American Seaman's Friend Society Sailors' Home and Institute

History and architecture

The American Seamen's Friend Society Sailors' Home and Institute was constructed in 1907-08 to the handsome neo-Classical style design of architect William A. Boring. He was formerly a partner in Boring & [Edward L.] Tilton, most noted as the firm that won the 1897 competition for new buildings at the U.S. Immigration Station on Ellis Island. The American Seamen's Friend Society (ASFS), established in New York City in 1828, was one of a number of nineteenth-century religious organizations concerned with improving the social and moral welfare of seamen throughout the U.S. and abroad.

ASFS, which had operated a Sailors' Home near the East River docks from 1837 to 1903, purchased a lot in 1905 in Greenwich Village amidst the busiest section of the by then more active Hudson River waterfront. Half of the cost of the Sailors' Home and Institute was paid for by a grant from Olivia Sage, one of the world's wealthiest and most important philanthropic women. The five-story (plus basement and partial sixth story) building, clad in brick and cast stone on its principal facades, is distinctively embellished with a polygonal corner tower, entrance portico, and nautical ornament.

Called by the New York Times "the largest institution of its kind in the world," it was operated as a hotel with numerous amenities for seamen of the commercial merchant marine, as well as a home for indigent sailors, and was intended as an alternative to the waterfront "dives" and sailors' boardinghouses.

After the luxury liner Titanic sank in 1912, surviving crew members received care here. In 1930-31, ASFS joined with the Young. Men's Christian and Seamen's Christian Associations in building a new Seamen's House at 550 West 20th Street. The American Seamen's Friend Society Sailors' Home and Institute building then became the Seamen's Relief Center annex, which provided free beds and meals to destitute seamen during the Depression and World War II. The property was officially conveyed in 1944 to the YMCA, which removed a beacon from the tower in 1946, symbolically signaling the end of its institutional history. Since then it has been a residential and transient hotel. The building stands out along the Hudson River waterfront as a significant reminder of the era when the Port of New York was one of the world's busiest and half a million seamen docked in the city each year.