IN 1976, my membership certificate for Keen’s English Chop House’s Pipe Club arrived in my parents’ mailbox, a gift from my godfather, James Elkins McIlvain. I hadn’t yet turned 2. I never did ask Uncle Jim whether the gesture was a hope that I, too, would one day puff away at his favorite hangout, or if he merely giggled at the image of an infant inhaling from such an instrument — it looked as if it should be filled with opium rather than aged tobacco — like some sort of diaper-clad burgher.

Starting in 1885, when Albert Keen opened his restaurant and saloon, now known as Keens Steakhouse, the destination has provided post-dinner pipes to the likes of Babe Ruth, Theodore Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill Cody. Keen, who managed the acting and literary society called the Lamb’s Club, on West 36th Street, in what was then the theater district, opened up his self-named restaurant next door. Players at the nearby Garrick Theater would pop by, in full costume, and pound Glenmorangie as if it were Gatorade in between acts of their shows.

The churchwarden pipes in question are roughly 15 inches long, emblazoned with the handwritten number assigned to each owner and kept on the premises, since they are far too fragile to transport. New members would receive their pipes, cards bearing the identifying digits and, back in the day, complimentary plum pudding delivered every Christmas. The most current models are made in Holland by a company called Royal Delta and are far more Shakespearean than Sherlockian in appearance. It is written that the “church” moniker comes from the old chapel officers, who created a stem long enough to reach out past the stained-glass windows so that they might smoke away during Mass.

My mother recently found my card and letter of introduction in an old file cabinet (“his ‘churchwarden,’ bearing the above number, is in our custody and reserved for his use whenever he partakes in the tavern’s hospitality” the probably now-dead manager wrote). My mother promptly mailed the documents to my Midtown apartment, whereupon I framed and nailed this little slice of the town’s more tobacco-friendly past onto my least-stained wall, confident in the fact that I’d never actually locate the receptacle itself.