The Allegheny Club has its influence, and the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Club is awash in old money. But the Duquesne Club is where the power is. This is the club that runs Pittsburgh, and from here much of the rest of the world. It’s the Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group,  and the Trilateral Commission all rolled together in one tastefully decorated brownstone building. Here we see it from Trinity Churchyard across Sixth Avenue.

And now old Pa Pitt will regale you with a Duquesne Club story he heard many years ago from an artist who made her living painting portraits of the excessively rich.

One of this portraitist’s clients had invited her to the Duquesne Club for lunch, and while she was waiting to meet him, she noticed an impressive collection of paintings on the walls by that great humorist in oils, David Gilmour Blythe. She approached one of the impeccably outfitted guards to ask whether the club ever lent any of the paintings to the museum.

The guard drew himself up to his full dignity. “Madam,” he said in carefully measured tones, “we are the museum.”

The Duquesne Club is half a block up Sixth Avenue from the Wood Street subway station.