Roaming the august quarters of the 150-year-old Down Town Association at 60 Pine St., it is easy to imagine its former members—big-time lawyers, Wall Street tycoons and wheeler-dealers—lounging in the red leather chairs of the reading room, sipping martinis in the bar, or ascending the elegant cast-iron and marble staircase. 

But while the spirits of Lower Manhattan’s business and legal elite still seem to inhabit Downtown’s oldest private club—one of the last of more than 20 of its kind in the Financial District—there are too few living members these days to maintain the club’s plush digs.

With its survival hanging in the balance, the club is pinning its future on a bold change to its landmark six-story mansion—the addition of 18,000 square feet on top of the club’s 19th-century Romanesque Revival building, which will house 41 bedrooms and a set of squash courts.

This month, club president Mark Altherr and his architect, Page Ayres Cowley, go before the Landmarks Preservation Commission for approval for the addition that, they hope, will attract a new and younger crop of members. 

“It’s an expansion that is essential to gaining a level of membership that would allow us to stay in business,” Altherr said during a tour of the building last month.

To keep up with the times, and the shift to residential development in Lower Manhattan, Altherr said the club has had to rethink its services. 

After operating for well over a century exclusively as a lunch club for prominent Manhattan businessmen (women were finally permitted to join the club in 1985), the club realized around 1995, Altherr said, that “there was no future in lunch clubs. You needed to be a full service club. We have 26 members who live downtown, but four years ago, we only had two. [They] want a place to go that’s not home, that’s not a bar, that you might see people that you know and have a nice conversation. A third place.”

The club added breakfast service, then dinner one or two nights a week in its opulent dining room. By the end of the 1990s, the club offered a full array of new features, including the recently added game room on the fourth floor, where the woody essence of cigar smoke hangs in the air and the stuffed heads of a wart-hog, moose, water buffalo and other assorted mammals look down upon a trio of billiards tables. At the entrance to the room, a lion keeps watch.

Altherr said his club has fared better than many others in the city that have failed to adapt to changing times and new economic realities. Along with broadening its scope of service, the club has relaxed its criteria for membership. No longer must one be an owner or partner of a firm.

Now, Altherr said, he is determined to see the club outlive its difficult times.

“We’ve had stubborn members, and now I’m one of those stubborn members, who is going to make sure that we survive by changing what we do and how we do it,” Altherr said. “We expect to celebrate our 300th anniversary in good form.”