Cannon Club’s opening set for February 2009

Cannon Club will reopen its doors next February, said Warren Crane ’62, president of the Dial Elm Cannon (DEC) Graduate Board.

In an interview with The Daily Princetonian in January, Executive Vice President Mark Burstein confirmed that the club is currently slotted for a February 2009 launch.

Crane had initially predicted that the club would open in time for Bicker this year. Difficulty in obtaining construction permits, however, impeded his plans for the club’s opening. Crane said ensuring the club’s financial stability and building a membership are among his top priorities.

The DEC Graduate Board — which consists of alumni from the defunct Dial, Elm and Cannon clubs — purchased Cannon Club’s old building in 2001 and have been working to reopen the club ever since.

“The club will reopen,” Crane said. “It’s not a question of if; it’s only a question of when.”

The club’s inability to obtain a permit to begin renovating the Cannon building is the cause of the current delay. A Class One reviewer, an expert inspector, must inspect renovations of large buildings, Crane explained.

Princeton Borough formerly employed a Class One reviewer, but he left his post before approving the club’s renovation plans. The DEC Board was forced to submit the plans to the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs in Trenton and is still waiting for it to send an inspector.

“As you might expect, there was a considerable amount of bureaucratic delay, but we are expecting to have the permit approved by the end of this month,” Crane said.

The building permit is the last obstacle between the DEC Board and the reopening of Cannon Club, Crane said.

“Once Trenton sends an inspector and approves the plans, the Borough will issue a permit,” he explained. “We already got approval for demolition and started demolition work, so with the construction permit we will be able to finish construction by next February.”

Crane said that even if Borough Council members were opposed to the addition of another club to the Street, they would not be able to refuse the construction permit.

“The Borough doesn’t have a legal prerogative not to issue the permit if the plans conform to the building code,” he said.

Recruitment plans

The DEC Board has not yet decided whether the club will reopen as a sign-in or a bicker club, Crane said. He did, however, lay out some methods through which the club could conduct a bicker process.

In one scenario, alumni of the club would bicker prospective sophomores.

“The alumni would come to run some sort of Bicker, which would be essentially an interview process, and would decide based on that process which students to offer membership to,” Crane said.

In another scenario, club alumni would create a bicker committee comprising current undergraduates who would run Bicker. Crane explained that the committee would consist of 10 to 20 people and would conduct “whatever bicker process was deemed appropriate by the Grad Board and [the students].”

The first recruitment process will only be open to members of the Class of 2011, Crane said, citing a number of concerns about taking members from older classes.

“The pool we would be drawing from if we accepted juniors and seniors would be people who aren’t in clubs, either because they didn’t initially express interest in joining a club or tried but did not get in, and we don’t know if those are the type we would want to take,” Crane said.

He added that it may prove difficult to offer a complete meal plan to juniors and seniors if Cannon’s kitchen is not fully operational by next spring.

“If we just took sophomores, we could offer two meals a week in the spring and just have food catered,” he explained.

The DEC Board plans to announce its recruiting strategies to the student body next fall. Since the Board publicized its plans to reopen the club, Crane said he has been swamped with inquiries from students interested in joining.

“The status, the history, the mythology, the legend of Cannon Club is fairly well established on this campus, and frankly, we don’t think we’d have a problem getting as many members as we want,” Crane said.

Before the club’s reopening was postponed from spring 2008 to spring 2009, Jon Bradshaw ’10 considered joining Cannon Club.

“There’s this sort of mystical quality about it,” Bradshaw said. “There have been a lot of legends about the club, ranging from kids riding motorcycles up and down the stairs to [the club’s] last party, which was a huge blowout where they just spent all their money on Oreos.”

Bradshaw said that he was also intrigued by the novelty of the club. “They’ve been closed for 30 years, so I had no idea how they were going to run anything. There would be no upperclass members to run events, so I was just really interested in how they would do it,” he said.

With Cannon’s opening postponed, Bradshaw decided to go independent but said he may try to join next year if the club decides to accept upperclassmen.

Financial concerns

The renovation of Cannon will cost $3.5 million, Crane said. The DEC Board expects to raise enough to cover the renovation but plans to have at least $1 million left over from fundraising to cover the club’s operating expenses.

“Our view is that it makes no sense to open the club if we don’t have an endowment of at least $1 million to sustain it going forward,” he said.

The club had total assets of $3,868,307 for the tax year ending June 30, 2006, according to the club’s non-profit tax filing.

DEC has had a history of financial woes that forced the individual members of the now three-club partnership to close. When Cannon’s funds ran dryin fall 1972, the club decided to close the following spring. Financial difficulties likewise forced Dial Lodge to close in 1988. Elm Club followed a year later.

In 1990, Dial, Elm and Cannon reopened as a single, merged club, but low membership left it short of cash, and it closed in 1998. Nonetheless, Crane expressed confidence that the Board will be able to obtain the necessary funds.

“There is no question that the club will open, and we will get the money we need,” he said.

— Senior writer Cornelia Hall contributed reporting to this article.