Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Between the Civil War and the Great Depression, the Young Men's Christian Association built more than a thousand community centers across the United States and in major cities around the world. Dubbed "manhood factories" by Teddy Roosevelt, these iconic buildings served as athletic centers and residential facilities for a rapidly growing urban male population.

In Manhood Factories , Paula Lupkin goes behind the reserved Beaux-Arts facades of typical YMCA buildings constructed in this period to understand the urban anxieties, moral agendas, and conceptions of masculinity that guided their design, construction, and use. She shows that YMCA patrons like J. P. Morgan, Cyrus McCormick Jr., and John Wanamaker hoped to create "Christian clubhouses" that would counteract the corrupting influences of the city. At first designed by leading American architects, including James Renwick Jr. and William Le Baron Jenney, and then standardized by the YMCA's own building bureau, YMCAs combined elements of men's clubs, department stores, hotels, and Sunday schools. Every aspect of the building process was informed by this mission, Lupkin argues, from raising funds, selecting the site and the architect, determining the exterior style, arranging and furnishing interior spaces, and representing the buildings in postcards and other printed materials.

Beginning with the early history of the YMCA and the construction of New York City's landmark Twenty-third Street YMCA of 1869, Lupkin follows the efforts of YMCA leaders to shape a modern yet moral public culture and even define class, race, ethnicity, and gender through its buildings. Illustrated with many rarely seen photographs, maps, and drawings, Manhood Factories offers a fascinating new perspective on a venerable institution and its place in America's cultural and architectural history.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Scholars have long looked to men's organizations to help unravel the changing contours of US masculinity over time, and the YMCA--with its large membership, vocal agenda, and rich archives--has proved a particularly popular area of investigation. (See, for instance, the work of John Donald Gustav-Wrathall, Take the Young Stranger by the Hand, CH, May'99, 36-5264, and Thomas Winter, Making Men, Making Class, CH, Jan'03, 40-2999.) Lupkin (architecture, Washington Univ.) builds on this existing body of scholarship but takes it in a new direction by looking specifically at the organization's buildings as communicators of the YMCA's ideals. Noting that YMCA buildings throughout the country (and indeed, the world) carried a distinctive architectural look, she argues that they formed a critical part of the cultural landscape of modernity, mediating the transition from an agrarian past to a corporate future and providing signposts for moral masculinity within that transition. Lupkin introduces the concept of "environmental evangelism" to describe this phenomenon. Because of the book's emphasis on the built environment, students of architectural history, cultural geography, and urban studies should find it useful. Lupkin's arguments also have relevance for gender studies and history, although her architectural lens is not as common for these disciplines. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. S. Ferentinos Organization of American Historians

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Paula Lupkin is assistant professor of architecture at Washington University in St. Louis.