Salvation Army Won’t Save Its Beloved Residence for Women

For 63 years, thousands of women have, for a time, called it home.

But on Monday, the current residents of the Salvation Army’s Evangeline Residence for Women in downtown Los Angeles found the notices in their mailboxes--news that the tenants had heard rumored but had never quite believed would happen:

The residence at 1005 West 6th St., dedicated in 1924 as a safe and affordable place to shelter young businesswomen away from home and family, will be closing.

Residents and staff stood murmuring in corridors, and the switchboard operator, who also lives there, was kept busy by the ringing phones: “This place is gonna close down . . . well, it’s an old building, you know . . . it takes a lot of money to repair . . . I love this place--we all do.”

One European woman, who has lived in one of its 340 rooms for more than two years, stood in the green-carpeted lobby with the white, photocopied letter in her hand, moving her finger down the page, one line at a time.

“It was a disaster to find this in the mail this morning,” she said. “Not to be compared to Tent City, but now we know how they feel. This is my home.

“I’m going to pray hard, pray for one of those wealthy millionaires in Beverly Hills to come to our aid. That’s all we can hope for. It can’t tell you what it will mean to me not to be able to live here.”

The formal tidings came in a residents’ meeting last night with the Salvation Army’s divisional commander, David P. Riley.

After the meeting, Riley told reporters there were basically two factors behind the decision.

The Salvation Army, he said, is “philosophically backing away from this type of program. The needs are greater among the homeless and the poor.”

Secondly, he said, it would cost between $2 million and $4 million “just to put the building in the condition we think it should be in.”

Riley said the organization is putting the building on the market for $10 million.

All older residents will be relocated to Salvation Army residences for senior citizens in the area, including Santa Monica and Westlake Village, Riley said.

Other residents will be assisted in finding homes, he added.

“We are not going to throw them in the street,” he said. “We will work with anybody to help relocate them.”

When the residence shuts its doors March 1, it is not just a building that will end, but a pattern of life for three generations of students and working women.

The Evangeline, is the last such residence in the West. Seattle’s closed recently, and San Francisco’s a few years before that, explained Salvation Army Maj. Elmer Yardley, who heads the facility.

The Evangeline has been a public secret, an unknown building on a busy street. Shadowed by the lavish hotel towers of downtown Los Angeles, it offered young women--art students, law students, foreign students, single businesswomen--a home for a week or a month or, for some, years.

In spite of the Evangeline’s purpose--”a temporary stopover for working young women, in recent years tenants have remained many months beyond the anticipated term,” Riley noted.

The overseas students at business and art schools, who hear of this place by word of mouth, usually come and go in a few months or four years at most.

But about two dozen women have lived at the Evangeline for more than 20 years, long enough to be permitted to move in their own carpeting and furniture, said housekeeper Elsie Smalley, who has worked there 20 years herself. On Monday, she was busy dismantling the parlor’s plastic Christmas tree for the last time.

One woman has lived there for 40 years, Smalley said. “She’s taking it very badly.”

The $85- to $100-a-week rent for each room offers more than two hearty meals a day and weekly maid service.

Besides the Wurlitzer piano, the laundry room, the billiard table--next to a rack of religious literature--there is a chapel, a library, outings to places like Solvang and the Los Angeles County Fair. And at every holiday, there is a party, a card or a Christmas gift to make it seem like home.

Indeed, a grandfather clock that once stood in the home of Evangeline Booth, daughter of the Salvation Army’s founder, still cozily chimes the quarter-hours outside the dining room.

For Pauline Eppink, the closure is “a double catastrophe.” She has lived in the residence for 14 years and worked there for nine as registrar and social director, organizing the parties and field trips.

“It’s very sad. This has been a home, particularly for the foreigners,” she said, plucking minute pieces of New Year’s Eve party popcorn off the carpet in her office. “Friendship--that’s the big thing around here.”

At Christmas, after little gifts for each “girl” and an ice sculpture on the buffet and baked Alaska--”they thought they were on the Love Boat!”--the residents “come up with tears in their eyes . . . those little things are very touching. It’s a family.”

On Monday, Smalley toted off the last of the poinsettias from the parlor, surveying the huge columns and solid-looking ceilings in the vast room she had kept tidy for 20 years.

“I think if they tear this down,” she said with satisfaction in her voice, “they’ll have a good big job doing it.”