page_title: Downtown Community House
section_title: Opening
hierarchical_section_title: Downtown Community House / Opening
caption_attribution_description: English: A few members of the Bowling Green Neighborhood Association, West Street near the Battery. Source: Brown, Henry Collins. Valentine's City of New York: A Guidebook. New York: The Chauncey Hold Company, 1920. p. 44.
context_page_description: The Downtown Community House at 105-107 Washington Street is a six-story, five-bay red brick building that is among the last vestiges of the Lower West Side of Manhattan's former life as an ethnic neighborhood known as “Little Syria.” From the time of its establishment, the Bowling Green Neighborhood Association, housed in the Downtown Community House beginning in 1926, was a pioneering organization that served the local immigrant population as a settlement house and continued to provide services for the area well after the community house became defunct. Built in 1925 with philanthropic funds from William H. Childs, the founder of the Bon Ami household cleaner company, the Downtown Community House was designed by John F. Jackson, architect of over 70 Y.M.C.A. buildings and community centers, and through its Colonial Revival style speaks to an underlying desire for the neighborhood's immigrant population to become Americanized and associate themselves with the country's foundations.
context_section_description: The Bowling Green Neighborhood Association was formed in 1915 as an affiliate of the New York Milk Committee and had its first residence at the Bowling Green Community House at 45 West Street. At its inception, it was primarily devoted to children's work, but over time also created services for adults, with a focus on education and health; the Association had a medical and dental clinic and sponsored folk dances, fund-raisers for special holidays, and English classes for over fourteen nationalities in hopes of working to “weld together the peoples of the many nations in the Bowling Green neighborhood,” according to news articles from 1922 to 1925. The Association described the neighborhood in 1922 as having an infant mortality rate that was twice the rate of the average of all of New York City and a death rate of tuberculosis that was four times the average in New York; they described the area as “the first, cheapest, and most convenient home for a motley immigration of Italians, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Syrians, Slavs and Poles.” In the late 1910s and early 1920s, Bowling Green Neighborhood Association was one of the only health clinics or dispensaries serving the downtown Manhattan residential community.
  The Bowling Green Association also published annual reports of both the current conditions and of their successes in “Wall Street’s backyard,” announcing a decrease in infant mortality rates in Bowling Green by two-thirds between 1910 and 1924, a decline in the death rate in the area by 1923 of 14.5%, and the daily attendance of 400 people to their playground. The Association's Health Center, equipped with four doctors and a part-time dentist, carried out pioneering medical studies, documenting the eating habits and improved health of the neighborhood's children when given adequate nutritional options, treating thousands of patients. In 1919, the Health Center had provided 1,801 physicians visits, 4,579 nurses visits, and had an annual attendance of 3,447; infant mortality was reduced from 321 to 175 per thousand.
  In 1917, after the publication of their second annual report, which received a special recommendation from the Mayor and other city officials, the Police Commissioner at the time, Arthur Woods, said that the Bowling Green Neighborhood Association had, “in the brief space of two years... developed a successful model program for community organization... that can, with profit, be studied by other social forces.” Their 1918 experimental study, in which three meals a day were provided to neighborhood immigrant children for a period of six months, aimed to instruct parents in the proper nutrition and feeding of children. These significant accomplishments, in particular the nutrition study, were well known in New York and often published in newspapers and medical and health journals, as well as Henry Collin Brown's Valentine’s City of New York: A Guidebook.
  Along with medical concerns, sanitary living conditions were also of the utmost importance to the Bowling Green Neighborhood Association. Workers at the Downtown Community House were constantly on the lookout for unsanitary or unacceptable housing conditions, which they would subsequently report to the social worker in charge of building incidents; he would then notify the owner or agency of the building before informing the government agency of the situation. Two weeks after the complaint was recorded, the social worker would follow up on the case and send a letter to the head of the appropriate municipal department if the requested improvements were not made. This ultimately resulted in a complete housing survey of the area and significant improvements in housing in the neighborhood, sometimes to the point of buildings being torn down or completely remodeled.
  In 1925, after years of campaigning for donations of money, toys, and food from the wealthy who worked on nearby Wall Street, William H. Childs, the founder of the Bon Ami powdered cleaner company, made a $250,000 donation to the Bowling Green Neighborhood Association with the promise of other Wall Stree
caption: Picture of Members of the Bowling Green Neighborhood Association by Henry Collins Brown in Valentine's City of New York: A Guidebook, 1920
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