“If there had never been a Stork Club,” wrote Lucius Beebe, “mankind in his vast and urgent necessity would have invented one.”

This line is what begins the Stork Club Bar Book , written by Beebe in 1946, and if you’re familiar with the the allusion he’s making—paraphrasing a famous quote from Voltaire, with Beebe inserting “Stork Club” where Voltaire had written “God”—then you’ll have a better sense of the reverence with which the author felt about the club in question. To a certain kind of well-heeled socialite in Post-War New York, the Stork Club may not have been the creator of the universe, but it might as well have been the center of it.

The Stork Club was the most famous nightclub in New York City. The Studio 54 of its time. Gloria Vanderbilt was a regular. It was the kind of pl

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