The Players Club, a 115-year-old establishment on Gramercy Park South, is expected to file a lawsuit today challenging the state and city anti-smoking laws.
Executive Director John Martello declined to give details about the suit, which will be announced at noon.
“We’re the first courageous club to take this step,” he told The Post.
The Players Club is acting after getting slapped with fines of $200 to $2,000 last month by city health inspectors for having three stacked ashtrays in Martello’s office.
“No cigarettes, nothing. No evidence of smoke, just three stacked ashtrays. I wasn’t even there,” Martello said.
Martello said he had the ashtrays in his office because it’s illegal to have them on the bar, so he had to put them someplace. “I didn’t know ashtrays were illegal,” he said at the time.
Club officials claim the city’s law wasn’t designed for inspectors to raid private offices. But the city’s anti-smoking laws, which went into effect March 30, ban smoking virtually anywhere indoors.
The state passed an even tougher law in July, closing loopholes that would exempt, for example, owner-operated bars.
Martello said he was suing both the city and the state because if the state repeals its law, the city law would still be in effect.
Both the city and state laws are controversial. The Post reported that 68 percent of state residents surveyed in a recent poll believed the state law went too far.
But Mayor Bloomberg has defended the city law, saying it would save the lives of hundreds of New Yorkers each year from secondhand smoke.
More than 500 city bars, restaurants and other establishments were ticketed in the first six months of the city law.
As of two months ago, 30 places received three tickets, 10 more received four, and two spots acquired five.
Being hit with three or more tickets in a 12-month period puts an establishment at risk of being shut down under the new laws.
The Players Club was founded in 1888 by Edwin Booth, brother of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, as a private establishment for actors and theater lovers.
The posh establishment in a historic brownstone has boasted as members Gen. William Sherman, Mark Twain, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, James Cagney, Mayor John Lindsay and now has as another honored member, former Mayor David Dinkins.