![]() Each of those lodges has a story of where that growth is coming from, yet the impulse remains constant: seeking connections, with people who are not necessarily like them, in dusty old buildings with $2 drafts and animal heads hanging over the doorway. Membership is exploding in San Francisco, the Florida Keys, North Carolina, and dozens of other areas, including the bedroom communities of New Jersey, where Eli Manning was just voted to membership. Average member age is down from 69 to 61. In Ballard, the Elks are a salve for very contemporary and Seattle-specific syndromes: For transplants, it’s an antidote to the “ Seattle Freeze,” the term for the difficulty non-natives face in making friends or finding dates for natives, it’s a retreat from the Amazon-incited condo-ization of the city as a whole and Ballard in particular.īut it’s also part of a national phenomenon: For the first time in 35 years, the Elks are growing. Fraternal organizations have always met specific cultural needs - providing a space for men as women entered the public sphere at the turn of the 19th century, and a return to the brotherhood of military service after both world wars. Many Ballard Elks were first drawn to the beach parking and cheap drinks, but have found that their investment in the lodge, and the community that forms around it, has transformed into something more. The lodge’s median age, 52, is the lowest in the country - and a figure that, if current trends hold, will only continue to fall. But the mother of two is a regular fixture at the lodge, which she joined about four years ago, so that “my kids would have somewhere to pee when we were at the beach.” That beach, right on the Puget Sound - and the bar that extends above it - is how the vast majority of the new members at the Ballard Elks found out about the lodge, which is one of the fastest-growing in America, mushrooming from around 800 members in 2012 to over 1,200 today. ![]() The woman is wearing an oversized faux fur vest and heeled suede boots, which is to say she’s dressed for neither the Elks nor Seattle. “And we’re trying to convince the club to do a fundraiser so we can go around and do to other clubs what we’ve done here.” Specifically: Make the Elks more appealing, more vital, maybe even cool - while still preserving its ties to both its old Seattle neighborhood and the longtime members who remain its core. “The guy I’m seeing, he’s a member too,” she continues, stuffing her phone into her Louis Vuitton purse. ![]() We’re in the women’s bathroom of the Ballard Elks Club, decorated with white wicker furniture and a tray of drugstore lotions and hairspray. “We’re like a cult,” a tan, freckled, ambiguously aged woman tells me, the dregs of Coors Light swishing in the bottom of her plastic cup. ![]()
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