Midlife Crisis for a Movement Icon: At 95, the ‘Peace Pentagon’ building is hardly in its dotage; is it nonetheless nearing the end of its days?
by JOtrompke
The year was 1997 when Molly Klopot first entered the building at 339 Lafayette in Manhattan, and like many people, she was initially struck by the amount of activity that went on in there.
“When I first came into the room, I met a very stately and tall old woman who represented our organization at the United Nations meeting on South Africa. There were several desks and about a thousand cards scattered all over with people’s names on them, including current and former members. It looked like the place had seen a lot of activity,” said Klopot, who will turn 95 years old this month.
“After my husband died, I went to an international women’s congress in Cuba, and when I came back, my sister-in-law wanted me to report on the meeting, and I came here to see if they had any papers of the speeches. The woman I met, who was the chair, got me to volunteer, and right after that she died, which is how I came to be chair,” said Klopot, chair of the New York Metro branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and a co-founder of the Granny Peace Brigade.
While WILPF, a 95-year-old organization which has included members such as Jane Adams and Mr. and Mrs. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., is one organization at 339 Lafayette which has a long history, it is not the only one.
“As issues come and go, so do groups, such as CISPES, the El Salvador group that was part of the building in the 1970s and 1980s,” said Ed Hedemann, organizer and activist with the War Resisters’ League, which has had offices in the building for the last 40 years. “There was a group called the Enola Gay action coalition here because in 1994 the Smithsonian was going to unveil the Enola Gay for the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima. Other groups like War Resisters’ League are not the type to come and go. War and militarism unfortunately don’t seem to be going away,” added Hedemann.
Unfortunately, the same may not be true of 339 Lafayette, also known as the ‘Peace Pentagon,’ which may be in danger of being sold or demolished, according to those who work in the building.
The A.J. Muste Foundation, which owns and operates the building, is considering selling the building, and buying an office condominium, or a floor in another building, to house the non-profits currently located in The Peace Pentagon, citing the expense of making the significant repairs on the building which are foreseen, amid the current recession. The Muste Foundation writes grants to fund peacemaking and education projects around the world, as well as owning and operating The Peace Pentagon.
Put Out to Pasture?
“This is an old building, in its senior citizenship,” said Jeanne Strole, co-director of the A. J. Muste Memorial Institute. “The building is currently having some issues,” said Strole, who declined to comment more than half a dozen times when interviewed for this article.
“Half of the street is fenced off,” said WILPF’s Klopot. “If you take a 6 train and get off at our stop, if you want to change going uptown you have to get out and pay another fare. They’re talking about making it so you can switch without having to pay another fare,” explained Klopot, who assisted the husbands and children of WILPF members in building new furniture and painting their office shortly after she took over.
Still, Klopot has not joined issue in the debate over what is to happen to the Peace Pentagon. “Space in New York is very expensive, but there’s no sense in worrying about it at this point. What will be will be,” she said.
“While the MTA is doing a major three or four year project, the reason the scaffolding is up is that there needs to be some maintenance work done on the building,” said Maria Bick, distribution and administration manager for Paper Tiger, Inc. “But the bricks are tight enough; the scaffolding has been up for over a year, and I haven’t seen a single brick fall out,” added Blick, who also serves as building liaison for the Friends of 339, an organization founded about a year ago, the same time Blick first learned the building might be in jeopardy.
Because part of the Muste Institute’s assets do include the Peace Pentagon, the organization has a responsibility to benefit other organizations in the building. “As a 501©(3) with a particular mission statement, any income we generate has to go back to the work of the organization,” said the Institute’s Strole. “The building program is something our Board of Directors is committed to preserving, because it’s part of our mission statement,” she added.
Still, the dispute between the owners and occupants of the building has left life in the Peace Pentagon in an uncertain state. The Foundation is giving thought to simply selling the Peace Pentagon, while many of the occupants want to keep the building, and make any upgrades or repairs which are necessary.
Life During Wartime
“’Slum’ might be too strong a word for the neighborhood as it existed when I first visited in 1973,” said the WRL’s Hedemann. “It was an old industrial neighborhood that had seen better days. When I first went to work there in 1973, there was a liquor store across the street, and a lot of alcoholics hanging out. My first impression of the deli…was that this was not one of those prim and proper orderly establishments,” he said.
The War Resister’s League, which moved into the building in 1969 following a suspicious break-in at its earlier location across from City Hall, initially bought the building with like-minded organizations, but set up the Muste Institute as the owner in the mid-70s.
“This was because the War Resisters’ League continues to be involved in illegal action, like war tax resistance and civil disobedience, so it is possible the building could have been seized by IRS because of these activities,” Hedemann said. So the owners felt it would be better to create the A.J. Muste Institute, named after a long-time peace activist, who died in 1967, and who was also the subject of a biography by Nat Hentoff called ‘Peace Agitator,’ according to Hedemann. Muste’s grandson still sits on the board of the institute.
“My other impression at the time was that the building was also very busy. There were far more important things to do than to be tidy. There were leaflets everywhere, and posters announcing this action, or that event,” Hedemann said.
Historic actions devised or participated in by the organizations housed in the Peace Pentagon included a number of protests through-out the years, including the largest arrest in New York City to date, Hedemann said.
“We were planning in 1972 and organizing against the air war in Viet Nam, and there was a demonstration where two people snuck into the Waldorf Astoria to get a room in order to throw leaflets out the window. Then in 1976 there was a continental walk for disarmament organized out of the building. People walked from California to Washington, D.C., and there were twenty feeder walks.” Ten to twenty thousand people were involved in the walk, which took nine months, Hedemann said.
Other demonstrations organized out of the building set, and then beat, the record for the largest New York City arrests. “In 1979 the main organizing for the Wall Street Action, on the 50th anniversary of the ‘29 crash, took place here. A demonstration was organized where over 1,000 people were arrested for blocking the New York Stock Exchange, which was the largest arrest in the city’s history at that time. Then in 1982 the U.N. held a special session on disarmament, and there was a rally with over one million people in Central Park on June 12. That wasn’t organized out of the building, although there were groups participating in it. But what was organized here was an event called ‘Blockade the Bomb Makers,’ where there were demonstrations held at the U.N. missions of the five countries that admitted they had nuclear weapons. There were 1,600 people arrested on June 14, 1982, and remains the largest arrest in city history,” Hedemann added.
What is to be Done?
Some hope that the building’s glory days are not all in its past.
“Our wish for the building is to build a peace center, not just to be in the location, but to use our location to embody the spirit of the social justice movement and project it outward, as well as nurturing it from within,” said Paper Tiger’s Maria Blick.
Paper Tiger itself, approaching its third decade, has already been a trend setter. The organization was founded in 1981, when its slogan was ‘Smashing the Myths of the Information Industry.’ Paper Tiger moved to the building on Lafayette Street in 1983.
“We have been really blessed with having a space like this,” said Blick, who has been a part of the organization for four years. “A big part of Paper Tiger is operating on an extremely low budget, so we can create our media without outside influence or sponsors breathing down our necks. When we’ve had a financial crisis, we’ve been able to at least keep our home,” she added, noting the Muste Foundation has given the organization tens of thousands of dollars in in-kind donations over the years, in the form of reduced rents. Currently the organization pays $475 per month in rent– about a quarter of the market rate, Blick noted.
According to Blick, it’s not just the non-profits, but all the tenants of the Peace Pentagon who pay below the market rate in rent. “The financial crisis is not due to the fact that building needs repairs, but it is due, dare I say, to a lack of initiative on realizing the full potential of the building,” she said. Blick said that the commercial tenants in the five storefronts also pay less than half the market rate in rent. The Muste Institute’s Strole had no comment. A refurnished building could continue its non-profit mission and still bring in about half a million dollars per year in rents, were the economy not in recession, Blick said.
While there has been talk within the building of buying a floor in an office building or a business condominium, such a solution might not serve the same purposes accomplished by the Pentagon’s current historic home, said Blick. “Moving to another building, we might end up in a place not consistent with our politics,” she said, noting that the War Resister’s League originally bought the Peace Pentagon upon being evicted by an unfriendly landlord following a suspicious break-in in the late ‘60s.
“There have been a lot of politically quite radical groups that have been housed here over the years, which people might have issues with, if we were sharing space with an accounting firm or a modeling agency,” she added.
Options include keeping and repairing The Peace Pentagon, or selling it and buying either another building, or a floor in an office condominium, to provide space for the current occupants. But whatever the future of the building, the Muste Institute’s Strole says that any funds the organization gets if it sells the building will go back into the peace movement. “We have a counter recruitment fund, which suggests alternatives to military enlistment in the United States. We also have an international nonviolence training fund, and sponsor some projects in Latin America, some in Southeast Asia, and nonviolence education projects in Palestine, for example,” she said, noting that the organization’s donations are ordinarily in the hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, although the grant-making program is on hold for the time being.
In either case, this is a momentous period for a historic building in New York, for its occupants, for the building, and for the peace movement itself. The efforts made by all the parties may have momentous consequences for generations to come.
