Do you know where this restaurant building is?
(This Then & Now originally appeared in 2015. We are republishing the story on Labor Day weekend because of its focus on workers.)
While Bennie’s Café might have more traffic than the building’s owner and largest tenant, both served a similar population: the working folks of Worcester.
The building’s owner, the Union Labor Temple, was home to the Central Labor Union, one of the early umbrella organizations that aided smaller craft and trade unions — a union of unions.
This building, erected in 1915 by the Union Labor Temple, was a central meeting place for the groups that served many more purposes than the image of the modern union would indicate.
As social as they were political at that time, unions became central to the lives of the workers who joined them, many of them immigrants. The CLU building became a place to socialize as well as organize, but the organization also filled the very useful purpose of raising funds.
Those funds were necessary to help support workers during strikes, a vital function for workers paid so little that even a week without a paycheck would result in eviction or, at the very least, cold rooms and sparse dinner tables.
In 1915, when this building was erected, trade unions in this manufacturing center were likely abundant. Worcester’s tens of thousands of manufacturing workers in its thousands of factories and smaller businesses had need of representation.
Funds apparently didn’t stretch to cover building maintenance. By the time this photo was taken in the 1940s, the wners had decided to attempt to sell rather than try to pay for upkeep.
Hint: The streets that met to make this corner meet no longer.
See Tuesday’s Telegram & Gazette, and telegram.com, for the answer.