New York's Hottest Club is a Chess Club
And here is what that says about the state of the youth
It’s what you’d expect to be a slow Tuesday night at a vibey wine bar on the Lower East Side, but the room is buzzing with chatter and excitement. Here is an artist whose work you’ve probably seen in a couple of galleries across New York and Paris, a marketing manager who teaches an occasional breathwork class at a yoga studio down the street, and a popular vintage shop owner — and they are all here to hang out, have a drink, and well…play chess. This isn’t your classic NYC chess club, like Marshall or Chess Forum, that associate themselves with prominent historical figures, like Bobby Fischer and Stanley Kubrick, and proudly carry on their serious, old-school, and masculine spirit that can come off as slightly off-putting in 2024. This is a cooler, younger, and more artistic take on it, called Pawn Chess Club.
“[Our] first event really came about because we wanted to find a place to play chess that felt like the sort of place where we were already hanging out — these bars and restaurants that we were already going to with our friends,” told me a co-founder of the club Simone Robert. “A lot of the other chess clubs that were already in the area didn't necessarily accommodate that, and we didn't really feel like there was a place for us to go to.” Isabel Münter, the other half of the project, walked me through how it all started: an invite poster, an Instagram account, ten chessboards, a film camera, and a group of loyal friends who showed up to support their first ever event. Today, they can get anywhere from 130 to 150 people out of the house on a weekday night to a place, like Dimes, Time Again, and Metrograph, and have worked with some buzzy NYC-centric brands, like Hinge, Happier Grocery, Aplos, and Maude. “We are a year and a half into it, and this project has become bigger than the sum of us,” said Isabel. “Simone and I just put this out into the world, but what it is today is the total of all these people bringing energy and consistently coming [to the events] and talking about them.”
There are a couple more groups across LA and New York who are also playing with the concept of a classic chess club and using it as a creative medium and a social framework that creates a low-stakes environment for people to meet each other and get to know their local communities IRL. Club Chess events at Le Bain and The Standard, hosted by Alec Bahta and Corrine Ciani, are popular with the indie sleaze and crypto-adjacent artist crowds, and have attracted brands, like Highsnobiety and Margiela. Over in LA, Michelle Kong mixes chess and speed dating to help young people find love at LA Chess Club. Depending on what you gravitate to in terms of the visual aesthetics and the crowd, you may choose to go to or partner with one club over the other, but as a whole, the rapid rise and success of these projects signal something bigger — an overwhelming demand for genuine IRL connection and interest in local communities among the youth.
“The HHS came out with a report basically stating that there's an epidemic of loneliness and isolation happening among the younger generations because they have very much grown up on the Internet and now have a hard time meeting other people in person and connecting. And I think we're kind of an [unintentional] solution to that problem,” Isabel, who is clearly passionate about the topic, explained. “There is something interesting [here], especially about the people who are showing up alone. I would consider myself a very social person but it would take a lot for me to show up to a club where I didn’t know anyone, on my own. Simone and I try to really keep an eye on those people, but I think it’s also an indication of where we are as a society in 2024 — people are tired of being online. They want to get out and meet people in person.” “We have a lot of people who dress up and treat it as a night out,” Isabel continued, “and we will hear little stories of like “oh, people went on dates” or “people have been hanging out on the weekends outside of the club who met at the club.” Diego Segura, the founder of Family Office, and a chess club regular shared a similar sentiment: “It’s a very fun way to meet people IRL. For me, way more fun than a concert/show for example, or even a reading.”
This also means that social clubs are getting a healthy amount of inbound interest from brands and hospitality businesses who see this cultural shift and want to participate in it in any way they can: lending their venues, gifting products, and offering proper paid sponsorships. Earlier this year Pawn Chess Club was one of Trippin’s partners in Assemble - a big initiative produced as part of Hinge’s One More Hour program and designed to create more opportunities for people to connect IRL. But perhaps, the most interesting partnerships that Isabel and Simone have worked on, were put together in collaboration with fellow creatives and artists, like Joe Henry Baker and Minjae Kim. “[Switching up partners and venues] keeps things exciting. We would never just have a weekly chess club at the same venue without putting any new energy or ideas into it. We like experimenting with different formats and structures,” Isabel explained. “Simone is a designer, and I grew up very much in the art world. So, I think we’re both very interested in the overlap [of our work] with other mediums and trying to put chess into different contexts that make it interesting.”
Even to the people like me, who never touched a chessboard as a child, stumbling upon one in the wild is an instant reminder of the simpler times when we tried really hard and got really creative to keep ourselves active and entertained. It seems so unlikely for something so simple and almost archaic to regain popularity among the chronically online generation with a short attention span, and yet, chess club events easily pull together some of the most exciting rooms of people I’ve seen in the past few years. “You see people you know, respect, and admire doing really, really exciting and interesting things in the city, and when you're first getting started, it can feel like such a mystery, how those things come to be. And I think getting this stuff up and running, and our first few events, suddenly distilled a lot of that mystery down into some pretty clear steps,” Simone told me. “If you have another idea, you could absolutely make it happen — these things just take somebody championing them and bringing them forward.” And as it turns out, that idea doesn’t have to make total sense for the current state of the world. It can just be something you think you and your friends might enjoy.
IN THE MARGINS:
I am working on the next big Busy Corner report as well as a new look, but in the mean time, I’ve added a couple more references, indie magazines, and retail stores to the respective lists.
In the interest of spending more time looking for inspiration in the archives, I dug up some fun chess player visuals from Life Magazine, Sports Illustrated, New York Times, and Getty:
Damn i gotta move to nyc
wait love we have a similar movement towards chess clubs in pdx as well!