Attorney Maya Curtis has her office in the Fritz Building on the corner of Main and Liberty. Her husband, Ben Curtis, is part of the family that owns it. But she had no idea that one of Ann Arbor’s oldest and most esteemed private social clubs was upstairs until a friend invited her to lunch about five years ago.
Curtis loved chef Melissa Reid’s cooking, and the photos of distinguished past Ann Arborites backed up the website’s claim. “I think every mayor in Ann Arbor has been a member,” she says. Women had been admitted only a few years before her first visit—on the club’s 100th birthday in 2016—but as a former litigator in New York and Chicago, Curtis was comfortable in male-dominated environments. When she was invited to join, “that didn’t dissuade me,” she says—and, uniformly, “it’s been a welcoming experience.”
So much so that Curtis and Emily Dabish Yahkind are now the first women to lead what Curtis’s mother-in-law, Mary Curtis, still calls “the men’s club”—they’re president and vice-president, respectively.
A U-M grad, Dabish Yahkind had lived in Detroit and Washington, D.C., before moving here with her husband during the pandemic. She launched the premium canned-wine company SolSummit last year, and says women she’d worked with recommended the club—“they enjoyed the delicious lunches and found that it was a great space to take calls or do a little bit of work in.”
Curtis and Dabish Yahkind topped this year’s vote for new officers. Though only about a dozen of the eighty or so members are women, Dabish Yahkind says, “it seems like it was something that was wanted. … The club is looking for new ideas and for positive energy.”
Curtis explains that some members dropped away during the pandemic—“why would you keep your lunch membership if you can’t eat?” she asks rhetorically. Now they’re looking to get back to what Curtis calls their “sweet spot” of about 100.
“Part of what makes the Ann Arbor Club great is that it doesn’t advertise,” she says. “It’s not trying to boast or preen, you know? The flip side of that genteel approach is that people don’t know about it.”
