University & Whist Club to sell Wilmington headquarters
One of Delaware's oldest private clubs is selling its historic clubhouse to a pair of area businessmen.
The University & Whist Club says its members voted Aug. 9 to transfer ownership of the Tilton Mansion in Wilmington's Hilltop neighborhood to club members John Hynansky and Thomas Hatzis.
Hynansky is the multimillionaire founder of the Winner Group auto dealerships and owner of one of the largest auto importers in Ukraine. Hatzis owns Winner Ford in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and the Hollywood Grill off U.S. 202 in Fairfax.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, and a closing date was not listed.
Neither the new owners nor University & Whist Club President Edward Clemens returned messages seeking comment.
The club, which traces its roots to 1821, will continue to occupy the 20,000-square-foot august mansion under a lease with the new owners, the University & Whist Club said in a press release announcing the deal.
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Originally built more than 200 years ago, the Tilton Mansion has served as the club's home since the 1930s.
Tucked away on a 2-acre, tree-lined property surrounded by a stone wall topped by a hedgerow, the mansion is perhaps best known as one of the city's premier locations for weddings, banquets and other events largely targeted to Delaware's upper crust.
Multimillionaire magazine publisher and former presidential candidate Steve Forbes visited the mansion last week for a gathering of local Republicans hosted by GOP gubernatorial candidate Colin Bonini. Rapper Kanye West, along with wife Kim Kardashian and their daughter, North, attended a wedding there in 2014, just hours before West headlined the Made in America Festival in Philadelphia.
Today, the biggest draw for the University & Whist Club's 220 members may be the full-service fine dining in rooms specifically appointed for formal, casual and pub atmospheres. The menus include $19 Norwegian salmon fillets and $22 lump crab cakes for lunch, along with a dinner menu that features $36 plates of Dover sole a la meuniere and a $38 sirloin strip steak.
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Membership also includes access to an in-house florist, in-home catering, private rooms for personal and business meetings and reciprocal memberships with more than 250 other private clubs around the country.
Despite its long-standing reputation as a getaway for wealthy movers and shakers, the staid, wood-paneled mansion has become a shadow of its former glory, having last undergone a major renovation in the mid-1950s.
Hynansky and Hatzis reportedly have committed to making extensive upgrades to the property, including a complete renovation of the kitchen, the addition of a patio enclosure and cosmetic changes such as fresh paint and new landscaping. The partners also "expect to increase catering and will work with the club members to increase club membership," according to a press release.
Undertaking expensive improvements to the Tilton Mansion had become increasingly difficult for the club to manage on its own, according to club members who requested anonymity.
The University & Whist Club reached a peak of 800 members in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
But like other private clubs throughout the country, the University & Whist Club has seen a steady decline in membership in recent decades. Sliding interest in private clubs among the affluent has been attributed to several factors, including changes in federal tax code that made business club membership nondeductible and negative press from the long-standing exclusion of women and minorities, along with a series of economic downturns and general changes in lifestyle over the last century.
The Rodney Square Club on the top floor of the Wilmington Trust Center in downtown Wilmington was one of the first private dining clubs in Delaware to accept women and minorities but fell into financial trouble and ceased to exist in 1999. The University of Delaware closed the doors of its Blue & Gold Club in 2009 during the Great Recession, citing declining membership and increasing operating costs.
The Wilmington Club, one of the oldest private membership clubs in the nation, and its younger cousin the University & Whist Club both began allowing women and minorities members in the late-1980s under pressure from city leaders, including then-City Council President James Baker.
But those changes did little to reverse the trend with the University & Whist Club seeing its membership fall by nearly 40 percent in the last decade.
It is unclear if the Wilmington Club is experiencing similar difficulties. Founded in 1877, the club is located in a relatively anonymous building at 1103 N. Market St. but has no web presence beyond a Facebook page.
Adam Pletcher, general manager and chief operating officer of the club, declined to discuss any details about the group's membership or operations.
"We don't want to be in the news," he said. "We're very private. That's why we've been around for so long. We're not like the University & Whist Club at all."
Officials with the Monday Club, an African-American men's club located just outside Wilmington, could not be reached for comment.
Hynansky and Hatzis will become the first new owners of the Tilton Mansion since 1948, according to the University & Whist Club.
The property sits on a tract where silversmith Bancroft Woodcock built a house in 1766. The core of the building was constructed in 1802 by Dr. James Tilton, who served alongside Gen. George Washington during the Revolutionary War and recommended the site as a potential location for the nation's capital. Tilton later became the nation's first surgeon general.
A century later, J. Danforth Bush, Delaware's sixth lieutenant governor, gave the building an English manor house style. Francis V. du Pont, acting as Elafrel Co., then acquired the property from Bush's estate to save it from the development project that added adjacent townhouses.
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Elafrel, in turn, sold the property in 1935 to the University Club, a group of male college graduates. During World War II, dozens of members moved into the mansion and nearby carriage house. Most were young, while professionals who sought out the social scene and other amenities the club offered. William V. Roth Jr. reportedly spent time there before becoming Delaware's a long-serving Republican congressman and U.S. senator.
In 1958, the University Club merged with the Wilmington Whist Club, an organization founded in 1891 around what was then a popular card game known as "whist" that eventually evolved into bridge.
Contact business reporter Scott Goss at (302) 324-2281, sgoss@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @ScottGossDel.