new york yacht club party

How to sneak into a Bored Ape Yacht Club party

You need to own an nft that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. or do you.

By Adlan Jackson

Illustration by Alex Castro

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As someone who clears out his checking account every month to pay rent, I’ve been a passive observer of the whole NFT phenomenon rather than a participant. When you can’t afford one anyway, it’s much more tempting to see the technology as a gimmick, the scene’s adoptions of language like “democratization” as half-hearted cosplay for assets available mainly to the very rich, and the whole enterprise as a scam by people too rich to get in trouble for scamming, especially when NFTs mostly look like shit. They look like the kind of thing that in the past might have earned you a modest following on DeviantArt — but these things are getting sold at Sotheby’s. 

A few weeks ago, though, erstwhile countercultural bible Rolling Stone collaborated on a “zine” with the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, saying that they had “built an immersive, fantastical world” and advertised one of their creators comparing themselves to “the Beastie Boys on tour with Madonna.” Steph Curry had one. Another sold for $2.7 million. As of this writing, the cheapest one you can buy is for sale at around 50 Ethereum, about $200,000 dollars.

I got into a frenzy and skimmed a New Yorker article. It taught me that when you buy or “mint” one of 10,000 available NFTs, an algorithm sorts a bunch of random attributes to create a cartoon of a monkey (the “Bored Ape”) that, while an instantly recognizable variation on the theme, is unique. One is shooting laser beams from its eyes; the next has 3D glasses. One frowns in front of a cyan background; the next grimaces over a mauve background. By virtue of that uniqueness, it becomes an asset, and membership among the owners (the “Yacht Club”) makes it valuable. 

But what about the NFT, the thing that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars?

But the article didn’t explain their value. What was so meaningful in the apes’ aesthetic, which reminded me of Neopets? What was so compelling about the members of the de facto club that had formed among the owners of the exorbitantly priced avatars? But just when it seemed like I was doomed to my confusion, I found out parties were a part of this whole thing. 

More specifically, a “warehouse party,” held at Brooklyn Steel, which is not so much a warehouse, as it is a mid-size concert venue created and owned by the same people who run Coachella (and who just renamed the Staples Center to the Crypto.com Arena). That’s like saying you went to a supper club at Applebee’s. But I like parties, so I figured if I was ever going to find out what the deal with this NFT stuff was, as a nightlife journalist, “NFT NYC” week was my time. A Twitter employee had posted a picture the previous night of a defeated-looking James Murphy at a BAYC party.

I went to Princeton on a scholarship, so a lot of my college friends went to high school with James Murphy. So it was uncanny to see their hometown hero, a veritable titan of New York nightlife, DJing for… whatever this was. 

But my proximity to that kind of privilege made me think someone I knew might have a Bored Ape. You needed one to get in, and the blockchain is purportedly so impregnable that people are using it to unlock their apartment doors. But I’d been guested into country clubs before, and this seemed like something similar. Even in college, I always got a voyeuristic thrill from watching how the wealthy behave when they let loose and enjoyed mooching off their open bars.

My first move was to ask a friend who has posted Instagram Stories of her crypto-trading brother-in-law staring into multiple screens at a standing desk. “Don’t have one, friends sold as well,” the brother-in-law replied to her curtly. “Depreciating asset.” I tweeted, I ‘grammed, I texted college friends who had gone into the tech industry — nothing doing. Mostly, people just wondered what I was even talking about. 

Then I heard back from H, a former philosophy major who now works for a blockchain company. He thought his boss might have one — why? I explained the situation sweatily. 

“I don’t think he’d transfer it to me,” H said, and I felt like I looked silly — like I was betraying how little I knew about expensive financial assets and web 3.0 technologies that will define our society’s future. I had caveated multiple times with “I know this is super weird” and “no worries if not,” but H suddenly announced that his boss could verify his ownership online and text him a screenshot of a QR code. The boss teleworked in from Puerto Rico anyway. He said H could go in his place, and I could tag along as his plus-one. What the fuck? Holy shit. Fuck yes. Let’s fucking go. 

Hype drives value. It was the reason any of us were standing in line

At 6PM, I took the B43 bus to Brooklyn Steel as I had many times before. Just as I was stepping off the bus, though, H called me. He had wisely gone to the security to ask about the protocol for admission and had been told that they would be checking not for NFT ownership but yellow wristbands that had been given out at a prior event. What? But what about the NFT, the thing that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars? Nope, she was just checking for yellow wristbands. That might be a problem, but H and I met up at around 7 and joined the line that curled around the block.

In line, I learned my first lessons about the NFT scene. It’s not even made primarily up of people who work in tech. A guy wearing a custom blue tracksuit with his ape printed all over it said he didn’t even get the blockchain stuff and needed H to explain it to him. He was just an investor, he said. Rather than the software engineer types I was imagining, the Bored Ape crowd was full of young, eager-eyed bros, happy to strike up conversation about their own pet NFT projects. It was more like a real-life version of those Twitter spam bots that promise that a certain cryptocurrency is “going to the moon” because NFTs are fundamentally about hype. Hype drives value. It was the reason any of us were standing in line. 

It also means the actual aesthetics are shamelessly derivative. The Bored Apes themselves are a shoddy appropriation of the Japanese streetwear brand A Bathing Ape. But in line, the Yacht Club members talked up their own, non-Ape zoo-animal-themed limited avatars.

Everyone else, however, had yellow wristbands, and sure enough, another security guard advised us to step out of the line when we neared the front. “But we have the NFT,” we said pathetically, brandishing our QR code screenshot. She had no idea what the fuck we were talking about. I could not believe that, having gotten (by proxy) this one-in-10-thousand cartoon monkey worth half a million dollars, that we were not going to get let in because of, like, resort rules. But we accepted the judgment, went to the nearby bar Tom and Joan’s, and drank for an hour, talking about love. 

I joined the longest line to a mens’ room I’ve ever seen

By around 10PM, we were ready to head home. “Do you want to just go back and try one more time?” H asked. Yeah, fuck it. We decided that maybe if we persisted, we could annoy people long enough that they’d call someone who knew the value of our QR code screenshot. As we stepped into the crowd between the food trucks and the entrance, though, security waved us in without asking us to pull up our sleeves. 

The irony was not lost on me that actually getting the non-fungible token had no bearing whatsoever on us being denied entry at first or later when we got in. But honestly, I’ll be chasing the high I felt when we illicitly crossed that threshold for the rest of my life.

Brooklyn Steel was covered in tropical camouflage; over the bar, opposite the stage, a fluorescent “BAYC” logo was glowing, and blown-up Bored Ape portraits tile walls. 

The decorators had done a good job, but even when I was in the Yacht Club for the night, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the Bored Apes didn’t seem much more impressive than the art in a typical Newgrounds flash game. I figured I must be wrong, though. Art and commerce’s mingling isn’t some new scandal, anyway. I thought, maybe the next great patron of the arts is here tonight. A hundred years from now, scholarship kids at an art school will claw each other’s eyes out to take classes in a building with his name on it; tonight, he’s doing a backflip in the photo booth, picking up his Stella Artois Cidre, and heading back to the dance floor to try to grind on his coworker to “Reptilia.”

The Strokes were there, by the way. We missed seeing Beck get introduced by Aziz Ansari but got in in time to see Chris Rock try to riff on NFTs for 90 seconds and then introduce what must have been one of the first Strokes shows since their fundraisers for Bernie Sanders. “This is kind of about art, right?” Julian Casablancas pleaded from the stage. “NFTs? I don’t know, what the hell. All I know is... a lot of dudes here tonight.” The other members of The Strokes wore stony expressions and gripped their instruments like nervous high schoolers at a talent show.

Casablancas was right about the gender breakdown; I joined the longest line to a mens’ room I’ve ever seen. It was a jumble because while the organizers had booked multi-million dollar comedians to introduce multi-million dollar indie rockers, they had neglected to actually hire anyone to manage the crowd inside the venue; the Yacht Club was being run by a skeleton crew. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I had to notice the failure of the party to live up to any of the futurist promises that drive the value of NFTs. It turns out you actually can’t use the blockchain to work a door or keep a bathroom clean. You can only really do that with labor.

“Brooklyn, if you’re making more money this year than last year, make some noise!”

The relentless peer-to-peer advertising I noticed in the line continued inside as well. It’s one of the more memorable lessons I learned: though I was expecting software engineers getting loose, while the NFT crowd wasn’t cool per se, creating value in a public marketplace requires more social engineering than other tech phenomena. If you can make your ape, giraffe, or pizza popular, it could mean getting rich. So, more stickers were left in the bathroom, and more people are smoking indoors than I’ve seen at any punk show. (Weed, mostly.) And the crowd in this millionaires’ party was noticeably less white than I expected, reminiscent of the Supreme store line crowd of nerds, hypebeasts, and hustlers — diverse but without very many Black people.

And if there’s something that the makers of BAYC did right, it’s encouraging all their attendees to buy merch (that’s where you got the wristband that we don’t have, a merch pop-up). The crowd was full of black-and-white Bored Ape Yacht Club hoodies and T-shirts, which have the look of mid-2010s streetwear, just north of minimal, and the Yacht Club members wore them like frat letters. The energy was very collegiate, sloppy. The partiers didn’t seem to care much about cleaning up their messes. The ground was sticky before long, and the spilled beer smell began rising from it.

Drinks were free in the Yacht Club, and thank God, because I had already broken my pledge not to spend any more than my $5.50 in bus fare tonight by insisting drinks were on me at the bar. But we had gotten in late enough that the open bar was starting to run out. I got a Stella Artois Cidre of my own, and The Strokes had gone by then, and a DJ was playing a pretty good hip-hop set by the soundboard. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard a crowd of literal millionaires go up to Bobby Shmurda’s “Hot Nigga.” The DJ ended up being Questlove, and blessedly, he knows to play the censored version in this crowd.

Lil Baby, the night’s headliner, finally took the stage at around 1AM. Most people had left by then. I was drinking my last vodka of the night and zoning out to “Life Goes On,” though, and a small group of attendees bounced near the front of the stage, and there was something inspirational about Lil Baby’s utter lack of concern with how small the audience had grown and how utterly dry the vibe in Brooklyn Steel was. He had none of Julian Casablancas’ cool kid embarrassment or Chris Rock’s self-consciousness. He was simply getting to the bag. “Brooklyn, if you’re making more money this year than last year, make some noise!” his hype man screamed to the crowd’s delight.

I’m a taker and not a maker, so because unemployment ran out, I don’t think that’ll be quite the case for me. I think he’s got the right idea, though. On the walk back to the bus stop, I found myself a little shook by the diversity of the new class of oligarchs, their expensive sneakers, and their knowledge of Lil Baby lyrics. One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned as a scholarship kid myself is that after spending enough time in the borderlands between rich and poor, you could still end up dying as poor as you were born, no matter how many times you party with the rich. However strained the atmosphere of people trying very hard to make a party cool because their ROI depends on it may have been, I thought I might finally be learning to emulate the money moves of the Casablancases and the James Murphies, rather than their subversive poses. They wised up at some point, whereas I still hadn’t learned. Culture is cheap, and the Bored Apes were right to turn it into a token. If only I’d bought in sooner. 

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Museums, Mansions, Yacht Clubs: Finding a Grand Spot for a Party

By Paul Sullivan

• April 7, 2017

Maggie Norris, a fashion designer, likes to throw a good party. But after a while it’s hard to find a venue interesting enough to attract her coterie of well-heeled, socially busy friends.

So a few years back, she rented out the Russian Consulate in New York for a Russian-themed bash. The consulate, a former Vanderbilt mansion, was a hit, she said. This fall, she gained entree to the New York Yacht Club, the exclusive club that held the America’s Cup sailing trophy for much of the 20th century.

Beyond the unique locations, these venues served up a different experience for her guests: access to places they wouldn’t normally be able to go. “I like to create really special events, but they have to be so special that they don’t happen every year,” Ms. Norris said.

That’s probably a good thing, since events like these — a fixture of the spring social scene — are anything but easy to pull off. They take a long time to organize, involve complex logistics and cost more than a traditional party. Yet when the host succeeds, the parties leave memories far more lasting than the most expensive dinner.

The first step is planning, which is how any good party starts.

All planners say they can pull together an event in a few months, but most prefer to have nine months to a year. Ms. Norris said it took her a year to organize the event at the New York Yacht Club, and it happened only because she knew a member.

Planning too far in advance will not necessarily make the event grander, experts say. “There’s a sweet spot,” said Matthew David Hopkins, president and creative director of Matthew David Celebrations. “If they come to us two years before their event, we know we’re going to design it five times before we have to commit to something. A couple of months is a little short.”

The venue is as much a star as the host. And like any diva, the venue’s rules can delay, change or even derail an event. Many are institutions where the staff, club members or paying public are likely to be inconvenienced by the event.

“When you’re at any type of cultural landmark, anything where there is a curatorial responsibility, you have got to be so careful,” said Bronson van Wyck, a New York City party planner. “Almost everything that you want to do there will require an extra step or two to protect and preserve the place where you are.”

At the New York Public Library’s flagship building in Manhattan, for example, the loading docks lead directly into rooms of historic significance, putting the people working the party on watch from the moment they arrive.

With a space like that, Mr. van Wyck said, setting up the party is a lot easier and potentially less expensive if it is planned for a day when the institution is not open to the public. Otherwise the planner might have to wait until closing time and rush to set up. (Though with the New York Public Library, which is closed only on major holidays, that may not be possible.)

In some instances, the venue can be a great help. Jacques Halbert, a French artist and a former New York restaurant owner, said he gave a party in October at Le Carroi , a museum in the Loire Valley in France that would have been hard to stage without the museum’s help. The theme was the 100th anniversary of the Dada art movement.

“On every chair, I wanted to attach a fishing pole, so every guest would have a hat hanging over his head,” Mr. Halbert said. “I had 250 guests. I needed 250 hats and 250 fishing poles.”

The museum connected him with a group of gardeners who had bamboo poles that could be used as fishing poles. “They also knew someone who worked at a hat factory, and we got the hats for 50 cents each,” he said, adding, “If I’d been alone, I’d have been incompetent.”

The museum also helped with more mundane tasks, like supplying the chairs (to which to attach the poles) and the trucks to bring in all the supplies.

Weather plays its own role in these events. An institution may not allow a tent for an outdoor party. Even if it’s allowed, the tent may block the view that made someone want to have a party there in the first place.

Then there is the issue of electricity. Simon Powles, a founder and the chief executive of Starr Catering Group — which has supplied food for events at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Museum of American History in Washington — said that for a 75th birthday party at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, he brought in a generator powerful enough to run the whole party.

“We have no control over mother nature, but we do have control over the event being flawless,” Mr. Powles said. “You peel the onion back until you’ve looked at every possible thing.”

Given this level of planning, these events cost a lot more than a similar event at a more traditional space, like a hotel ballroom.

For the food alone, Mr. Powles said, it might cost $150 per person at a hotel, but around $225 per person at a cultural institution, since those venues often lack industrial kitchens and all the meals must be brought in. “It’s definitely a steep increase in what you’d see in a hotel or a restaurant,” he said. “But you’re getting something very custom or private.”

At that price, though, Mr. Powles said clients should do a tasting as close to the real thing as possible.

“We show them every dish we’re going to serve,” he said. “If it’s a special event, we have our staff in that uniform. We get their input and do detailed notes. When they get to the event, they know exactly what they’re going to get.”

The cost of renting the venue can range from $5,000 for a room to $100,000 or more a night to have a museum to yourself. Some venues include more for that fee, like lighting and sound equipment, while with others, the clients have to bring everything themselves, including a kitchen to cook in.

One of these parties could easily cost $100,000, but planners say costs can stretch to $1 million or more.

Ms. Norris said that the New York Yacht Club donated what she paid to charity. As for her event at the Russian Consulate, she would say only that she got a good price, and that it was worth it given the atmosphere.

“I thought it was kind of interesting — all these Russian guys were smoking cigars in the stairwell,” she said.

Mr. Hopkins, the planner, said he provided line-item estimates for clients so they can decide what they really want included.

For a wedding, he recently designed a wall with pictures of the bride and groom on it. When dinner was over, the wall rotated to reveal acrylic shelves on which desserts appeared to float. For that one piece, he needed people to build the wall and the shelves, light the wall properly, make the desserts and then individually place each dessert on a shelf.

“Every piece of this becomes expensive, because there are often multiple vendors who become involved in any one thing,” Mr. Hopkins said.

Charges that may look negligible can add up, Mr. van Wyck noted. “You don’t want to be hit after the fact with a cleanup fee, or a fee for taking all the books off the floor and storing them in a secure facility — and they are going to be handled by art handlers who get paid $100 an hour,” he said.

But — as the MasterCard ad reminds us — there are some things money can’t buy. “It’s one thing to walk through the Temple of Dendur in the daytime,” Mr. van Wyck said, referring to an exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “It’s another thing to sit and have dinner by candlelight inside the Temple of Dendur.”

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• New York City
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Rock the Yacht New York City Party Cruise

• 2.5-hour 'Rock the Yacht' party cruise on New York Harbor
• Take in the glittering Manhattan skyline from the outdoor viewing decks
• View the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building and other top New York attractions
• Upgrade to enjoy your cruise with beer and wine or a premium open bar
• Dance until midnight to lively tunes from a DJ or a live band

Inclusions & Exclusions

• Onboard music
• Beer, wine and soda (if option selected)
• Premium open bar (if option selected)
• Port fees and taxes
• Hotel pickup and drop-off
• Food and drinks available for purchase

Departure & Return

Pier 15, near South Street Seaport

Returns to original departure point

What To Expect

Beginning at Pier 15 at the East River Esplanade, head out onto the water with the New York City skyline in full illumination. Be sure to being a camera to capture breathtaking nighttime views of landmark attractions like One World Trade Center's Freedom Tower, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, the Brooklyn Bridge and more. (How about a selfie with Lady Liberty?)Mix and mingle - and depending on the type of cruise experience chosen, enjoy beer and wine or an unlimited, premium open bar. Listen to live music and dance to an award-winning onboard DJ or head to the outer deck, drink in hand, to take in the view of the city sites at night.This "Rock the Yacht" party cruise is great for fun of all kinds - as a birthday party, a bachelor or bachelorette outing, an after-party celebration or just as another excuse to get out and about.

Additional Info

• Confirmation will be received at time of booking, unless booked within 3 days of travel. In this case confirmation will be received within 48 hours, subject to availability
• Must be 21 years old
• All enclosed areas on board are non-smoking; smoking is only permitted on the outer decks
• Cruise schedule is often affected by group charters
• Not wheelchair accessible
• Onboard music ranges from live local bands to live radio station broadcasts to DJ entertainment; DJs play a varied mix of songs
• If you require vegetarian meals or have special dietary needs, please specify in the Special Requirements field at time of booking
• Tables are assigned in advance. If there are additional parties you would like to be seated with, please make note in the Special Requirements field at time of booking and confirm with the operator no less than 72 hours in advance
• Please note: Yacht subject to change

Cancellation Policy

For a full refund, cancel At least 24 hours in advance of the start date of the experience.

Your Contact Details

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