How to get into 5 Boston private clubs, from $40 a day to don’t even ask

The Athenaeum on Beacon Street is a private membership library, open since 1807, and it’s the one club on this list you can join on the spot. A $40 day membership gets you into the reading rooms, the upper floors and the fifth-floor terrace. If you like it, the Athenaeum will put that $40 toward a full membership as long as you join within a week. Individual membership is $506 a year, and it’s $338 if you’re 40 or under. Members can borrow books and work in the reading rooms as often as they like. If you just want to look around, the first-floor gallery and exhibitions have their own admission, and the art and architecture tours are worth booking ahead.

The Harvard Club at 374 Commonwealth Avenue in Back Bay takes alumni of Harvard, MIT, Yale and Tufts’ Fletcher School. Harvard and MIT faculty and students can join too, plus physicians at Harvard-affiliated hospitals and the parents, children and grandparents of members. Nobody on that list needs a sponsor. If you don’t qualify, you can try for the Commonwealth Membership, with 50 spots a year for friends and family of current members, and that one needs a member to sponsor you. Dues depend on your age, your status and the ZIP codes where you live and work. Once you apply, the club says membership is active in 10 to 15 business days.

The ‘Quin House opened in 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, Boston.com reported annual dues of $2,000 to $4,000, with lower rates for people in the arts, civic and nonprofit worlds. The club doesn’t publish current prices. Members get Japanese food at Bondo, Latin American cooking at Lunasol, Café Q, a gym, guest rooms and talks.

The Union Club started in 1863, when members of the Somerset Club split over whether to back the Union, and the pro-Union side walked out. It moved into two connected townhouses at 7 and 8 Park Street, next to the State House, and remodeled them for the club in 1896. Calvin Coolidge, Louis Brandeis, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Sumner were all members. It was the first men’s club in Boston to admit women, and in 1983 it took its first Black member. You can’t walk in from Boston Common. Membership questions go straight to the club, and guests need a member to bring them.

The Somerset Club took its name in 1852 and has been in the granite David Sears house at 42 Beacon Street since 1872. The building has no sign outside, just the number 42. Membership mostly passes through families. A 2000 Harvard Crimson story about Boston’s old-line clubs quoted one person saying the surest way to never become a member is to ask about becoming one. If a member brings you as a guest, wear a jacket and tie or a dress, skirt or pantsuit, with no denim. Your phone stays out of the public rooms. If you need to make a call, go to Room 6.