Streetscapes/The Swiss Home; With Not Enough Old Indigents to Fill It, It's for Sale 
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By CHRISTOPHER GRAY 
Published: September 25, 1994
ANOTHER lump in the melting pot is about to dissolve. The 1905 Swiss Home, at 35 West 67th Street, was built to house aged, indigent Swiss, but after 90 years of trying to fill it, the Swiss Benevolent Society is giving up and selling its building to concentrate on social services. 

Although government now controls most charitable endeavors, mid-19th-century New York fairly bristled with improvement and self-help societies organized around religion or nationality. In 1846, upper-class New Yorkers of Swiss extraction founded the Swiss Benevolent Society, which finally bought an old rowhouse at 108 Second Avenue in 1883. 

Prominent families like the Iselins, the de Coppets, the de Rhams and the Couderts supported the society and in 1904 it began a building from scratch on the upper West Side. It appears that the Swiss sought a site near both Central Park and an established neighborhood. They economized wisely by buying at 35 West 67th Street: their land backed up on an existing neighborhood of brownstones stretching north, but West 67th itself was then predominantly a street of light industry and stables. 

The Swiss-American architect John E. Scharsmith designed the $117,000, five-story building, which "resembles somewhat the City Hall of Basel," according to the society's 1905 annual report. The report also praised the location as "in the most salubrious part" of the city. 

The interiors had the plainness of sensible charity: a dining hall on the first floor and, above, rooms for up to 80 people in spaces that are, by New York standards, one notch up from a servant's room. 

The opening ceremonies in December 1905 were in French, German and English, and attended by groups like the Helvetia Wheelmen and the Swiss Choral Society. They looked with pride on a building that still has the seals of the United States and Switzerland above the second floor and those of all 22 Swiss cantons in the cornice. 

Histories of the Swiss Benevolent Society refer to a constant schism in the organization; apparently the French Swiss were generally better off than their German- and Italian-speaking countrymen, dominating the affairs of the society. Census records for 1910 show that almost all those living in the Swiss Home were of German extraction, like Adam Gasser, 74, a widower and retired machinist. 

After the opening of the new home, the society adopted English as its official language to reduce tensions. 

In 1916 a new president, Robert J. Schwarzenbach, expressed concern that the residents of the home were in danger "because of its proximity to saloons" on Columbus Avenue. He also said that, in part because the society could never more than half-fill the building with deserving poor, it was spending $400 a year per person. This was, he said, an extravagance "of which economically thinking and thrifty Swiss should not be guilty." 

PERHAPS his judgment was also affected by the later development of West 67th Street, which had become a center for expensive apartment buildings, like the Hotel des Artistes. 

Under Schwarzenbach's leadership, the aged occupants were moved to an estate that the society bought in 1923 for that purpose in Mount Kisco. In 1924 the Swiss Home became the Swiss Town House, a dormitory for working women; the stated purpose was to house women of Swiss extraction, but exceptions were numerous. The charge was $9 to $14 a week for room and board. 

The 1925 census shows a new crop of residents, including a corset saleswoman, a child's nurse, a ladies' maid and a dental hygienist. Erma Ringh, a stenographer, 23 years old and nine months in the United States, lived in one room, and Ida Haas, a seamstress, 52 years old and 15 years in the United States, lived in another. 

According to Annemarie Gilman, executive director of the Swiss Benevolent Society, in the early 1980's New York City threatened to begin charging real estate taxes on the West 67th Street house because it was no longer serving a tax-exempt function, and the society began restricting admission to students. By 1991 the building was costing it $50,000 a year and was far from its original mission. That was when the society closed the building, except for some office space. 

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