5 Boston private clubs ranked from easiest to impossible, starting at $40

The Athenaeum on Beacon Street has been a private membership library since 1807, and it’s the one club on this list you can join on the spot. A $40 day pass gets you into the reading rooms, the upper floors and the fifth-floor terrace, and you can use it any day Monday through Saturday within 90 days of buying it. If you like it, the Athenaeum will put that $40 toward a full membership as long as you join the same week.

Individual membership is $524 a year, or $350 if you’re 40 or under, and members can borrow from more than 500,000 books and work in the reading rooms as often as they like. If you just want to look around, first-floor admission is $11 and includes the Norma Jean Calderwood Gallery. The art and architecture tours often sell out days ahead, so book early.

You don’t need a Harvard degree to join the Harvard Club at 374 Commonwealth Avenue in Back Bay. Graduates of MIT, Yale and Tufts’ Fletcher School can join just like Harvard alumni, and so can full-time Harvard and MIT faculty, Harvard and MIT students, and residents, fellows and faculty physicians at Harvard-affiliated hospitals. Members’ parents, grandparents, children and grandchildren are eligible too.

Everyone else gets one shot: the Commonwealth Membership, which opens 50 spots a year to friends and family of current members and needs a member to sponsor you. Dues depend on your age, your status and the ZIP codes where you live and work, and the club says membership is active within 10 to 15 business days once your application goes through.

The ’Quin House opened in July 2021 in the old Algonquin Club building at 217 Commonwealth Avenue, designed by McKim, Mead & White. The club says invitations come through member referrals, and you pay a one-time initiation fee plus dues renewed every year.

When it opened, annual dues were reported at $2,000 to $4,000, with lower rates for people in the arts, civic and nonprofit worlds earning under $150,000. The club doesn’t publish current prices. Members get four dining spots, three bars, five lounges, a fitness center, eight guest rooms, weekend brunch at Café Q and book talks.

The Union Club was founded on April 8, 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, and its clubhouse is at 8 Park Street. Calvin Coolidge, Louis Brandeis, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Sumner were all members, and it was the first of Boston’s traditional men’s clubs to voluntarily admit women to full membership.

There’s no public way in. Membership starts with an inquiry through the club’s website.

The Somerset Club has been in a light gray granite house with two turrets at 42 Beacon Street since the early 1870s, and the building has no sign outside, just the number 42. Membership is by invitation, and a 2000 Harvard Crimson story put it bluntly: applying directly is the surest way never to be invited back.

If a member brings you, dress for the public rooms in a suit jacket and tie, a dress, a skirt or a pantsuit, and leave the denim at home. Phones stay out of the dining and public rooms, and personal calls go to Room 6 on the first floor.