THE HOLLAND SOCIETY DINNER DANCE

The Holland Society Dinner Dance is an evening on a Saturday late in October, given by the Holland Society of New York, whose members descend from the Dutch of New Netherland: black tie, at the Lotos Club on East 66th Street, with cocktails in the Library, dinner in the Ballroom, a medal for someone outside the Society, and dancing afterwards to the Peter Duchin Orchestra. It is one of the two evenings the Society keeps each year, and a non-member comes only on the introduction of a member or a Friend.

At the founding one member suggested that only men whose surnames began with Van be admitted, so that the Society would be the “Van-Guard of civilization upon this Continent.” The answer, that its motto should then be “Vanity! Vanity! Vanity is all!”, ended the idea.

The Van-Guard

George West Van Siclen first proposed the Society in 1880, after a run of lawsuits in which the lawyers and judges on both sides were of Dutch descent. The first meeting was held at his house on 21 February 1885; the constitution was adopted on 30 April at Clark’s Restaurant, 22 West 23rd Street, and the Society was incorporated the next day, 1 May, with forty-six signatories, its founding fathers. Judge Hooper C. Van Vorst was its first president. The name was chosen because “it was simple and it required no explanation.”

The founders resolved, with what the Society calls “typical Dutch equanimity”, to admit only men who could prove their descent in the direct male line from a settler of New Netherland. The rule has gone. Membership is open now to men and women descended in the direct line from a Dutch native or resident of New Netherland or the American colonies before or during 1675. The sample application the Society gives to applicants is based on Humphrey Bogart’s own.

Bogart was a member, and so were Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Cecil B. DeMille, Henry Fonda and John Updike. The Society dined at the Waldorf-Astoria on 18 January 1900, for its fifteenth annual dinner, and in 1974 began the New Netherland Project, translating the colony’s seventeenth-century records in the New York State Archives.

Its library and office are at 161 West 86th Street, the first permanent home it has had. Its first woman president was its seventy-seventh, Sally Quackenbush Mason, daughter of the sixty-first, James E. Quackenbush.

The Beaver

The Society keeps two evenings a year: the Annual Meeting and Dinner, in April, and the Dinner Dance, in October, which is black tie and honours a non-member for contributions to “the human endeavor” with the Society’s Medal for Distinguished Achievement. In recent years it has been held at the Lotos Club, a private club founded in 1870 by writers and critics, which Mark Twain called the “Ace of Clubs”.

Cocktails are taken in the Library and dinner in the Ballroom. The Dutch and American anthems are sung before the toasts, and the medal is given. Then comes the Society’s tradition: the parading of its beaver, the mascot kept in honour of the beaver trade that supported New Netherland. The guests follow the beaver into the Library, and the orchestra plays for dancing.

It is a small evening, of seventy or eighty guests. Recent medals have gone to Peg Breen of the New York Landmarks Conservancy in 2023, to Ahmed Dadou, the Dutch Consul General in New York, in 2024, and to Louise Mirrer of the New York Historical in 2025. The Society’s report on 2024 said the dinner dance “kicked off the social season in style.”

In 2026 the Society holds its 136th Dinner Dance on Saturday 24 October at the Lotos Club, with music by the Peter Duchin Orchestra. The Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement goes to Charlotte Moore and Ciarán O’Reilly, who founded the Irish Repertory Theatre in 1988, for their contributions to the City of New York.

What to Know

It falls on the last or the second-to-last Saturday of October, and runs through the evening. The 2027 date has not been announced.

A non-member needs an introduction from a member or a Friend of the Society before buying a ticket. In 2026 a seat cost $400, or $300 for a young member under forty, and tables of ten were sold at $5,000, $10,000 and $25,000. A seat cancelled before 14 October is refunded in full; after that it is charged.

Black tie, as the Society asks.

The Lotos Club is at 5 East 66th Street. The Society names no hotel.

The mistake is to leave after dinner. The medal is not the end of it: the beaver is paraded after it, and the dancing follows it into the Library.

The Court

The Holland Society Dinner Dance is not the Court’s own, and the Court will not pretend it can buy a member a seat: a ticket follows an introduction from a member or a Friend of the Society, and the Society admits as a Friend anyone with an interest in the Dutch colonial period. For a member who is introduced, the Court arranges the whole of the rest: getting there, where to stay in New York for a member coming from out of town, and the table afterward. The Court is at the Mayflower Ball in early November.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.