Old York FOE lodge, now Marketview Arts, offers artist symbol of change
Earlier this month, five makers took to the stage at Marketview Arts in York to tell stories about their art, writings and other craft.
They were all about the search for meaning in the things they made.
And they were in just the right place for that quest.
For the story of Marketview Arts, a former fraternal lodge, is packed with meaning, like a prized arrowhead, three stories high. This former Fraternal Order of Eagles, or FOE, building at 37 E. Philadelphia St. is an artifact brimming with lessons and stories.
The hall opened in 1908 and housed the secret society, as such fraternal groups then were called, for about a century. These were York-area doers and makers from another era, using their hands and minds in nearby red-brick factories or working in offices during the day and congregating in the evening for fellowship in their lodge.
A century passed, and the county redevelopment authority bought the lodge and later sold it to York College. Today, it houses art galleries and studios and hosts gatherings like the May storytellers event, in which the presenters deployed the PechaKucha method, speaking against a backdrop of 20 slides that changed every 20 seconds.
If this grand place itself could participate in a storytellers evening, these are some of the tales it would tell and meaning it would find.
More: Obscure F.O.E. building to become colorful beacon of York, Pa.'s renaissance
York, at turn of the 20th century
The founding of this Eagles chapter, York Aerie 183, came at a time – the Industrial Revolution – that work was so available with livable wages that people gained leisure time.
So you have veterans groups, VFWs and American Legions; social service, Lions and Rotary clubs; and emergency organizations, fire and ambulance companies.
And many organizations were sorted according to gender.
Exclusive men’s clubs formed — the Lafayette Club — and women’s groups — Women’s Club of York. Social and recreational organizations were also sorted according to race, with Crispus Attucks and Faith Presbyterian’s Community House serving Black people. There were Black Masonic lodges and an American Legion post.
Many fraternal organizations — Elks, Masons, Eastern Star and the Eagles — combined social amenities and community service.
According to a brochure published in the post-World War II era, FOE, the “Fighting Fraternity,” claimed be alone in reaching “outside their ranks to fight for the welfare of all.”
Indeed, 50 years after its formation, Eagle membership wasn’t far from the blue-collar roots of its founders, theater owners in Seattle’s docks district. The organization advocated guaranteed annual income for all. The brochure carried an endorsement from President Harry S. Truman saying that the Eagles were first in advocacy for Social Security, mothers’ pensions and veterans’ benefits.
But the brochure also showed FOE responsible for gender and racial sorting, though certainly not alone in York County in these respects. A principal reason for joining the Eagles is that it offers a home for “congenial men with tastes like yours.”
The brochure then explained: “Those eligible for membership … are males over the age of twenty-one … of the Caucasian Race, of sound body and mind, and who believe in the existence of a Supreme Being.”
Many FOE chapters hosted ladies auxiliaries, whose membership received a magazine, Mrs. Eagle, telling about auxiliary activities and benefits.
So the Eagles reflected York County, a day in which such organizations somehow claimed benevolence alongside exclusion. The county, a place some folks say can be aloof, was a quietly social place. And it still is, with private clubs still operating, though members are aging and many now have inclusive membership rules.
More: Of York County, Pa., social clubs and virtual communities
A lodge with a view
There was also a farm vs. town sorting.
Marketview Arts faces the Central Market, hence its name. The Eagles represented city folks. The farming community gained support from the Grange, Farm Bureau and farm women’s clubs.
And the market provided an interface between the two, farmers selling excess fresh produce to factory workers at the late 1880s markethouse.
As the decades passed in the 20th century, development stemming from the Industrial Revolution sapped agrarian energy in York County, gobbling up farmland. That voracious appetite for green space was so great that by the early 1980s, non-farm uses topped farming interests for the first time.
If you looked out the front windows of the Eagles lodge through the doors of Central Market, you’d see the change from a sellers space of produce stands to a more upscale market with gourmet coffee and burritos, reflective of the changing tastes of York County in the 21st century.
More: 'FOE' in old F.O.E. lodge is no foe of York, Pa.
Not keeping up with change
Though the market house sought change in the new millennium, the Eagles and other fraternal organizations did not transition — or at least not quickly enough.
Their aging memberships found younger generations gravitated to more individual personal pursuits. These younger folks preferred to bowl alone, rather than in leagues, disconnecting from relationships that characterized past communities. And this came before cellphones that accelerated this individualism.
The idea of an evening at the lodge no longer had appeal, and Eagles’ members could not support a 30,000-square-foot building. And so York Aerie 183 moved to smaller suburban quarters, making its longtime home available to the county redevelopment authority, the new owner in 2010, to look for the next thing
That came in the form of York College.
About 2008, York College constructed a million-dollar-plus wall around its campus, a move seen by some, including those in the Black community, as a severing of the relationship of town and gown. York College seemed to prefer bowling alone.
Time passed, and the college administration changed in 2013. The college made two moves in the mid- to-late 2010s designed to strengthen the college’s relationship with the city. It purchased Marketview Arts in 2015 to expedite its path of becoming a prime city center for engagement in the arts. And it acquired the vacant former Lafayette Club as new headquarters for its Center for Community Engagement.
The story of the Eagles Lodge and the Lafayette Club sound similar notes: exclusive organizations that did not mesh with an increasingly diverse community.
When the Eagles were vacating their building in 2010, members brought up tired explanations for the building’s availability: not enough parking and crime in the city.
The parking piece is particularly puzzling because the building sits next to a city parking garage.
And the old saw about crime in York’s downtown seems lost on the newer generations of city residents who regularly attend events at Marketview, fill city coffee shops and shake the pinball machines at Timeline Arcade. Many in the PechaKucha Night audience, for example, were under 45 years in age.
Tattoo adds meaning
About 2000, as the FOE building entered its second century, it received a tattoo on its side that presaged its future use and those artists who would be working and exhibiting there.
An artist painted a York Barbell mural, one of 18 large-scale panels in the city’s Murals of York series. It featured York Barbell owner Bob Hoffman and Japanese American Olympian Tommy Kono.
By about 2015, that mural was part of an interesting confluence: an arts-oriented tourism/economic development idea of the past, the Murals of York, with a growing idea, an arts district developing around — and including — the Eagles building.
The arts/mural combo illustrated consultant Roger Brooks’ notion of combining York's industrial arts and design prowess into a theme, "Creativity Unleashed." What could signify this hard-to-grasp theme more than a mural touting York's "heavy" industrial past on the side of an arts studio, its service-oriented future.
As it turned out, the “Creativity Unleashed” tag didn’t stick, and the city has moved on to a “Historically Edgy” brand. Time will tell whether framing York and its complexity in this way will exhibit well.
It’s interesting, though, that Marketview Arts has hosted edgy exhibits: an installation that explored the touchy subject of the Confederate invasion of York County in the Civil War and an art exhibit of sexual assault survivors, as just two examples.
Value of gathering
If the old building, a witness to so much history, could talk, it could teach its visitors and exhibitors about the value of gathering. The Eagles got that right.
It is interesting that a building constructed as a place for joining and membership now highlights the work of some of the community's most noted individualists: artists.
To be sure, the county art community has long had artist collectives – the York Art Association, for example. But there are signs that York County’s art community is accelerating far beyond painting alone.
Earlier this month, numerous art studios painted in a league. Studios participating in a Second Saturday Art Walk extended from the WeCo District, west of the Codorus, to the Royal Square District at King and Queen streets.
And leaders in the local art community told stories or were present in the audience at the PechaKucha Night of storytelling at the very place, the old Eagles Lodge, where generations gathered to socialize.
A connected community of artists would fulfill a vision put forth by then-city Economic Development Director Kevin Schreiber at the time that the Eagles Lodge gave way to Marketview Arts in 2010.
Schreiber is now president of the York County Economic Alliance, sponsor of the PechaKucha Night, an event run by the Economic Alliance’s JJ Sheffer.
“It has been evident in models,” Schreiber said, “artists have an uncanny knack for revitalizing urban communities.”
Sources: YDR files, York County History Center files, Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone, The Collapse and Revival of American Community.”
Upcoming presentations
Jim McClure will present to an OLLI at Penn State class about “York’s Box Hill Mansion: If These Walls Could Talk” from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 21. Details: olli.psu.edu/york.
Jim McClure is a retired editor of the York Daily Record and has authored or co-authored nine books on York County history. Reach him at jimmcclure21@outlook.com.
This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: York PA FOE lodge, now Marketview Arts, offers artist symbol of change
