Civic Club

History and architecture

The elegant building of the Civic Club, now known as Estonian House, was designed in the French Beaux-Arts style by Thomas A. Gray. Erected in 1898-99, the Civic Club building was commissioned by Frederick Norton Goddard (1861-1905), the founder of the club and a leading social performer in the city.

The son of J. Warren Goddard, a wealthy businessman and owner of a successful dry goods firm, F.N. Goddard joined the family business after graduating from Harvard in 1882. Shortly after his father's death, however, he left the firm and moved to a tenement at 327 East 33rd Street, where he lived with an old and trusted servant. This part of the city was them dominated by the working class. Several factories were near Fast 33rd Street and along the East River were rail and lumber yards as well as ferry landings.

It was Goddard's intention to devote himself to helping the less fortunate in this neighborhood. Me soon joined a small group of men, who worked as ferry boatmen, plasterers, and bricklayers, and who formed the nucleus of what was to become "one of the most hope-inspiring organizations in the city." This group met regularly near the house of "Captain" Goddard, as he was known, and eventually formed the Civic Club, the purpose of which was to:

...render personal service as well as pecuniary aid to anybody needing it within the district they [the members] regarded as their own, bordered by fourth Avenue, 4 2nd Street, the Fast River and 23rd Street

Goddard commissioned Brooklyn architect Thomas A. Cray to design the impressive clubhouse at 245 Fast 34th Street.

Just a few houses away, at 217 East 34th Street, stood the East Side Republican Club, another neighborhood organization launched by Goddard. In 1899 he became the Republican leader in his local district, and during the next five years he made a number of political reforms. Another successful campaign of Goddard was his fight against the form of gambling, known as the "policy game," at the turn of the century. Me helped found the Anti-Policy Society, and his greatest triumph was the arrest of Al Adams, the "Policy King," in 1901.

Goddard had married Alice S. Winthrop in 1899 and moved from his tenement on 33rd Street to a more fashionable town house at 36th Street and Lexington Avenue. Despite his deep commitment to social and political reform, Goddard was, nonetheless, a member of several traditional and affluent men's clubs and also owned a country house in Litchfield, Connecticut. It was there that he died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 44.

The Civic Club building remained in the Goddard family until 1946, when the Estate of Alice Goddard sold the property to the Estonian Educational Society, Inc., which still owns the building today. Founded in 1929, the Estonian Educational Society sponsors a variety of activities for Estonian-Americans in the New York area, including a senior citizens' club, folk dance, and singing groups, gymnastic classes, and courses for young children in the history of Estonia. How known as Estonian Mouse, or "Eesti Maja" in Estonian, the building houses a number of Estonian organizations, such as the Estonian Relief Committee.