THIS DAY IN 1918 IN THERECORD
Friday, March 15, 1918. As the Watervliet Arsenal launches a nationwide recruitment campaign for skilled workers, plans to house thousands of new arsenal workers in Troy don’t look quite as promising as they did a short time ago. The South Troy Improvement League recently formed to provide housing for the expected influx of arsenal workers. The league also planned to offer ferry service between Monroe Street in South Troy and the arsenal, but The Record reports that plan “will not be put into effect for the present.” As George J. Ryan of the league’s ferry committee explains at tonight’s meeting with the Troy Chamber of Commerce, “it would be impossible to land a ferry at Monroe Street because of low water.” It’s impossible to make plans for dredging the river at Monroe Street right now because it’s unclear whether that would interfere with the federal government’s dredging project on the Hudson River. Should the dredging question be resolved, John H. Murphy has two ferryboats ready to transport from Athens. The boats will be able to carry a total of 150 passengers per trip across the river. “The country is being combed from the Atlantic to Michigan for machinists and toolmakers to fill the demand at Watervliet arsenal,” another reporter writes. The arsenal is sending “scouts” to recruit skilled workers from “every city east of the Mississippi.” The recruitment campaign will extend to newspaper and movie theater advertising in which “Troy would be pictured as a live, flourishing city,” according to the arsenal’s labor director, Captain D. W. Dunn.
“Machinists and toolmakers to the number of perhaps 2,000 are still necessary to recruit the working force up,” Dunn adds. Since the federal government as yet has made no move to build additional housing in Watervliet, “this will tend to enlarge the obligation resting upon surrounding communities to furnish lodging to the men.”
In Troy, Harvard professor James Ford tours “the so- called alley houses of the southern section” today. Ford is assisting housing expert John Nolen’s housing census to support Troy’s application for federal subsidies for wartime housing.
“Whatever hope may have been placed in [the alley houses] as ultimate abodes for the arsenal men may be eliminated,” another reporter writes, “because it was evident Dr. Ford was disappointed in them.”
Ford tells reporters that Troy’s current housing resources would be used up by war workers within two months. While “he realizes that a great deal in improvements must be done to the greater part of the city’s available flats,” he assures Trojans that their city “is the logical place for workmen to live.”
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