Songs of Yale -- 1701

Speranza

Ironically, the Yale rowers who "discovered" the original Mory's on Wooster Street in the 1860s were more or less slumming when they stopped in after practice on the harbour one day.

The Yalies were smitten by the tavern keeper, Frank Moriarty, and the place soon filled with Yalies.

Moriarty moved twice in order to get closer to campus, first to Court Street and then in the 1870s to Temple Street.

The bar fell into decline after Moriarty died.

In 1898, a German immigrant named Louis Linder took over.

A singer and music lover, Linder encouraged singing groups to visit Mory's and helped to revive its popularity.














Mory's -- on Temple, where the whiffs first met -- up to 1912 (before Mory's moved to York)


In 1912, Linder, whose health was failing, lost his lease on the Temple Street "bar".

The thought of Mory's closing was too much for Yalies to bear, so a number of them hatched a plan to convert the bar to a "club", and that meant a change of location.

The place was worth saving as "a genuine institution of considerable value to Yale life, because of its atmosphere of spontaneous democracy and hearty comradeship.

In 1912, the clubbers bought this house on 306 York Street and set about transforming it into as close an approximation of the old "Temple street" bar as possible.

They moved not just furniture and pictures from the walls, but also wainscoting, the fireplace mantle, and the entire front entrance.

So in its current location, Mory's has more or less been a museum from the beginning, sentimentalized and preserved in amber by long-ago graduates.

Old Mory's hands often repeat with pleasure the legend that it took 20 years of lobbying (or 30, depending on the telling) to get ice cream on the menu.

Not all of Mory's history of resisting change is so benign.

For its first 60 years as a club, only men could become members.

Although Yale's managerial and professional workers can become members, its clerical, technical, service, and maintenance workers cannot.

Mory's current troubles were brought home to members in June, when Tyler sent out letters explaining that the club had been driven "into the red" and that "everyone will have to get involved to keep Mory's afloat."

Tyler told faculty, staff, and alumni members that their dues would be raised from $165 to $250.

More controversially, he asked the club's local life members to convert to dues-paying members and pay $200 a year.

It wasn't long before we heard from a handful of alumni who were in high dudgeon at the suggestion they begin paying dues.

Mory's life members are noticeably proud of their status, and they have fought previous attempts to make them pay.

"I signed up in good faith in sophomore year, and I know it's not a good deal for Mory's," says one life member, "but they should have thought of that in 1966."

As it turns out, the conversion to dues-paying membership is voluntary, and no life members are going to be turned out of the club.

But the board's willingness to tinker with life membership is a sign of just how serious Mory's troubles are.

Although it's too early to know how members will respond to the dues increase, Tyler says he believes it will provide a short-term solution to Mory's problem and buy the club time to make changes to its menu, hours, layout, and operating procedures.

The question facing Shumway and the board is: how much change are they and their clientele willing to accept?

Should they heed their motto—"Keep Mory's Mory's"—and tinker slightly with their existing model, surviving with the help of charitable contributions, like an actual museum?

Or should they make more-dramatic changes in order to try to make Mory's relevant again?

One area in which Mory's wants to make changes is its appeal.

Where Mory's might have felt as comfortable as an old white oxford buck to a well-heeled Yale man of the 1950s, its atmosphere, prices, and clientele are forbidding to Yalies today.

The kitchen closes at nine o'clock, just about the time students these days are deciding what they'll do that night.

The membership structure and the need for reservations are two more hurdles for spontaneously minded students, as is the dress code, modest though it is.

Men must wear shirts with collars.

All of this sets up a chicken-and-egg problem—a dearth in the club that discourages students from considering it their turf.

 

Still, many Yalies report going there once or twice a year with teams, singing groups, and other campus organizations.

It's really cool to go there and see all the old pictures on the wall and all the carvings on the table and know that people who went to Yale years ago did the same things you're doing now.

 

Conservative party chair Adam Hirst says that while his party and all the others of the Yale Political Union still hold weekly lunches at Mory's, the idea of a spontaneous trip to Mory's is foreign to his contemporaries.

"As a member of an organization called the Conservative Party at Yale, you don't need to sell me on the idea of Mory's," says Hirst.

But the food is pretty expensive for a Yalie.

If it's between going there or going to Yorkside, where I can get a sort-of-good slice of pizza for two dollars, that's an easy choice every time.

 

Even the Whiffenpoofs go somewhere else to drink after singing for their supper at Mory's on Monday night.

We would usually go to Rudy's or to the Colony Inn, says Nathan Reiff who directed the Whiffenpoofs.

 

Of course, Mory's biggest problem in attracting student business has nothing to do with economics or changing fashions.

Since the drinking age was raised to 21 in 1984, one of the club's raisons d'etre—drinking the traditional alcoholic Green Cup, Red Cup, and other punches from silver cups—has been officially off limits to about three quarters of Yalies.

For many years, enforcement of the law was spotty, but the state has gotten stricter recently, and Mory's has responded by tightening its own rules.

Yalies must show identification cards, which are run through a machine that can detect some forgeries.

Those who demonstrate they are old enough to drink are fitted with bracelets and segregated from the nondrinkers in large parties. "I've got a law to obey, and I do my best," says Shumway.

 

Along with the traditional alcoholic cups, Mory's now offers nonalcoholic versions.

Shumway uses these for an event that harks back to his days at Colonial Williamsburg.

Last year, he hosted an open house for freshmen to introduce them to Mory's and its traditions.

Like a historical interpreter, Shumway demonstrates the cups ritual.

The way the cups are passed around the table (without ever being set down), the singing by the group as one member drinks, and the spinning of the upside-down cup on the head of the person who drinks the last drop.

"You don't have to be drunk to spin a cup on your head," says Shumway. (No, but it certainly helps.)

 

Outreach efforts like the cups demonstration have become necessary, since Yalies  don't necessarily pass down Mory's traditions to each other anymore.

"If we don't expose this wonderful tradition to the Yalies, they become Yalies who don't have that frame of reference and are less likely to see Mory's as their place," says Shumway.

 

Shumway acknowledges that "Mory's probably missed a lot of people who are now alumni," but he says he's not giving up on attracting them to the club.

"One of the messages I want to give alumni is that they can come when they're in town and see what we're doing to make this place better," he says.

"They don't have to be members. If we've got space, we'll be glad to serve any alumnus who's back in town and wants to see what's going on."

 

With student use in decline, alumni have been some of Mory's most stalwart patrons, and the club has for years relied on lunch and dinner trade from alumni and faculty.

The university once used Mory's as a kind of de facto faculty club (an actual faculty club on Elm Street closed in the 1970s), and the daytime crowd still includes a fair number of administrators and staff attending meetings or celebratory lunches.

But faculty seem to have gone the way of students in recent years.

Conversations with faculty members in their 40s and 50s turned up few Mory's partisans.

Some complained about the stuffy atmosphere; almost all complained about the food.

"I'll bring out-of-town visitors there now and then for a full dose of Old Yale," says one of the more enthusiastic ones.

More representative is another: "I would enter the place only if it were absolutely a requirement," says Nemerov. "Mory's is not me."

 

Some of the faculty are simply finding places with food they like better, as are a lot of people in the Yale community.

The last decade has seen a restaurant renaissance in New Haven, with a dazzling array of choices from Indian to Cuban to Malaysian cuisine.

"Our clientele are sophisticated, smart people who know what good food is," says Cheever Tyler, "and so they tend to experiment and go to all these good restaurants."

 

What's more, Tyler points out, almost none of the city's restaurants or clubs have a unionized staff, as Mory's does.

The club offers medical and dental benefits and a pension to its employees.

All this makes Mory's labor costs higher.

In 2006, according to the club's 990 tax form, Mory's took in $1,224,340 in revenue and spent $1,392,576, of which $904,942 went to salaries, benefits, and other payroll-related expenses.

"That kind of labor cost would bury just about any operation," says Patricia Dailey, editorial director at Restaurants and Institutions magazine.

Labor costs for restaurants typically equal about a third of gross sales.

At Mory's, even when dues and other income are added to gross sales, labor costs came to 78 percent in 2006. Shumway says that although the union contract "is a factor in considering how and when we do new things," he feels he has developed a relationship with the union that is "a lot more productive than it used to be."

With the increased dues in place to provide a financial cushion, Mory's is proceeding this fall with a number of innovations recommended by consultants to try to regain the club's share of the Yale community's discretionary income.

"A lot of our support in the past has come from people who feel very strongly about keeping Mory's Mory's," says Tyler, "and that's one of the reasons we were slow to react. But we know that there have to be some significant changes."

 

As this article went to press, Shumway was still experimenting with dishes for a revamped menu.

He wasn't able to say what new dishes might be offered (though he did mention wasabi tuna as a possibility). But he was quick to offer reassurance to diehards.

"There will be rarebits, there will be baker's soup, and there will be liver and lamb chops and all the Mory's favorites. But we can't just have club food. We have to be in the mainstream."

 

The club is also going to start staying open until midnight on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.

After nine, Shumway says, the club will serve drinks and a cheaper, more Yalie-oriented menu, perhaps with burgers, chicken wings, and the like.

Perhaps more surprising, the building was recently fitted for wi-fi service, and laptop computers may soon be permitted in the upstairs rooms.

 

Further down the line, Mory's is looking to make significant changes to its home.

The early-nineteenth-century building needs a lot of work to update its mechanical systems, and the board has discussed installing a bar and adding conference space upstairs.

All this would require a strategic plan and a capital campaign, Tyler says, which will have to wait "until we put the ship on an even keel."

 

Aside from these changes, when I talked to people associated with Mory's about how they're addressing their woes, they spent a surprising amount of time talking about the pictures on the walls.

Shumway suggested that they might branch out more in their choices -- he has begun to add singing group photos, and he suggests including pictures from the Political Union (another loyal constituency) and perhaps portraits of Yale Rhodes Scholars.

"We may need to reflect more of the richness that is Yale on our walls than we do today," says Shumway.

 

Such attention to what's on the walls may seem like rearranging the picture frames on the Titanic, but the importance attached to it goes to Tyler's characterization of Mory's as a "museum of the evocative."

Mory's is slowly realizing that the Yale it is evoking is at best foreign and at worst off-putting to many in the Yale community today.

 

Richter Elser, a Mory's member who has operated restaurants in New Haven and is now general manager of the Quinnipiac Club, says Mory's "has to figure out which constituency it's going to cater to.

If it's Yalies, that takes you toward late-night food.

If it's Yale faculty and administrators, that suggests an emphasis on better and quicker dining at lunch time.

And if it's alumni, their interests are more directed toward early evening dining. So my concern is that if they try to do all three at the same time, it's difficult to do any one of them well."

 

And the club's most cherished goal may also be the most elusive, says Elser.

"For Mory's to be Mory's, they really have to reconnect with the student body.

But trying to reach the undergraduates is probably the toughest, because they have to win them back. The Yale Co-op, in its last couple of years, was trying all sorts of things to be a new and reinvented retailer, but none of them really took off.

Ultimately it became part of Yale's history instead of something necessary on Broadway."

 

 

It's tempting to speculate that Mory's won't outlive its current aging clientele, that the club's air of WASP privilege will make even less sense to future, more-diverse generations of students and faculty.

But it's not necessarily true.

Students from all backgrounds have come to Yale and learned to love faux Gothic architecture, the Elizabethan Club, a cappella singing, and other seemingly arcane traditions.

And many of them love Mory's, too.

 

One came to Yale from Israel after serving in the Israeli Army, first went to the club as a freshman for a squash banquet. "I said to myself, 'This is why I came to Yale—the tradition, the history, all in one place.'" He is now working in investment banking in New York, has continued his membership. "In my four years at Yale, the only time I ever had tears in my eyes was in Mory's, when I was elected captain of the squash team. That was one of the most meaningful moments in my life. So this is why I'll do everything I can to help and support Mory's."