About this listing
A center for pacifist activism
Place Details
Borough : Manhattan
Neighborhood : NoHo
Place Matters Profile
The "Peace Pentagon" has served, in its own terminology, as a "'sanctuary' for the movement" for 35 years. Owned since 1978 by the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute, the building provides highly subsidized office space to left-focused pacifist organization ranging from the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom to the Metropolitan Council on Housing and Paper Tiger Television.
The Peace Pentagon, as some call the building, is easy to miss despite its central location at the busy intersection of Lafayette and Bleeker Streets, a block up from Houston Street. Its ground-floor boutiques fit in nicely amid the bustling expansion of NoHo; only the War Resisters League logo (two hands clutching a rifle snapped in two) and leftist banners visible in the second-floor windows give the Peace Pentagon away.
The organizational strategy employed by the Muste Institute -- providing grants in the form of in-kind office donations, funded in large part by renting the ground floors at commercial rates -- has proved remarkably
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The "Peace Pentagon" has served, in its own terminology, as a "'sanctuary' for the movement" for 35 years. Owned since 1978 by the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute, the building provides highly subsidized office space to left-focused pacifist organization ranging from the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom to the Metropolitan Council on Housing and Paper Tiger Television.
The Peace Pentagon, as some call the building, is easy to miss despite its central location at the busy intersection of Lafayette and Bleeker Streets, a block up from Houston Street. Its ground-floor boutiques fit in nicely amid the bustling expansion of NoHo; only the War Resisters League logo (two hands clutching a rifle snapped in two) and leftist banners visible in the second-floor windows give the Peace Pentagon away.
The organizational strategy employed by the Muste Institute -- providing grants in the form of in-kind office donations, funded in large part by renting the ground floors at commercial rates -- has proved remarkably effective. The Peace Pentagon has remained for over 30 years in a prime area of the city with no sign of failure, giving the building's tenants a deeply seated sense of security and stability.
The building's established history as a home to activist organizations begins with one of its present tenants, the War Resisters League. The league is one of the nation's oldest pacifist organizations, formally organized in 1923 by men and women who had opposed World War One and war in general. The War Resisters League protested the Second World War, and after the war ended, greatly expanded its scope of work to include agitating for civil rights and against nuclear weapons and power. League members founded Pacifica Radio in 1949, while the league itself helped launch Liberation Magazine in the 1950s and organized innumerable public protests of every major American military campaign since WWII.
As with many leftist organizations, the War Resisters League found itself and its organizational spaces threatened and kept under government surveillance, especially during periods when their message of peace opposed government policy. Throughout the 1960s, a variety of pacifist and anti-Vietnam War organizations headquartered themselves on the 10th floor of 5 Beekman Street. In the late 1960s, the 5 Beekman Street management asked all of the 10th floor groups to leave the building. Accounts vary on the reason for the groups' expulsion. Some maintain that FBI raids on the offices were a primary concern. Others assert that the sheer presence of barefoot, longhaired peace activists in a primarily corporate building prompted the management to ask the groups to leave.
Rather than continuing to rent, the War Resisters League purchased the three-story building at 339 Lafayette Street. The group bought the building in 1969 for $80,000 with a $20,000 down payment. When the War Resisters moved in, the league took over the top two floors, bringing most of the other groups from Beekman Street over with them. The Muste Institute's director, Murray Rosenblith, recalls the rationale for purchasing 339 Lafayette Street, "At that time there were a lot of third and fourth class office spaces around Manhattan that could be had relatively inexpensively. It wasn't as much of a problem to find space as it is now, but many of the WRL's members had been around long enough to remember the Red Scare. They were tired of being kicked out of all these places, because, if for no other reason, it was a drain on resources to have to move so often."
The current owner, the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute, was incorporated in 1971, sharing many of the same board members as the War Resisters League. The idea of the institute was to serve as a non-profit organization umbrella for like-minded pacifist organizations, which were ineligible for non-profit status. The Institute was named for A.J. Muste, who died in 1967. Active in four generations of socialist and pacifist protest, Muste is considered by many to be the premier American pacifist of the 20th century. A self-described "Calvinist Socialist," Muste brought a unique Christian take on socialism to such organizations as the Congress on Racial Equality, Conference for Progressive Labor Action, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and, of course, the War Resisters League.
Ownership of the building was transferred from the War Resisters League to the Muste Institute in 1978 under the assumption that it was better for a non-profit organization to own taxable property and that WRL resources were disproportionately sapped by building maintenance costs. As it turned out, grants did not support the building nearly as well as the commercial market. Renting out the bottom floors to commercial tenants has made the building into a fixed sustainable resource for several generations of left-centered and anti-war groups. When asked about potential threats to the building and organizations, Ralph DiGia, who has been active in the league since the 1950s, chuckles, "I mean, the one thing about property in this country, man, is that property rules; it's protected!"
Prior to 1969, 339 Lafayette Street was a small office building, holding a machine shop (now Spooly D's boutique) and a luncheonette (now KD Dance Wear) on its ground floor, and a dentist, locksmith, and picture framer on the upper floors. No one from the institute knows much about the early history of the building, although Buildings Department records indicate that it was standing by the mid-1920s.
Most organizations have been in the building for at least five years. Several have stayed in the same space since 1969, when they moved in. In general, organizations, once they have arrived, tend to dissipate entirely more frequently than they move. As Rosenblith put it, "Rent here is so inexpensive that lots of organizations, if anything, exist longer than they should, when, in any other office situation, they would either fold or revert or being somebody's kitchen-table kind of an organization."
The present tenants include the institute itself, the War Resisters League, the Nicaragua Solidarity Network, Coalition for the Human Rights of Immigrants, the Socialist Party of New York City, Paper Tiger and Deep Dish Television, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and the Libertarian Book Club. The most recent organization to move in was the Metropolitan Council on Housing in 2001.
Sources
2002 Sanborn Map.
About WRL. http://www.warresisters.org/about_wrl.htm.
A.J. Muste Memorial Institute. http://www.ajmuste.org/.
A.J. Muste Memorial Institute: Biographical Background. http://www.ajmuste.org/ajmbio.htm.
AJ Muste: the Communists' "Dean of Peace." http://members.tripod.com/~BioLeft/muste.htm.
NYC Department of Buildings records.
Interview with Ralph DiGia, War Resisters League.
Interview with Murray Rosenblith, Executive Director, A.J. Muste Memorial Institute.
Interview with Wendy Schwartz, former Executive Director, A.J. Muste Memorial Institute.
Interview with Diane Tosh, A.J. Muste Memorial Institute.
War Resisters League. 70 Years of Nonviolent Action (pamphlet).
War Resisters League Records, 1923-date. http://www.swarthmore.edu/Library/peace/DG026-050/DG040WRL.html.
