cost to join grosse pointe yacht club

Grosse Pointe Yacht Club

Inaugural Member – Private Yacht Club which has consistently been voted Number One Yacht Club in the United States by the Club Managers Association. Diverse programs from sailing, swimming, tennis, platform tennis and bowling, in addition to fine dining and children’s programs, are all benefits of membership.

788 Lake Shore Road Grosse Pointe Shores, MI 48236 USA

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313.884.2500

[email protected]

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The Chamber will provide leadership and services to the business community, promote economic vitality, collaborate with municipal government for business development and enhance the quality of life for those who live, work and visit in the Grosse Pointes.

(313) 881-GPCC (4722)

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Your ticket for the: Grosse Pointe Yacht Club

Where Tradition Lives

Meet the general manager, aaron wagner.

“GPYC is truly a place like no other. The historic Clubhouse with its majestic bell tower is an awe-inspiring and well-known landmark. Our grounds and harbor are exceptional. While we continually strive to give our members an unparalleled experience in every facet of the Club, the most important offering to them is the gift of memories. Whether it’s a wedding, Mother’s Day Brunch, bowling birthday party or just another gorgeous day relaxing at the pool, we love that many of life’s greatest and simplest moments can be made right here at the Club. We are honored to be a part of your memories in the making.”

Board of Directors

Commodore William Dillon

President, Gresham Driving Aids

Vice Commodore Robert Weiland

Partner, Kapnick Insurance

Rear Commodore David Schaden

General Manager of Sales, Toyoda Gosei

Treasurer Bruce Knapp

Partner, Doeren Mayhew PC

Secretary Michael Sobolewski

Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP

Director Christopher Izzi

Owner, Unique Technical Services, Inc.

Director Kevin O'Brien

Doctor of Radiology

Director Joseph Backer Jr.

President, Backer Landscaping & Backer Service

Director Kurt Saldana

CEO/Owner, Diversified Technologies International

Director Peter Beauregard

President, Colony Marine Sales & Services

Director William Turner

Owner, Turner & Company

Director Peter Gleason

Partner, IBM Consulting

Grosse Pointe Yacht Club

Review Highlights

“ Dress codes are strictly enforced (no jeans, jackets required in the main ballroom ). ” in 2 reviews

“ The marina and boats really have no significance to a bride & groom unless they are boaters, and half the time the water stinks. ” in 3 reviews

“ you must be a member to get in. ” in 3 reviews

Location & Hours

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788 Lake Shore Rd

Grosse Pointe Shores, MI 48236

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Attended a seminar here, partial dinner included.very good waitress service. Huge chicken breast- juicy, served with steamed vegetables and potatoes. Water only, as even to purchase no other beverages were offered. Very good looking building- kept up quite well.

Always a special time at this picturesque venue. Food is excellent, service is top notch. I could come here everyday.

Came with friends from another club, we were greeted graciously. Went to dining area to sit and as I walked in a nurf ball came falling/sailing over the top of my head. Scared me a bit and threw me off a bit. Seriously? Kids playing in the bar area restaurant with absolutely no control over these "Free range"kids, from their lazy parents. (Kid we threw the nurf ball came to apologize for scaring me, which was nice and appreciated. Unfortunately, at a club like this, the kids are used to being out of control, since they know that no one dares to reprimand them. The whole evening dinner was spent watching this circus play out. Parents, have some guts, put down your drink and be conscious of others who are attempting to enjoy their food also. Or better yet take you and your kids to McDonalds!!!! We could tell the wait staff was at their wits end, everyone trying to carry their trays without tripping over one of the kids! I hope the pay and tips are worth the aggravation. There have got to be better venues to work!!!!

The staff is very personable and they give you an experience like no other. They host some amazing events and Mothers day brunch. They offer a amazing Adult learn to sail program that gives you some great tips to use. This place is always decorated so beautifully. Make sure you visit the Marine activity center. This is a wonderful club and very welcoming. You can always know your getting the full Grosse Pointe experience here. Please note... you must be a member to get in. But if you already are you know exactly what I am talking about. From the service to the staff giving you a experience. It has earned a solid place in my book.

View from lakeshore

Best members EVER!!! As someone that has worked there for 23 years. The members treat the staff like family!!! The best!!!

We have been boating for many years, traveling to many yacht clubs around the Great Lakes. This gives me a bit of a different perspective of the facility. The docks are difficult to access with a lot of current, only one staff member to assist us. After a long day of sailing we went to take our showers. My husband had no issue, the men's locker room had four nice showers. The women's only two, one with a torn plastic curtain. I never did get to use the shower as it was filled with tweens washing each other's hair. I asked if there were other facilities for dockers and was told no. As I stood in the hall waiting, one man made a snide remark about "always waiting for women". I suggested it was probably because there were only two women's showers compared to the four for men. He just laughed and said "we're an old club". An old boy's club would have been more accurate. The boat which is named "Old Money" was an accurate welcome to the club. They have old money because they don't believe in spending it equitably on the women's facilities. The food was at least editable.

Gorgeous place. You have to be a member or be able to sneak in on a family member's name (as we do). Weddings and special events here are beautiful. The Sunday brunch is a smorgasboard of deliciousness ranging from eggs to salmon to waffles to shrimp and crab to a whole room devoted to desserts. Dress codes are strictly enforced (no jeans, jackets required in the main ballroom). Prices are steep and all charges are added to the member's monthly bill. In the summer the pool is an oasis, though a crowded one. The dress code for the outside bar and grill is obviously much more relaxed, and they serve killer hummers.

One of my best friends was married at the GPYC, and there's a few things I thought about it. First, yes, you really couldn't ask for a more elegant setting for a wedding... except for the surrounding dock. Of course this would seem obvious (since it is a Yacht Club... right?), but not until we were behind the building was it visually apparent that this gem was multi-tasking as both a marina AND a catering facility! But still, there's a great arch on the dock where my friend and his wife had pictures taken; in the photos, it looked like they were out at sea, a really beautiful backdrop if you can get a skilled photographer who can work around the yachts. I can't say much about the food, because the bride and groom opted to have Andiamo come in instead of using GPYC facilities, so anything I'd have to say should be directed elsewhere. But the bartenders were staffed by GPYC. I can say they made the tastiest martini I've ever had at a wedding (and in the Pointes that's no surprise), and were more friendly (albeit, professional) than I expected them to be. The room we were in was absolutely gorgeous. The tables were set elegantly, the cloth chair covers matched the table coverings... I really can't describe it. You know what silverware and plates look like when you go into a diner? Think of the exact opposite of that... and that's GPYC.

Definitely not for weddings. Staff seemed clueless, broken glass on the dance floor was ignored then poorly cleaned. Venue treats vendors like crap.. would you like your photographer / videographer / DJ treated like second class ? These are just the people entrusted with your once in a lifetime memories!

The Grosse Pointe Yacht Club is one of the best kept secretes of the Metro Detroit area. Located on Lake St. Clair in beautiful Grosse Pointe Shores the Yacht Club is clearly visible when driving up Lakeshore Dr. from the other Grosse Pointe Communities. The Belle Tower is hard to miss from a distance and is a easy reference point for boaters on the lake to navigate back into shore. Amenities of the club, besides the marina itself, include a bowling alley open from September until May, several clay tennis courts, two lighted paddle tennis courts and a sailing center with a large fleet of club owned sail boats. The club has 3 restaurants: The Spinnaker, The Binnacle Room and the Main Dining Room. The main ballroom can serve food as well. The Main Dining room is clearly a wonderful to take someone special for a night that they will remember. The windows provide adequate sunlight and a wonderful view of the lake to offer you and your significant other a night to remember. The Binnacle is overlooks the Yacht Club's pool at Lake St. Clair and is perfect for Breakfast and Lunch. Catch a glimpse of the boaters out on the lake and the beautiful Sun making its way up. Spinnaker is a good place to come if it's Fall or Winter since there is a beautiful stone Fireplace which offers a beautiful setting during dinner to strike up a good conversation. The club also features out door tennis courts as well as two heated tennis courts with what they call a 'warming up' room to come in from the brisk air. I have not been to the bowling alley but have herd that it is a lot of fun and they do offer leagues. Membership is a bit pricey and I am not sure on all of the rules, I get in as a guest with a friends family. There is a dress code for the club as well as the restaurants so visit the website for all information.

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The Detroit Yacht Club is trying to shed its stuffy image

Walking into the men’s locker room of the Detroit Yacht Club in 2014 for the first time, Colin Knapp’s friend pointed to the forest-green benches that spanned the length of the room.

“Just imagine the butts that have sat on those benches,” he said.

It’s impossible to count every derriere. But outside the locker room, the litany of visitors once included the Fords and the Dodges; the Crown Prince Harald V of Norway and the King of Sweden. (The late actor Charlton Heston was once supposedly turned away from a haircut with the club’s barber). Nowadays, the trained eye might spot the faces of General Motors executives, or Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, who members said recently tucked into a lunch with friends.

But Knapp wasn’t a car executive or aspiring young politico. He was a 22-year-old organist fresh out of the University of Michigan, new to Detroit, jobless. He’d never been on a yacht in his life.

“The whole concept of a private club was new to me,” he said. “I also assumed it was unattainable for me to become a member … I was nervous, you know, would my background be suitable for a place like this?”

But Knapp is the kind of person that the DYC, now in its 150th year, is hoping to lure to its 93,000-square-foot clubhouse on Belle Isle. Through its reduced-fee “intermediate” membership,  which starts at $60 a month for the under 35 crowd, the club is aiming to revamp its numbers and cultivate an image outside the stuffy boat club stereotype.

Economic trouble

As a kid growing up in the 1950s, Ed Theisen gallivanted around friends’ boats, watched movie screenings on Sunday nights and sat through meals with his great-aunt and uncle. It was quintessential childhood, he said.

But the 71-year-old Theisen has also seen the club hit rock bottom. From a peak of about 3,000 members in the 1920s, when Detroit was the fourth-largest city in the country, the club currently clocks in at 800.

And that’s a big improvement. Even though the DYC’s sprawling property – and some of its well-to-do members – seem nestled in a far-off cocoon, the club was never completely immune to Detroit’s economic difficulties.

Some members dropped out because they couldn’t afford it, others because they had fled Detroit altogether. 

“The membership was for years going down and down and down, and that was because of the political climate in the city,” Theisen said. “People in the suburbs did not want to drive down to the club, or drive down to Belle Isle, which was considered a ‘black park.’”

Another wave of members disappeared during the financial crisis of 2008 and Detroit’s bankruptcy. But the few times the DYC has come close to closing — nearly a century apart in 1932 and 2014 — members always came up with the money to save it, Theisen said.

Now the DYC is debt-free and ready to tap into the influx of cash and people to the downtown area. And that means appealing to a wide range of tastes.

While Theisen said he’s nostalgic about the 1950s and the stories of turn-of-the-century Detroit that were passed down to him, the club can’t look back.

“What can I say? It was a different world,” Theisen said.

The 'yacht club stereotype'

Attracting Detroiters to the DYC, whether they’re new to the city or not, means overcoming the “yacht club stereotype.” And part of that comes down to who exactly is welcomed to a private club.

The first thing is, well, yachts. A little more than a third of the DYC are boating members who pay $390 per month for the privilege to dock their boat at the club, plus the annual cost of the boat slip. (Non-boating social members over the age of 35 pay $365). And boating is the reason the club ultimately exists: it hosts a formal junior sailing program, several century-old regattas, weekly off-the-dock sailing races, an adult sailing program and the annual Gold Cup championship race.

Still, it's frustrating that people see owning a boat as the only reason to join the club, said past commodore Ray Batt.

“It’s a much more comfortable, friendly, welcoming environment than most people think when they hear ‘yacht club,’” Batt said.

That hasn’t always been the case. Until the 1950s, there was just one female member who had taken over her late husband's membership, said Theisen. The first black member was accepted in 1971 — two years after the city threatened the club with eviction from Belle Isle in a dispute centered around its all-white membership.

Joining requires a “sponsor” from someone already in the club, plus four more signatures, a process that critics said kept people out. A 1974 settlement required that the club always have at least five black members.

“It was unofficial,” Theisen said of the club’s discrimination. “And that was sad. In our early days, we had Jewish members, and then all of a sudden after 1910 until 1950, we had no Jewish members.”

The DYC doesn’t keep track of its members by race now. But the attitude about who should be allowed to join has progressed tenfold, Theisen said.

Overall, the club is still primarily white but becoming more diverse, said Knapp, who joined the summer after his first 2014 visit.

That year marked a turning point for the LGBT community, too: Knapp was among the first openly gay young people at the club. Then-membership director Lena Angott pushed to grow the LGBT community, and although a few "dinosaurs" resisted, she said, the reception was overwhelmingly positive.

A poolside romance turned into a long-term relationship with Knapp's boyfriend.

“I forget about that part – I met the love of my life at the Detroit Yacht Club,” Knapp said.

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The death of social clubs?

Other longstanding social organizations, from the Loyal Order of the Moose to motorcycle clubs, have also grappled with declining membership for years.

The Masons hit its lowest point ever in 2017 , with about 1.1 million members nationally as opposed to about 4 million in the 1960s. The phenomenon even serves as the premise for "Lodge 49," a sitcom about an ex-surfer who joins an ailing fraternal organization and, at one point, discovers a mummified body in the basement.

Now Detroit's exclusive city clubs are being forced to revamp, too. 

In March, the Detroit Club in downtown was reborn with renovations that included a basement-turned-spa, new guest bedrooms and a cigar bar. A craft cocktail bar and "art and wine" series will also launch in coming weeks to give people a more modern experience, said Angott, who now serves as membership director at the Detroit Club.

The Detroit Athletic Club, near the Opera House, has survived unscathed, as have suburban spots like the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club.

But most other hallowed Detroit spaces didn't make it. The University Club declared bankruptcy in the 1990s. The Recess Club, the Standard Club and the Renaissance Club also remain shuttered.

One issue is clubs' reliance on traditions, Angott said, which can create a generational gap.

"I can tell you every event that's going to happen next year," Angott said of the DYC, adding, "Their traditions are beautiful, but it lends itself to an older crowd ... It makes it a little harder to attract the younger member, because in general, they love the pool and the tiki bar. And then it makes it a little tougher to keep them in the winter."

But the biggest challenge clubs face today is their exclusive origins, said Randy McBee, a professor of history at Texas Tech University who has written two books on American social organizations. Whether a working-class ethnic club of the early 20th century or a country club, members tend to bond over a shared identity that, at its core, bars others.

"It’s not just, 'It happens to be all-male or all-white,'" McBee said. "But at the root of it, it’s 'We don’t want to hang out at the park, because there’s all those other people there we don’t want to hang out with, so we have this other place.'"

That creates a catch-22: The exclusivity that makes a club attractive to one core group can also make it difficult for it to stay afloat when that group dwindles. But if a club tries to cater to everyone, McBee said, it may struggle to foster friendships based on shared values.

"It’s an odd thing these days in the midst of gender equity and equality conversations, especially with the MeToo movement," McBee said. "To what extent can we revive these things that have been based around excluding people?"

The new members

For its part, the DYC still wants the “who’s who” of the city to dine at the club and do business under the radar, Batt said. But it also wants to create an oasis for younger people and families.

Knapp, now 27, felt that the outdoor pool, sports courts and cheap membership justified joining the club. He works in development at the Detroit Opera House, and the $60 fee was about the same as joining a gym, he said.

He quickly made friends with members ranging from young working people in their 20s to grandparents in their 80s. The environment doesn’t feel buttoned-up at all, Knapp said.

“Lots of judgment can happen at a private club,” he said. “The DYC, absolutely everybody is welcome as they are, and we will all party together.”

Knapp isn’t alone in that feeling. Over an eighth of the DYC's members are in the intermediate category, and the club has developed a range of activities that appeals to different tastes: A “metro” club-within-the-club attracts young people in the city; as does the biking club, while there’s also more traditional groups like reading and opera lovers.

From Memorial Day to October, people show up in droves to sip drinks poolside at the tiki bar and watch the weekly bandshell concerts.

“While there’s a profound respect for tradition at the club, there’s also an acknowledgment and the reality that ... you can’t let tradition make you irrelevant to your members and your prospective members,” Batt said.

Of course, some traditions are here to stay. There's the annual Sweepstakes Regatta (since 1892), the Memorial Day Regatta (1915), the Christmastime Commodore’s coffee hour (1925) and the Memorial Day service (1948). And if you accidentally wear a regular suit to the winter black tie Officers' Ball — which hasn't missed a year since 1877 — you'll never make the same mistake again, Theisen said.

For Knapp, the club feels like a connection to Detroit’s past as much as a place to play.

“You go to the end of our little island and see the skyline of downtown,” Knapp said. “Looking at the east riverfront, Detroit is very much — it’s our setting.”

Contact Fiona Kelliher at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter: @fiona_kelliher.

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The Grosse Pointe Yacht Club (GPYC) dates to 1914 when 25 men formed a club to pursue their interests in ice boating and sailing on Lake St. Clair. The clubhouse was designed by Guy Lowell, a Boston architect and yachtsman, and was dedicated on July 4, 1929. Its Italian Renaissance façade with its 187 ft. bell tower is a well-recognized landmark to boaters around the lake, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2015.

In 1997 the GPYC was named the “Number One Yacht Club in America” and is still considered among the best. The GPYC provides all the traditional amenities of a classic yacht club, including an Olympic-sized swimming pool, tennis and bowling facilities, as well as elegant dining rooms and ballroom. Boating members enjoy the GPYC’s central location on Lake St. Clair and the club maintains a spacious deep-water marina with a private gas dock.

The GPYC maintains membership in the Detroit Regional Yachting Association and holds two annual DRYA-sanctioned sailing regattas each year in addition to numerous other sailing-related events and programs, such as an adult sailing school, exclusively for its members.

Despite the region’s recent struggling economy, the club continues to boast more than 900 members and over the years the architectural integrity of Lowell’s original design and the spectacular view of Lake St. Clair have been meticulously preserved.

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Grosse Pointe Yacht Club

788 Lake Shore Road, Grosse Pointe Shores, MI

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Embarking on the journey of wedding planning should transcend mere task lists. It deserves to be a joyous and stress-free experience for everyone involved. Allow our skilled Catering Department at the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club to guide you, ensuring a seamless and expertly handled celebration.

Whether you envision an outdoor ceremony on the East Lawn or an elaborate reception within our historic Ballroom, the GPYC stands out as the ideal venue for your wedding. Reach out to our dedicated event staff today to commence the journey toward your perfect day!

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