Members of Toledo’s historic and most celebrated private club are meeting Tuesday to brainstorm ideas on how to keep it in business.

The Toledo Club, which offers its members fine dining, fitness programs, and musical and social events, has experienced a significant revenue loss caused by a membership drop from about 550 before the pandemic to about 375 currently, said Chad Bolles, club president.

In other words, membership dropped by about 32 percent, or nearly by a third.

“That’s a big drop, a big drop, and realistically, for the club to run perfectly, you need at least 500 members,” Mr. Bolles said. “We’ve had deceased members. We’ve had members who retired and moved to Florida, but we’ve had members who, you know, quite frankly, just weren’t using the club, which is somewhat our fault.”

Keith Burwell, the club’s interim manager, said that as a result the club has been “using the line of credit to help us make ends meet.” 

The club, he said, has got to the point where in order to stay solvent its members need to have “a serious conversation” about innovative ideas about attracting new members and about new business models for each segment of the club operations such as food and beverages, athletics, member events, and outside events such as weddings and anniversaries.

Mr. Burwell, the recently retired president and CEO of the Greater Toledo Community Foundation, said he stepped in March 1 as the club’s interim manager “to help us put everything back in order.”

“We basically have three legs of a stool,” he said. “One is to increase the quality of our service. One is to reduce expenses. And the third is to increase membership.”

The difficulty attracting new members has to do with the absence of a golf course and outdoor tennis courts, Mr. Burwell said.

With the current average monthly membership fees of $325, the club would need to have 500 members, he said, “to do just a bit better than break even.”

The club is considering “all sorts of possibilities,” Mr. Burwell said, including finding new sponsors. “And we have to improve the quality of service in all those different business-model pieces to attract new members.”

Another venue of improvement would be to account separately for the club’s events, which together amount to about a half of the club’s revenue, he said.

They include member events and external events, such as weddings and anniversaries.

“All events such as member events, weddings, and outside events, we lump them all together, and that’s a little over half the revenue on average,” he said. “And if we try to break out just external events, that’s less, about a third.

“We’re really working on getting a handle on this right now, because we’ve lumped all kinds of events together. We need to get really, very, very specific about that.”

The club hosted 36 weddings in 2023 and just 24 in 2024.

“We’re trying to increase that, and we’re already on our way to doing that,” Mr. Burwell said. “We’ve had great success [with weddings] just because of the beauty of the building.”

Mr. Bolles said the club’s losses have been so far covered by member donations, bank financing, or tapping into the club’s credit line.

However, he said, the club is now coming into the fourth [fiscal] quarter — April, May, June — and in the past two years it lost “a substantial amount of money” in that quarter.

“This meeting is not because the bank’s pulling our credit line or we’re out of cash,” Mr. Bolles said. “It’s more like we’ve got to stop losing money, because if we have that loss in the fourth quarter again, the [expletive] is going to hit the fan.”

Losing the club would be a shame, the interim manager said.

A historic hub for socialization and business networking, the club, he said, “is one of the last remaining institutions connecting the city of Toledo to its history, a place that is worth saving.”

Officially established in 1889, the club dates back to around 1879 when former publisher of The Blade David Ross Locke founded the Draconian group, which was renamed the Toledo Club when it began to grow more exclusive, limiting the membership to 350.

Initially a men’s-only club at Madison and Huron streets’ intersection, it remained so when it moved in 1915 to its current location at 235 14th St., where it opened its dining room to women in the 1920s.

The club had survived the Great Depression and had hosted presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Warren G. Harding, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt. 

“I think the club will pull through at some level,” Mr. Bolles said. “The question is how different is it going to be, and that’s going to come out of that meeting.”

Along with membership options, ideas he recently heard from club members included using the fourth and the fifth floors of the five-story club building for a hotel, condominiums, or a tavern open to the general public, Mr. Bolles said. 

Some have also suggested that the club’s catering business should be a lot bigger and be geared to businesses downtown.

“The purpose of the [Tuesday] meeting is to get real, actual ideas and business models that we can implement to preserve as much of the Toledo Club as possible and establish a financially sustainable model for the future. That’s the game plan.”

The alternative would be to put some hard choices on the table.

“If we don’t come up with any solutions, there’s a couple different things that could happen,” Mr. Bolles said. “One of them would be cutting services and the other one would be raising membership fees or issuing a special assessment.

“But we wouldn’t want that because that would make people want to quit.”

First Published March 15, 2025, 8:43 p.m.