THE FEBRUARY 1995 Leather and Lace party at Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club was an especially good one. The cold night made everyone’s flesh stand out a little more firmly through the hair shirts and studded collars, bare Victoria’s Secret bras, and well-padded transvestite-dominatrix ensembles. A member of the Harvard crew team, the scion of an old-line Boston family, wore only a strategically placed sock, and flexed his buttocks as he walked casually toward the bar. A buxom young woman, the daughter of a movie producer, was dressed as a French maid, and aggressively deployed her feather duster on her date. Outfitted in skimpy leather, progeny of the Aga Khan and of the prime minister of Canada grooved to the dance beat near a dazed Karenna Gore. Several male attendees had handcuffed themselves together by the neck. But no one could match the simplest, most surprising outfit of them all: duct-taped nipples — and no other clothing above the waist — sported by the granddaughter of a well-known politician.

As had been the case for years at the annual party, trust-fund bunnies, heirs to royal titles, and even the " less fortunate " sons and daughters of bankers, lawyers, doctors, academics, and actors drank, smoked, had sex in the bathroom stalls, or just took it all in, at times biting at each other in unrestrained glee as they stood tottering on the railing of the fireplace, surveying the scene. As a night, this particular Leather and Lace party did a fairly good job of representing the private undergraduate social club for what it was: a place of frivolous, often excessive good times, but a place unlike any other on campus. The invitation-only party did little to dispel the Pudding’s reputation as a haven for the elite, the sort of students whom Matt Damon might ask how they liked their apples. But the costumes served as reminder that the building houses a spirit of exuberance and revelry that broke past the stereotypes of dull, library-pale Harvard students and allowed a self-selected group to escape from the tedium of their social life in today’s Harvard Square.

For over a century, visitors who climbed the stone steps on the east side of Holyoke Street and pushed past the charmingly battered, brass-handled green doors were stepping into a living piece of Harvard history. The place, despite repeated vacuuming, retained the musty smell of generations of cigarettes and spilled booze, late nights, and excessive dancing. The first-floor entrance opened onto a members’ lounge — peaked windows, walls hung with framed black-and-white pictures of membership classes, and wooden floors dominated by a large pool table that had seen many a bare ass pressed against it in the heat of passion. The Krokodiloes, a male a cappella group started by four Pudding members in 1944, practiced here. On the other side of the building, the ground floor held a full-size professional theater, where the famed Hasty Pudding show was mounted each year.

Up the wide staircase, the barn-like second floor contained a long wooden bar to the left, large windows ventilating a large open dance floor, and a wide hearth guarded by a wizened stuffed crocodile above and a giant set of bellows below. Halfway up, the walls of the room were painted a deep, rich red and lined with vintage theater billboards and elaborately designed initiation-dinner posters signed by all the members in attendance. The third floor, reached by a narrower, steeper set of stairs, most recently held the much-lauded Up Stairs at the Pudding restaurant — formerly the club’s dining room, where jacket-and-tie-clad members took their dates or dined with friends on steak meals for under $10. The large, high-ceilinged room drifted off into white rafters and beams that swallowed the chandeliers and soft candlelight. The acoustics were excellent and, at the end of the club’s black-tie Christmas dinners at the restaurant, after many a chair-tottering toast, the Kroks came in to serenade the members with melodies that echoed perfectly the mood of reconnection with a long-lost past.

On the stair landing between the restaurant and the bar hung a simple item that summarized the Hasty Pudding Club’s social standing then and now: a well-placed wooden frame inscribed from the pudding to the presidency, under which were displayed the photographs of four of the club’s most famous members: John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy.

ALL THIS will soon be gone. In October 2000, the president and fellows of Harvard College ended months of discussion and legal wrangling by acquiring the worn Hasty Pudding building at 12 Holyoke Street. According to official documents, the purchase of the building, which in 1999 was assessed at $1,449,100, cost Harvard nothing up front. Rather, payment came in the form of forgiveness of a sizeable lump of unpaid rent: Harvard had owned the land on which the building sits since 1986, and the Institute of 1770 — an umbrella organization for the Hasty Pudding social club, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, and the two Harvard a cappella groups that used the building — had simply fallen too far behind in payment. What’s more, the building, commissioned in 1888 from Peabody & Stearns, builders of the Custom House Tower, had become hazardously dilapidated.

Under the recent deal, the university will assume the debt, and take on the extensive cost — estimated at $10 million — of the repairs and rewiring necessary to bring the building into compliance with Cambridge building codes. It is a relatively small price to pay for the building — itself a historic landmark, sitting on prime Harvard Square real estate.

But the significance of the transaction can’t be measured in dollars alone. Harvard acquired the building by capitalizing on the slow financial and social demise of a club started as a haven for the sons of the East Coast’s most wealthy and powerful families — a demise that reflects Harvard’s peculiar ambivalence about exclusivity and the declining social influence (our current president notwithstanding) of those simply born with the right last name. To many students and alumni, though, the issue is more basic: the university has all but guaranteed an end to the liquored-up, leather-clad antics of the Hasty Pudding, and thus to a 206-year-old tradition that, to the university’s chagrin, defines some students’ Harvard experience as much as their academic endeavors.

" The Hasty Pudding is not a building, " says one graduate member simply. " It’s a lifestyle. "

The Hasty Pudding Club was born in September 1795, the brainchild of the poetically named Nymphas Hatch and a group of other Harvard juniors with Updike-worthy monikers you couldn’t possibly make up. The fledgling organization was dedicated, according to the 1874 edition of The Harvard Book, " to cherish the feelings of friendship and patriotism, " twin sentiments that flourished in the heady days after the Revolutionary War. The club quickly developed its own idiosyncratic series of rituals and events: the anniversary of George Washington’s birthday was celebrated by " oration and poem, followed by a supper with patriotic toasts and songs. " Written into its original constitution was an article stipulating that " two members in alphabetical order shall provide a pot of hasty-pudding for every meeting " — hence the club’s name. (Hasty pudding, a regional Native American dish of cornmeal mush usually flavored with molasses, combines a vaguely pumpkinesque taste with a perfect diarrhea consistency.) For a time, members were allowed to drink only malt liquor with their meals.

Club meetings were held regularly, and often devolved into raucous skits, which eventually gave way to scripted performances. By the early 1880s, the Hasty Pudding Club’s theatrical endeavors were so elaborate as to attract national attention. The performers were invited to tour the Northeast, and made so much money with the show that in 1882 the Pudding was able to commission the 12 Holyoke Street theater and clubhouse.

The Pudding continued to develop its signature pun-filled revue, put on by an all-male cast dressed as women, with increasing success and renown. In 1951 it began giving out the now nationally recognized Woman of the Year Awards (Man of the Year Awards came later, in 1967) to popular entertainers, and would eventually honor actors and actresses ranging from Rosalind Russell to Harrison Ford. Today, the Hasty Pudding show is a prime moneymaker and proving ground for generations of showmen as well as writers, producers, directors, and politicians. Illustrious " stage-transvestites " have included Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Randolph Hearst, Henry Cabot Lodge, Leverett Saltonstall, Jack Lemmon, and William Weld.

But more than anything else, the Hasty Pudding Club embodied prestige. As the Pudding shows grew in popularity, the social aspect of the club also flourished on campus. Each year, within the ivy-covered brick walls of the country’s most elite university, it invited the most elite of young men to join. According to The Harvard Book, in 1875 the " forms of initiation were of course a profound secret.... Shopkeepers in Boston and highly respectable residents in Beacon Street are said to have been sometimes amazed by the appearance of gentlemanly youths uttering ‘in accents of unknown tongue’ the mystic words ‘segis votes respondet’ and ‘concordia discors.’ " Juniors and seniors elected to the club would spend a week in a member’s room, undergoing a Revenge of the Nerds–type hazing, composing elaborate essays and poems " as proof of fitness for admission. " To be chosen to " run for the Pudding " was, quite simply, to be recognized as the cream of the crop of already exclusive social circles in turn-of-the-century New England. " To be left out meant that your social future at Harvard was likely to be in the back seats, " was how Owen Wister, author of The Virginian and a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt, put it when he joined in the early 1880s. And so it remained for nearly a century.