Fly Club Wins Tax Exempt Status

Despite concerns about its all-male membership, the Fly Club successfully eliminated the last possible challenge to its tax-exempt status last night.

As long as the money goes to improving the club’s building, alumni of the final club will be able to legally write off donations to their old haunt after a Cambridge City Council vote approved their preservation easement.

Such donations have long been possible, but without the city’s official stamp, arcane laws previously meant that the legality of some donations could have been questioned.

The vote was delayed for almost a year because Councillor Jim Braude questioned whether the club—given that it accepts only the male half of the population—deserves any tax exemptions.

After reviving the discussion last night, Braude asked Deputy City Solicitor Donald Drisdell whether the council could grant the easement only on the condition that women be admitted after some defined period of time.

“I think the undergraduates have made some very poor decisions,” Braude said.

But Drisdell said that, since the motion was simply to approve a contract that the Fly Club had already made with the nonprofit Historic Massachusetts, Inc., the City Council didn’t have the power to limit the club’s easement.

He added, however, that the Fly Club’s tradition of male-only membership won’t necessarily go untested.

“There are obviously provisions against discrimination provided by federal, state, and our local Human Rights Commission,” Drisdell said.

After Drisdell’s report, the council voted 8 to 1 to approve the easement.

Councillor Timothy P. Toomey, Jr., the lone holdout, said that he was “just uncomfortable” giving the boon of tax deductionto the all-male club.

Fly Club alum Camimir de Rham Jr. ’46 said that the club’s constitution does not prohibit the election of women.

“The undergraduates have the sole power to elect members,” de Rham said. “So far, the undergraduates have not elected any female members.”

Councillors were optimistic about women’s eventual admittance.

“Hopefully, one of your daughters will be one of the first female members,” Mayor Anthony D. Gallucio said to Braude.

Charles M. Sullivan, executive director of the Cambridge Historical Society, said his organization holds preservation easements for seven Harvard-affiliated club buildings.

But although preservation easements allow those final clubs to have lower taxes, none of them can receive tax-deductible building donations, because their easements are held by the city and not a third-party nonprofit as the Fly’s is.

Braude told de Rham, the lone representative of the Fly Club at the meeting, that the undergraduates in the club should express gratitude to the council by opening admissions standards.

“Tell them to thank the City Council—then thank us again by admitting women,” Braude said.

Several officers of the club did not return calls for comment last night.

—Staff writer Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at dorgan@fas.harvard.edu.