Members of the Saint Louis Club are being asked to kick in a voluntary assessment of at least $5,000 each—or the private club may have no choice but to fold.
At a meeting of the membership Monday evening, members were given a stark picture of club finances. According to several attendees who asked to remain anonymous, they were told that membership has fallen from 950 to 560 members. The club is now three months behind in rent, a past due bill of $360,000. The club owes $7.6 million to Enterprise Bank for the loan that financed its five-year-old home in downtown Clayton, and other vendors are owed millions of dollars as well. While some deep-pocketed members made large donations a few months ago, that money has been exhausted by operating expenses.
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Members who attended the meeting say they came away worried the club cannot survive the financial crisis. They were sent a survey after the meeting that asked about their appetite for the voluntary assessment and for continued membership. Says one, “If you put $5,000 in, a year from now, you might be in the same place. I think you’re going to have a hard time getting even 50 percent of people to pay that.”
Says another, “The membership is way down, and it’s just not sustainable. … It’s just going to die, and it’s going to be a loss of an institution, a long-standing institution in St. Louis.”
The club’s board of directors had said it would meet on Tuesday to see if there was enough member support to refinance its debt—a plan of which the additional member assessments are one component. “If this path does not look possible, a decision will be made to close the Club on or before August 29,” the board wrote to the club’s membership last week.
The club’s general manager, Mike Brady, did not respond to a message seeking comment yesterday.
The club’s woes are widely believed to have stemmed from its move from its longtime home at the Pierre Laclede Building at 7800 Forsyth Boulevard to Centene’s new Plaza C Building, which is just across the street at 7676 Forsyth Boulevard. While the new space is striking, members seem to have much preferred the parking and the ambience of the prior building. And they really preferred the view from the old building, which offered soaring views of Forest Park and downtown St. Louis. The fifth floor digs offered by Centene, which became available when the athletic club being operated on site closed, felt like a big downgrade.
Ironically, the old space has now become a Clayton outpost of the Missouri Athletic Club—which means the competition can now offer the amenities that Saint Louis Club members now eulogize.
Tax returns filed by the club, which is registered as a nonprofit, show that it ran a comfortable revenue surplus before the move. In the year that ended in April 2019, it showed a $202,808 profit; even with the pandemic’s onset the following spring, it eked out a $47,227 profit. But that soon turned to losses after the 2021 move. It lost $2.4 million in 2024 and $2 million in 2025, tax records show.
One member says while the view was a source of frustration for many members, the real problem for revenue was that the Centene space simply didn’t have the private rooms that had previously helped drive revenue.
“The main function of the club is its members’ usage of the club for weddings, parties, events,” he says. “I mean, they have numerous meeting rooms. But the banquet rooms were not the same size as what they had across the street, and I think their wedding business fell off drastically. And weddings make a lot of money.”
Centene’s CEO, the late Michael Neidorff, was a member of the club, and members note that a different Centene executive was on the club’s board of directors at the time of the move. That’s led to some questions about whether the club really got the best deal, as well as frustration that a costly move was treated as a fait accompli.
Says one longtime member of the board, “They have a fiduciary responsibility to the members to make good decisions and to have open, transparent transactions. That never occurred.”
Centene did not respond to a request for comment.
But perhaps the biggest problem for the Saint Louis Club is that private clubs no longer hold the cache they once did. It’s not a uniquely St. Louis problem. Restaurants now offer top-notch cuisine even in mid-sized cities. And young people no longer understand the appeal of paying $800 a month just for the right to access a discreet setting with excellent wine and French cuisine.
“Luncheon clubs in America are dying,” one member says, adding, “I give to a lot of things. The last thing I’m going to do is give to a luncheon club.”
