YMCA property development and Building and Furnishings Service records

The rented rooms used by the North American YMCA movement in its early years were quickly outgrown. Within its first decade the YMCA was buying and remodeling existing buildings in an effort to serve its growing programs. However most of these facilities quickly proved inadequate for the purpose. In 1869 the New York City YMCA built the first building specifically designed to serve the purposes of a YMCA program. The concept of “association architecture” was soon established, and accumulating a building fund to construct purpose-built facility quickly became a standard goal for every association.

In the last two decades of the 1800s many YMCAs suffered debt and bankruptcy due to haphazard fundraising and overbuilding. In response, the North American International Committee developed recommended strategies for local associations to follow in obtaining buildings. Charles Sumner Ward, a traveling field secretary, also instituted standard procedures, most notably the short term building campaign. This method of raising funds, familiar today through telethons, was unknown at the time, an invention of the YMCA.

The 1900s began a period of more permanent buildings. As YMCA buildings were specialized and more than likely built or rebuilt only once in a generation, the best way for YMCAs to benefit from a comprehensive building experience was to make it available at the national level. After the Convention of 1913 a Building Bureau was established under the leadership of Ward. Its attention was entirely focused on fundraising until 1915 when architectural resources were added and a new employee, Neil McMillan, a trained architect familiar with the workings of the YMCA, was hired to lead a new planning division. Building plans supplied by the Building Bureau were widely utilized. McMillan’s system of artistic design combined with managerial techniques took the Building Bureau from a clearinghouse of technical information to a full-service design firm.

Significant changes to the model for YMCA buildings included the addition of camp facilities and dormitories. This included the Chicago YMCA Hotel with 1821 rooms rented at thirty to fifty cents a night. Attention to the aesthetics of the YMCA building also increased. The goal was both to create a building that the YMCA could be proud of and also to support “environmental evangelism,” ennobling the character of young men through exposure to art.

The booming economy of the 1920s supported a YMCA building boom, including million dollar campaigns in St. Louis, Missouri (1923); Detroit, Michigan (1925); and New York City, New York (1927). With the coming of the Great Depression in 1931, however, the Building Bureau, by that point known as the Architectural Bureau, was reduced to the New York Office primarily operating with a skeleton staff of three people on deficit financing. Few new buildings were built during the ensuing decade, and none of them were very large, but the rehabilitation of buildings was widespread. Many innovative solutions utilizing unused space were implemented, including auditoriums being made into gymnasiums to support expanding physical education programs. In 1936 the bureau was renamed the Building and Furnishings Service (BFS).

In 1945, immediately after World War II, huge sums of money were raised for building and reconstruction purposes. John W. Ogg, an architect first employed by the Building Bureau in 1923, became the director of the BFS. By the end of 1949, thirty-eight million dollars was collected for the purpose of construction of new buildings, and modernization and rehabilitation of existing facilities. By the mid-1950s the BFS reported over 100 building projects in process.

The Service approved and oversaw schematics and protocols for new and remodeled sports and recreation facilities, as well as staff office space. It had three major architectural responsibilities on a YMCA project; the functional arrangement of space, ensuring economical operation and that program needs could fit a building; the design of spaces special to YMCAs that local architects had little or no experience in creating; and the planning for all furnishings and equipment that would go into the building. The local YMCAs received schematic plans, detailed drawings of specialized parts, design criteria, specification data and equipment layouts as well as a continued interpretation of these by the project manager and a cooperative effort to adjust special requirements to the local situation. The project manager, who was generally an architect educated in YMCA goals, policies, programs, and problems, was typically assisted by planners, designers, specialists, draftsmen and typists to accomplish this task.

Technical research and development was essential in addition to experience. A continuous research effort was made on program processes, needs, and new trends that affected building and equipment requirements. Program specialists, management consultants and regional consultants provided data, experience and reports on necessities and information on regulations and trends to supplement BFS research efforts as well. This continually improved the design and economy of construction and developed new methods, material applications and equipment.

The BFS was placed under the arm of the YUSA Consulting Services in the early 2000s and by the mid-2000s the name Building and Furnishings Service was eliminated in lieu of the name Facilities Consulting. Towards the end of the 2000s Facilities Consulting was brought under the larger umbrella of Association Resources, and by 2014 was phased out completely in favor of outsourcing this service.

Historical information largely adapted and quoted from History of the YMCA in North America, (New York: Association Press, 1951) by C. Howard Hopkins;Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Urban Culture, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010) by Paula Lupkin; and from the collection.