitors to the New York alumni club of the youngest Ivy League university. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania also hold elegant property in Midtown (all within a few blocks of Cornell's) that provides alums with dining, business and fitness facilities, as well as lodging for out-of-towners. The clubs represent, perhaps, a sense of established space, a claim of sorts on the city. Cornell's "clubhouse," as it is warmly regarded, reserves an air of elegance for its lobby: stone fireplace, silver teapots and formidable furniture that seem to recommend that you don't make yourself comfortable.
This is only significant because Cornell's club is Duke's club. Along with Brown, Georgetown, Stanford, Notre Dame, Colgate and Tulane, Duke shares the clubhouse facilities. Drape blue and white over the red, and you have a quasi-fixture in Manhattan to meet your needs-especially if you're the kind of young alum who craves tea and fancy upholstery.
One young alum, Dana Vachon, Trinity '02, is paid to pen the consciousness of a particular common lifestyle in New York City. In his recent novel, Mergers and Acquisitions, he writes about fictional young alums who are less interested in tea and fancy upholstery than Bellinis and BlackBerrys.
"A lack of a club misses the point. The most important clubs are loose associations of people, 'lifestyle tribes,'" Vachon says. "Many students are part of them already when they go to Duke, and if they're not, then they find their way into them.. It's lifestyle that dictates your social patterns in New York, not the college cliques.. It's a certain kind of Duke grad that comes here. Engineers and doctors typically don't, it's finance and media."
And insofar as Duke grads have made their presence felt within these industries, Vachon feels that the college name and any sense of a restricting association, all but disappears.
"The Duke name is fine," he says. "Specific college names don't matter, but it helps to be in a certain band of colleges. All those people in the band of those other colleges are friends with each other. And if you're moderately social, you'll meet them all."
So perhaps the singular Duke presence is blurred by the lifestyle tribe, the common experience, the overlapping industries and social spheres. "[The schools] are all basically satellite campuses to the same broad institution, with a West Coast branch in Stanford, and a Catholic branch in D.C.." And Duke then, naturally, is the Southern representative to the social parliament of the City.
Vachon, who has characterized the Duke education as "flagrantly mediocre" and more interested in socializing its students than enlightening them, also emphasizes that, if names be judged, then Duke's highly-touted peer institutions are issued a comparable diagnosis. "Everyone's got a hard-on about Harvard, Yale and Princeton that stems from a time when the country was smaller and you only needed three schools to educate the bastards.. [Duke] hasn't been around long enough to turn out finely tuned assholes. Young egoists, but not ego-maniacs."
Earlier this year, Executive Director of Duke Alumni Affairs Sterly Wilder, accounted for 10,274 Duke alumni in the metropolitan New York area. That's the second largest group of concentrated Blue Devils anywhere in the country (falling behind only the Research Triangle, which claims around 14,000, and just ahead of the metropolitan D.C. area). Among the New York alums, 2,728 are fewer than 10 years out of school, an indication, perhaps, of the youth-heavy presence.
"New York is a hot place to live. And [recent graduates] work, and then they either stay or move out," says Wilder. "There are a few cities that are destination points for Duke grads. New York, D.C., Atlanta, San Francisco, L.A. If you didn't know what you wanted to do, those are the places you would go."
But New York possesses a unique gravity that seems to distinguish it from the others. In 2007, 31percent of the 1,146 senior respondents to a Career Center survey indicated New York as their destination for a job offer, and 7 percent indicated Washington, D.C., writes David Lapinski, assistant director of employer relations at the Career Center. In 2006, 22 percent bolted for Manhattan and 12 percent settled in D.C..
George Dorfman, associate director of Alumni Affairs, works closely with the Duke Club of New York, an alumni affiliation that costs next to nothing to join ($10-$30 for membership fees annually), and provides endless opportunities for social gatherings. "We certainly accomplish our mission in New York. We hold more events than any other group. We have at least an event a week," Dorfman says.
Each September the D.C.NY hosts a party for the most recent batch of graduates at a familiar hole-in-the-wall eatery: Cosmic Cantina. The Manhattan franchise, situated a couple blocks southeast of Union Square, is a rare stronghold for Duke alums. "But I wouldn't say that there is just one place, one Duke bar, a Duke restaurant. In New York, there's not just one place for anything."
There might be, however, one place to watch Duke basketball games. Nick Summers, a Columbia graduate and co-founder of IvyGate, a popular blog that covers news and gossip at Ivy League schools, provides an outsider's view of Duke's collective presence in Manhattan.
"Sometimes it feels like Duke does have a club in New York: Brother Jimmy's, the obnoxious ACC barbeque place on the Upper East Side," he says. Though theoretically shared with all member schools of the ACC, it's little surprise that Duke has more fans venturing to the Upper East Side than Clemson or NC State.
Fourteen percent of Duke's Class of 2010 is comprised of students from the Northeast (a seven-state block defined by the Admissions Office). North Carolina alone constitutes 14 percent, and the rest of the Southeast takes up an additional 24 percent. An unsophisticated interpretation of the statistics suggests that Duke is still a disproportionately Southern university when compared to its academic peers.
More than 26 percent of the Princeton student body hails from New York and New Jersey. Cornell yields 43 percent from New England. And Penn draws nearly half of each class from the states within a couple hours of the Big Apple.
Here's a basic hypothesis. Students tend to do one of two things after college: they either stay relatively put or they go home. Evidently the largest share of Duke graduates lands in the Triangle after they graduate. There's a large proportion in Atlanta, Charlotte and D.C. as well. These are both the places from which people come to Duke and the places that are close enough to be considered staying put.
New York is a different situation. It's not a matter of proximity, nor a matter, for most, of homecoming. It's the lifestyle, the destination, independent of the other factors. "A place like New York, my gosh, people go there without jobs just because it's New York," Dorfman says.
Some students originally from the City hold a different view of the situation. "As a New Yorker, I think of Duke kids as visiting," senior Lizzie Reinhardt says. "They come Fall Break and summer. And even a lot of people I know who work at dream banks, they don't think they're going to live there." This is the notion of the stopover-a third option, of sorts, for graduates. If you're not going to live near home or school, go to New York for a couple years, before moving back to one of the other places. And perhaps this contingency factors heavily into the Duke presence. But for New Yorkers, it's different. "The kids from New York originally come back," Reinhardt says.
Stanford has San Francisco. Georgetown's got D.C.. Notre Dame takes over Chicago. And, as would be natural for those hordes that spring from the region originally, New York is the urban destination of choice for Duke's peer Ivies. But the direct lifestyle line between Durham and Manhattan has been in the making for over a century.
A selective history of the Dukes in five movements: In 1905, James B. Duke, tobacco titan and University co-founder, hires the University's architect Julian Abele to build a home for Duke's family. The result is a mansion at the foot of what would come to be known as "Millionaires' Row" at 78th Street and Fifth Avenue on Manhattan's Upper East Side. This is the debut of the Duke presence in New York-the fortune from Durham translates into the lifestyle of the City.
Fast forward 10 years. It's a party and Angier B. Duke-namesake of the prestigious University scholarship and son of the other co-founder, Benjamin N. Duke- has intentions to marry Cordelia Drexel Biddle. Though Mr. Biddle, the girl's father, is skeptical at first, he climbs up on a table amidst the festivities and announces the engagement of his daughter to the "handsome and refined Angier Buchanan Duke of Durham, North Carolina and New York City." The two cities are wed, in 1915, as an attractive package.
The couple lives in Benjamin's 20,000-square-foot brick and limestone mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street, directly across the street from the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and just four blocks from James B. Duke's house on "Millionaires' Row." (Incidentally, this was the mansion that sold for $40 million in 2006).
In his autobiography, Uncharted Course, Anthony Duke, Angier's son, claims Angier passed up getting involved in the development of Duke University because, "he was very much the New Yorker now."
In 1958, James B. Duke's mansion is donated to the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, a direct transfer of physical Duke property to another institution. This is the Duke Club that could have been.
The young alums, entangled in the social atmospheres of Vachon's so-called "lifestyle tribes" may dismiss as an antiquated notion the idea of their very own clubhouse. But over the years, countless older alumni have expressed the same basic curiosity: With Duke's overwhelming presence in the city, where's the club? In the early 1990s, Alumni Affairs began looking into a Duke Club.
"We thought about it, and quickly learned that it wouldn't be possible for us to do it financially," Dorfman explains. "A perfect example is The Cornell Club. They probably have 30,000 alums in New York, but they need other schools to be members to remain financially solvent. What I heard is that even if someone donated a building to Duke, we probably couldn't even maintain the upkeep."
Though the university clubs are frequented by local alums, many who may stop in for drinks or lunch belong to other fitness and social clubs, which serve as their primary clubs. Nonetheless, the insatiable demand for some sort of resource in New York prompted the standing arrangement with Cornell.
There's something about the Duke experience that seems to naturally promote the route to New York City, first carved so many years ago by the University's founders. And just as Duke is successfully fresh in the company of its peer institutions, so too are its recent grads on the well-trodden cityscape. Basically it comes down to this: Duke conditions a certain population for the City, and beyond that, in the words of Vachon, "People either pay their rent or say 'fuck it' and leave."
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