Gloria Steinem, quoted in the short video The Women’s Building, produced by NoVo, ➝.
The Women’s Building, ➝.
Through its selected tenants, The Women’s Building “{works} to create a world free from violence, poverty, and injustice,” ➝.
NoVo Press Release, “New York’s Bayview Prison to be Redeveloped into The Women’s Building,” October 26, 2015, ➝.
Governor's Press Office, “Governor Cuomo Announces State’s First ‘Women's Building’ to Unite More Than a Dozen Women-Focused Organizations to Empower Generations of Women to Come,” October 26, 2015, ➝.
NoVo Foundation, Tax Records for Private Foundation (990-PF), 2017 filing, ➝.
Remarks by Jennifer and Peter Buffet, in their introduction of Governor Cuomo, Press Conference, October 26, 2015, ➝.
An RFP released by NoVo for Business Development Plans considers a variety of business structures, including a public benefit corporation, worker-owned collective, or paid membership models, Released January 28, 2017, ➝.
Lela Goren’s own “West Chelsea Building” is described as a sanctuary for her, her children, and various “thought leaders” and politicians, ➝.
Not only in New York, but according to a federal survey of 167 prisons across the country, ➝.
The Women’s Building appears as an item on the Governor’s website under “New York’s Commitment to Women,” a legacy that he tracks back to the Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention in 1848, ➝. On the decommissioning of Bayview, Cuomo is credited with saving taxpayer dollars as part of his larger initiative to close carceral facilities across the state, a centerpiece of his criminal justice platform, ➝.
As per the FAQ page: “The Women’s Building will be home to nonprofit organizations and a number of small, mission-aligned for-profit entities. All the organizations housed within The Women’s Building will benefit from the collaborative effects of shared office space, a likely wellness center, and the administrative and operational cost savings that are generated as a result. In addition, the nonprofit entities will receive a substantial rent reduction to allow them to devote even more of their funds directly to achieving their missions.”
For more on transformative justice, see this very good conversation with the authors of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements, Walidah Imarisha, Alexis Gumbs, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, adrienne maree brown, and Mia Mingus, “The Fictions and Futures of Transformative Justice,” New Inquiry, April 20, 2017, ➝.
Five white women, as per Liza Cowan’s recollection: Reeni Goldin, an organizer with The Cooper Square Development Committee, which performed squatting actions against the Urban Renewal plans at the time, Susan Sherman, June Arnold, Sarah Davidson, and Buffy Yasmin, who were later joined by filmmaker Jane Lurie, who produced a film about the event, which was screened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972, but doesn’t appear to be accessible anywhere.
Liza Cowan, “The Fifth Street Women’s Building: A Feminist Urban Action Jan 1-13th 1971,” Dyke, A Quarterly (1992), ➝.
Previously, it was used and then abandoned by the Graduate School of Design before it had found its home in Gund Hall in 1972.
Carson Bear, “The Historic Harvard Campus Building That Once Housed a Feminist Takeover,” Saving Places by The National Trust for Historic Preservation, January 19, 2018, ➝.
The distinction between women’s center and women’s building appears to be nominal; they are sometimes used interchangeably, but also appear to qualify slightly different, if overlapping, programming. To the extent that these architectures have been claimed as a matter of self-definition, we defer to the phrasing of each individual reference rather than find define types. Madeleine M. Schwartz, “888 Memorial Drive: Harvard’s Feminist Occupation,” Harvard Crimson, March 2, 2012, ➝. See also: the documentary that catalogs the event, Left on Pearl.
Maud Howe Elliott, Art and Handicraft in the Woman's building of the World's Columbian Exposition (New York: Goupil, 1893), ➝.
Stephanie Crawford elucidates this sequence of events in “A RE (RE) (RE)—TELLING OF THE NARRATIVE OF WOMANHOUSE, OR IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS A WOMAN WITH A HAMMER,” February 16, 2016, ➝.
Floorplan for the proposed Woman's Building, 719-725 S. Spring Street, ground floor, 1985-1986, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, ➝.
Dolores Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002 (1984)), 222–223. Quoted in Sondra Hale, “Power and Space: Feminist Culture and The Los Angeles Woman’s Building, A Context,” From Site to Vision: The Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture, eds. Terry Wolverton, Sondra Hale (Los Angeles: Otis College of Art and Design, 2011), 44–45.
➝.
Melissa Jeltsen, “Notorious New York Prison Is Reclaimed By The Women It Once Caged” Huffington Post, january 18, 2017, ➝.
The number of women in state and federal prisons and local jails has risen too more than 200,000, according to 2015 Bureau of justice statistics: a 700% from 1980, “Fact Sheet: Incarcerated Women and Girls,” The Sentencing Project, November 2015, ➝.
Monica Mohapatra, “Good Design . . . for Whom?” The New Inquiry, March 27, 2019, ➝.
While the Seamen's House was designed by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, the Architectural Bureau of the National Council of the YMCA contributed greatly to the building’s plans.
Like the Walgreens of its time, early twentieth century YMCAs were almost exclusively built on corner lots.
The Landmarks Preservation Commission Report on the American Seamen’s Friend Society Sailor’s Home and Institute indicates that the volume of passenger and freight ships after the turn of the century made the work of the organization not just noble, but necessary. This institute was sold by the ASFS in order to raise funds to donate to the Seamen’s House. Jay Shockley, American Seamen’s Friend Society Sailor’s Home and Institute, 505-507 West Street (aka 113-119 Jane Street), Landmarks Preservation Commission Report no. LP-2080, 5.
Ibid, 1.
This YMCA also served as the laundry facility for all of the New York YMCAs, necessitating boiling, ironing, sorting, and washing, and bundlework floors, alongside locker rooms, toilets and open dormitories for those working in the facility.
This dynamic continues today. According to NYT in 2003, there is no relation between the YMCA and YWCA. See: ➝
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 (New York: Basic, 1994), 154.
Jodi Vandenberg-Daves, “The Manly Pursuit of a Partnership between the Sexes: The Debate over YMCA Programs for Women and Girls, 1914-1933,” The Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (1992), 1332.
Quotations are excerpted by Vandenberg-Daves from a letter by Dwight C. Drew, the YMCA Massachusetts State Committee Secretary, March 1914 in “The Manly Pursuit of a Partnership between the Sexes,” 1332–1333. Emphasis ours.
Ibid, 1334. This complex racial element of the YWCA during the early twentieth-century is more thoroughly addressed in Nina Mjagkij, Light in the Darkness: African Americans and the YMCA, 1852-1946 (University of Kentucky Press, 1994).
Ibid., 13-16.
Ibid., 66.
Ibid., 67–74.
Smith v. Young Men’s Christian Association was the first case associated with the foundation of the Southern Poverty Law Center, ➝.
Dwight C. Drew describes the YMCA clientele this way: “a promiscuous crowd made up of men who might be miners, longshoremen, hack-drivers, cowboys, college men, molders, half-breed Indians, Bowery gang leaders, boys from the Jewish slums of the East Side or godless homes of the West Side. That's what an army of men is made up of.” Quoted in Vandenberg-Daves, “The Manly Pursuit of a Partnership between the Sexes,” 1333.
Paula Lupkin, Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Urban Culture, “Chapter Two: Inventing the YMCA Building,” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010): 37–71.
Ibid., 38, 67–68.
Paula Lupkin, “Accepting the Call to Build, Architectural Evangelism on Main Street,” in Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Urban Culture, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 96.
Nicolai Ouroussoff, “At the Corner of Grit and Glamour,” New York Times, March 14, 2010, ➝.
Elizabeth A. Harris, “A Luxury Condo Building With Views of the Skyline, and the Prison Next Door,” New York Times, March 12, 2012, ➝.
➝.
A street-level gallery is a suggested programmatic addition, as per the Design Competition Brief, a presumably appropriate public interface given the density of galleries in the neighborhood, which the brief also mentions.
As per their letter dated February 12, 2019 to the Executive Director and Vice Presidents of Empire State Development, ➝.
The Wing is a US-based, women-exclusive network of co-working spaces.
Betsy Morais, “What Does a Workspace Built for Women Look Like?,” Atlantic, April 12, 2018, ➝.
They affirm in the February 12th letter: “the preservation of the historic elements of the building, reflecting its history as the Seamen’s House YMCA as well as the Bayview Correctional Facility, was a critically important goal for us during the lengthy discussions and zoning work.”
Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild, interviewed by Carson Bear, “The Historic Harvard Campus Building That Once Housed a Feminist Takeover,” Saving Places by The National Trust for Historic Preservation, January 19, 2018, ➝.
Millennials demand a Green New Deal while the old one lives on in brick buildings and entitlement programs few of us will ever see. Perhaps we should just replace every building in the country, and start anew, as per the bad, news-making interpretation of the proposal by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey. The current outline includes the point: “upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification;” ➝.
From the Business Development RFP, ➝.