Explorers Club

Tucked away on East 70th Street in Manhattan, The Explorers Club has been a launchpad for history-making adventurers. From the poles to the Moon to the bottom of the ocean, its members have pushed the boundaries of what we know about our world since 1904. 

At the club, visitors can see Matthew Henson’s mittens from the first North Pole expedition in 1909, Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki Globe which was used to plan the daring 1947 Pacific crossing, and an Explorers Club flag, carried to the moon by Neil Armstrong during Apollo 11 and later signed by Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. When we said pushing limits of knowledge about our world, in their case, one of those boundaries was the atmosphere!

Members of The Explorers Club have been behind some of history’s greatest firsts: Roald Amundsen South Pole expedition in 1911, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay 1953 Everest summit, and Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard’s descent to the ocean’s deepest point in 1960.

For over a century—and still today—Explorers Club members have been adventuring scientifically, geographically, and… culinarily. The Club hosts an annual dinner as famous for honoring human achievement as it is for serving up wild dishes including but not limited to tarantulas, python, and cockroaches enjoyed in tuxedoed company (the members, not the cockroaches, wear the tuxedos).

In the 1910s, anthropologist Mabel Cook Cole hosted ladies’ night lectures, proving that even back then, the club believed that boundaries of discovery extend beyond gender—and beyond maps. Today, The Explorers Club is home to 3,500+ members across all corners of the globe. It’s a living archive of human curiosity—equal parts history, ambition, and the occasional deep-fried alligator or goat testicle (not kid-ding).