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| The exuberant cast cornice sits like a tiara on the beautiful, if abused, building -- photo by Nicolas Lemery Nantel / salokin.com |
As the 19th century drew to a close, the social
reform movement gained unprecedented momentum.
The focus of helping the poor was turning from merely providing charity to teaching
skills and a means of improving their desperate conditions. Among the leaders of the movement were
Ballington and Maud Booth who in 1896 founded the Volunteers of America. Booth was the son of William Booth, founder
of the Salvation Army.
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| Ballington Booth poses in his Salvation Army uniform -- photograph Library of Congress |
The couple organized volunteers who worked in the squalid
tenement districts. Initially the
Volunteers provided housing for unmarried men and women, and organized day
nurseries so mothers could work and earn money for food and rent. The group would expand to providing summer camps
for needy children and residences for newly-released prisoners until they could
get on their feet.
Within a decade the Volunteers of America had spread to
several major American cities. General
Ballington Booth described its organization to The World Almanac. “It is organized in military style, having as
its model the United States Army, but in conjunction with military discipline
and methods of work it possesses a thoroughly democratic form of government.”
In New York the organization bounced around; starting in the
Bible House at the corner of Fourth Avenue and 8th Street, then
moving several times until, in 1905, Harry L. Toplitz purchased Bartholomew Ward’s
five story house at No. 34 West 28th Street. The old residence had been in the Ward family
since 1858; but the once-quiet residential street was now anything but. Commercial structures had taken over the
block and newspapers announced that Toplitz “will erect on the site a six-story
store and office building.”
The “store and office building” would be the permanent
headquarters of the Volunteers of America.
Although The New York Times noted on April 20, 1907, upon the building’s
completion, that “The vendor was Harry L. Toplitz, who built it;” it was an
anonymous donors who paid for it.
Coincidentally, the building was completed exactly two decades years
after Booth and his wife arrived in New York.
He told reporters “Oh, it just comes to me—it is most interesting, most
interesting. Do you know, gentlemen,
that it was just twenty years ago yesterday, at 10:45 in the morning, that Mrs.
Ballington Booth and I sailed up New York Harbor to take up our work in
America? To think that it was at the
same hour twenty years later when I took title to this magnificent building for
the Volunteers!”
Architect Adolph Mertin had put his designs on the drafting
table a year earlier and the resulting structure was up-to-the-minute. Art Nouveau influences revealed themselves in
the railings and cornice along with wonderful Vienna Secession piers. An angled, three-story bay culminating in a
railed balcony was entirely clad in gleaming copper. Not only did the projecting sides of the bay
provide for optimum light into the structure, they captured the slightest
breezes on stifling summer days.
The Times remarked that “The new building of the Volunteers
is a very up-to-date affair both in design and construction…Expense was
apparently not spared in its decoration, and it has all the modern devices for
fire protection.” The newspaper added
that it “furnishes about as great a contrast to the present headquarters, in an
old rookery at 38 Cooper Row, just off the Bowery, as can be imagined.”
Despite the debilitating Financial Panic of 1907, the
$250,000 structure (an outlay of about $6 million today) was completely paid
for. The Volunteers of America would use
the second through fifth floors for its offices and headquarters; renting out
the store and basement as well as the three studios in the sixth floors. General Ballington Booth’s private office was
on the second floor, along with a board room large enough to accommodate 200. It was here where the meetings of the
executive heads of the Volunteers would be held.
The financial offices of the organization were housed on the
third floor, as well as the offices of the trade department. The fourth floor was dedicated to the
editorial department. The New York Times
reported that the fifth floor, “the lightest in the building, will be the
headquarters of Mrs. Ballington Booth and her Prison League, which is now
cramped up in a little room in the old shack on Cooper Row.”
Mrs. Booth’s Prison League had already placed 2,860 former
prisoners in steady jobs and had 43,000 convicts still serving their time on
the waiting list. In the past year the
Volunteers of America had cared for 3,933 “unfortunate women,” and provided
lodging for 31,487 women.
Among those renting the top floor
space was the architect himself, Adolph Mertin, who moved his offices here.
At the official opening of the building, on October 27,
1907, William Cullen Bryan spoke. He
noted the Volunteers of America’s focus on rehabilitation rather than
hand-outs. “No doubt the first duty to
the hungry man is to feed him, but to do him permanent good one must give him
high ideals and a nobler conception of life.”
He recognized, too, the more pragmatic and economic side of
their work. “It is cheaper to reform a
man than to protect society against him.
A vicious man is an expensive luxury.
While Gen. and Mrs. Booth are doing work which costs money, I venture to
say that it is worth to the people of the United States far more than is spent
upon it.”
Two months later the Volunteers were busy fulfilling what
would be one of their most widely-recognized deeds—the annual Christmas boxes for the families
of jailed convicts. “Two hundred boxes
of substantial clothing, groceries, and toys had been sent out to the wives and
children of imprisoned men up to the last night by the Volunteers of America,”
reported The Times on Christmas Day 1907.
The group obtained the foot measurements of every child and
mother in the families who were brought to its attention. “To every boy we give a warm overcoat and to
the girls a cloak of some heavy material,” said Maud Booth. “The grown women receive dresses. Underclothes are pretty generally
distributed, while everybody gets a pair of stout new shoes. Each box is packed with a particular family
in view, so that there is no chance of our gifts proving inappropriate or
misfit.”
In order to guarantee this, volunteers visited upwards of 80
families each, returning with a detailed report. Mrs. Booth provided detailed examples of the
conditions of the recipients.
“I had a box for a girl at one house, and when I knocked at
the door it was opened by what seemed to be a tiny little woman, who held her
broom in her hand, while her sleeves were rolled up for work. She was very small, but her face was marked
with care and toil.
‘You have children,’ said I, thinking the box was for her
child.
‘I am the only child,’ she answered, and I gave the things
to her. I found out afterwards that she
was only 15.”
Heart-breaking letters from the needy arrived at the offices
of the Volunteers. A month before the
following Christmas Mrs. Booth received a letter from a little girl.
Dear Santa Claus: Won’t
you please come to see us this year?
Last year you did not come, and we were very sorry, because we did not
get a single thing. Please do not
disappoint us this year. Papa is not
working, neither is mother. We are nine
children, running in ages thus: Girl,
16, the only one working; boy, 14; girl, 12; boy, 10; girl 6; girl, 7; girl, 5;
girl, 3, and little baby, 1 year and 3 months.
Dear Santa Clause, please make us happy.
Do not disappoint, or we shall be very unhappy.
The Volunteers of America worked diligently from its new
headquarters in attempts to relieve the suffering of the endless list of the
destitute. Ballington Booth documented
cases in 1909 that included “A poor woman whose husband is in Sing Sing, and
who lives with her three little children and her father, who has a cancer, and
has had to have his arm amputated, in an uptown tenement, has been supporting
herself and these on $3 per week. They
had absolutely nothing in the house, and were living on stale bread and
milk. The Volunteers have taken this
case, and are caring for them” and “A woman who was a janitress and worked
until faint and worn out was finally taken to the hospital. The children, aged 2, 9, 16, and 18, were in
dire need. Through the instrumentality
of our officers, the girl of 16 and the boy of 18 found employment, and the
little children are being cared for.
Their condition was woe-begone and pitiable in the extreme.”
In the meantime, artists leased the sixth floor studios,
providing extra income for the group. In
1913 artist Lewis Stone had his studio here when he gave up on his foundering
marriage. He explained to the Supreme
Court on January 9 of that year that “sex antagonism” was responsible for his
failed marriage.
“You may personally love each other—man and wife—but be
opposed sexually,” he said. Stone and
his wife had married in Paris in 1896 where they were both studying art. But after 14 years “My wife began to show a
passion for wine and did not seem to love our last child.” When the artist prepared to go to their
summer home in Hastings in 1912, his wife refused. So he left with the children.
When he returned in the fall he discovered his wife was
having an affair with two men. “He says
that he does not ask for the divorce in a spirit of vengeance, but because he
feels that he can no longer live with his wife,” explained The New York Times.
Downstairs at No. 34 West 28th Street the
Volunteers of America continued with their good works. The same year that Stone filed for divorce,
the Volunteers of America was busy procuring funds for its summer camps. Writing about the program to send city
children “to the fresh air,” Ballington Booth wrote on July 21, 1913 “It would
be difficult to adequately explain the rapid benefit and lasting good those
children have derived. It means so much
to them to be moved from the hot-roomed and ill-ventilated tenement to the
fresh air and breeze-swept camp.”
With the outbreak of World War I another branch of the
Volunteers of America was organized. The
Booth’s daughter, Theodora, was president of the National Honor Guard of
America; 6,000 girls and young women “who are prepared in case of a national
crisis to replace men in many different occupations.”
On February 6, 1917 The Sun reported that the girls came to
the aid of the navy militia who were tasked with keeping watch on sensitive
bridge piers during the frigid winter nights.
Several times the military men received “visitors.” “The visitors were girls of the National
Honor Guard of America, and they came in automobiles, bringing sandwiches and
coffee,” reported the newspaper.
The following year the “gray-uniformed girls of the National
Honor Guard” were seeking $3,000 for their work in the remote military
camps. “Also they would welcome baseball
hats, vases, jigsaw puzzles, phonographs, games of all kinds, book and anything
else that would help to pass a solder’s time,” reported the New-York Tribune on
May 12, 1918. The appeal promised “We
see that every dollar is spent to its greatest capacity, and often with $5 we
can bring happiness and cheer to a camp of 300 or 400 men…We need flower vases
for the flowers we give to our sick sailors and soldiers in the hospitals…We
need new games, checkers, jigsaw puzzles for convalescent patients, dominoes,
all kinds of games…We want flowers and fruit for our boys here; we want new
magazines, tobacco.”
The Depression Era and the poverty and unemployment it
brought meant even more work for the group.
But thirty-five years after the Booths had organized the Volunteers of
America the pair was still going strong.
On August 1, 1931 The New York Times reported on the telegrams of
congratulation that poured into the headquarters at No. 34 West 28th
on Ballington Booth’s 74th birthday.
Five years later officers and workers of the organization gathered in
the headquarters building to celebrate the Booths’ 40 year anniversary of the
founding.
“In a modest, sunlit room where many flowers had been placed
in their honor the General, who is a brother of General Evangeline Booth of the
Salvation Army, and his wife, known as ‘The Little Mother of the Prisons,’
received pledges of renewed loyalty from scores of followers,” reported The
Times on March 17, 1936.
On the same day that The Times printed its report of the
celebration, Pittsburgh was struck with what became known as The Great St.
Patrick’s Day Flood. Between March 17
and 18 flood waters rose to 46 feet, devastating the city and destroying about
100,000 buildings. As expected, the
Volunteers of America charged into action.
Approximately 20 truckloads of bedding and clothing provided by the
Volunteers left New York City for the West Pennsylvania flood areas. Each of the trucks contained 1,100 blankets
and 95,000 garments.
On September 13, 1940 Maud Ballington Booth celebrated her
75th birthday by going to work, as usual, in the Volunteers of
America headquarters. Her six hours of
work were interrupted by the need to acknowledge congratulations from
well-wishers like President Roosevelt; Major General James G. Harboard,
chairman of the board of Radio Corporation of America; and General John J.
Pershing.
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| A much younger Maud Ballington Booth posed in 1905 -- photograph Library of Congress |
Nevertheless, The New York Times said “Mrs. Booth showed no
signed of relaxing her zeal for work.
She insisted there would be no personal celebration of her
birthday. She wanted the anniversary noted
only to ‘carry again to the world my message on prison reform.’”
A month later, on October 5, Ballington Booth died.
After 34 years, almost to the day, in the building he
designed, architect Adolph Mertin moved his offices out of the building on
October 20, 1941; going to No. 101 Park Avenue.
Maud Ballington Booth lived on until August 26, 1948. The position of commander-in-chief of the
Volunteers of America passed to son Charles Brandon Booth until 1958 when he
was succeeded by John McMahon.
Change came to the Volunteers of America after nearly a
century when Raymond C. Tremont stepped into the position of general in
1980. His reorganization did away with
the traditional blue uniforms, the military ranks were replaced with more
corporate titles, and the organization moved from New York City to Louisiana.
In the half century that the Volunteers of America had been
in its building the 28th Street block had changed
significantly. The handsome headquarters
was now broken up into small offices and manufactories and at some point the
storefront was essentially obliterated.
Today the once-gleaming copper bay is covered with peeling brown paint and
a tawdry advertising awning stretches above the retail store. But overall Adolph Mertin’s wonderful 1907
design survives intact.
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| Pedestrians who rush by, not bothering to look above the tawdry store level, miss the magnificent details of the former Volunteers of America headquarters -- photo by Nicolas Lemery Nantel / salokin.com |
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