The Selfreliance Association of Ukrainian Americans: A $1.5 Billion Success Story The Ukrainian National Home: Where Stuffed Cabbage Meets the Dive Bar ADDRESS: 140 Second Avenue • PURCHASED: 1950s

ADDRESS: 98 Second Avenue • PURCHASED: 1959

Inside the narrow ground floor of 98 Second Avenue, between 5th and 6th Streets, the walls are paneled in a dark wood reminiscent of a basement den from the 1970s. The floors are vinyl tile, and the lighting is fluorescent. An old bank-teller window remains, behind which is a tiny office that has housed various subtenants over the years, most recently an accountant. This is the headquarters of the Selfreliance Association of Ukrainian Americans, founded in 1947 to assist the flood of Ukrainians arriving in the East Village at the beginning of the postwar immigration boom. It is a fivestory brick-and-metal Greek Revival, completed in 1843 and thought to be originally owned by the Stuyvesants. “The association formed out of a frustration of Ukrainians just not being able to find any jobs,” says Bohdan Kurczak, president and CEO of the Self Reliance New York Federal Credit Union, which was sponsored by the association in 1951. “Many of them were educated but spoke no English. So they took whatever work they could get: sweeping floors, cooking, menial work of all kinds.” In addition to helping immigrants find housing and other social services, in later years the association sponsored a Saturday Ukrainian-heritage school housed at the nearby St. George Academy on East 6th Street. The school remains a place where families can send their children to study Ukrainian language and culture. The association’s greatest legacy, however, may be its credit union, which provided a financial pillar for an immigrant community that had no money and no credit history. The credit union opened with a mere $316 in capital assets and served only individuals who could demonstrate Ukrainian ancestry. The rule still applies today, but now the credit union has $1.5 billion and 15,000 members across branches in New York. In 1972, the credit union moved one block over to its present location at 108 Second Avenue. The front lobby is a low-ceilinged space lined with teller windows. In contrast to the sleepy headquarters of the Selfreliance Association, the credit union is bustling with business conducted in Ukrainian and English. “This association was started by people who were already here to help, and just look what it’s grown into,” Kurczak says. The building at 98 Second Avenue remains the association’s headquarters. The place is mainly used as a Ukrainian American community center that hosts weekly bingo games for seniors, English classes, guest speakers, and, until recently, Jazzercise sessions. It has a modest library housed in large glassdoored bookshelves. A beautiful, brightly colored map hangs on one wall depicting Ukraine, illustrated with images of native animals and agricultural and industrial regions. Lately, the association has been collecting clothes and supplies, which are sent to the motherland via courier service to help in the war effort.

The credit union is bustling with business conducted in Ukrainian and English.

Ametal-clad building emblazoned with Cyrillic characters, the Ukrainian National Home— “Ukie Nash,” as it is affectionately known to some locals—was once a pair of identical single-family rowhouses on Second Avenue. They were likely built in the early 1830s by Thomas E. Davis, a prolific but forgotten realestate developer who designed (and named) nearby St. Marks Place. By the end of the 19th century, the houses’ tenants started to change as waves of new immigrants came to the avenue. A German YMCA opened in the buildings in 1881 (when the area was known as Kleindeutschland), to be replaced in 1909 by Stuyvesant Casino in what was then the Yiddish Theater District. The casino, which merged the houses and opened a commercial space on the ground floor, attracted guests both famous and infamous, including “the Big Yid,” a feared gangster who killed his would-be assassin in the building, and New Orleans jazz musicians, like Bunk Johnson and Hot Lips Page, who regularly performed there throughout the 1940s. After World War II, Second Avenue became the main artery of Little Ukraine. Ivan Kedryn, a prominent journalist and Ukrainian nationalist, helped form the Committee for the Building of the Ukrainian National Home, a place where the Village’s 60,000 Ukrainians could gather. The group purchased the casino in the 1950s. Over the years, more than a dozen political and cultural organizations—the Ukrainian American Coordinating Council and the Plast Supreme Council (a Ukrainian Scouting group) among them—set up offices on the top floors. Below, there was a dance hall, Lys Mykyta bar, and the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant, a homely dining room situated at the end of a fluorescent-lit hallway, which still serves pierogi and borscht. Bohdanna Pochoday-Stelmach, who immigrated to the neighborhood in the 1960s, attended her sister’s bridal shower at the Home as well as her niece’s and nephews’ christening parties and her mother’s funeral reception. “For every party my family had there, every other Ukrainian family had one too,” she says. On an autumn night in 1984, the building went up in flames, reducing 20-some offices to rubble and badly damaging the restaurant, bar, and dance hall (and two grand pianos). Officials believed the cause was arson. Two years later, after nearly $1 million in renovations partly fund-raised by the community, the Ukrainian National Home reopened. A bishop from the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church came from Connecticut to bless the place, and renowned singer Marta Kokolska-Musijtschuk performed at a reopening banquet. Much of the interior remains untouched since the reopening. Bucolic paintings in ornate frames and embroidered scarves adorn the wood-paneled restaurant. Next door, the dimly lit dive bar has a log-cabin feel, earning it the name Karpaty Pub (after the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine) from regulars. The patrons, though, have changed a bit. On any given night, tables of mesh-shirtclad students can be seen seated next to old men ordering vodka. The event space, still the site of communion parties, recently hosted Natasha Lyonne’s birthday party. The Bushwick Book Club, a tango salon, and an anti-vaccinemandate group meet there regularly too. “We do a lot with the Ukrainian and East Village communities,” says manager Ron Kavral, “but anyone can call and reserve the space.”

Tables of meshshirt-clad students can be seen seated next to old men ordering vodka.

It has only gotten bigger since then. When longtime Plast member Taras Ferencevych was a kid, he remembers there being a Plast store called Molode Zhyttia (“young life”) on the first level and a coffee shop. Now, it’s all Veselka. In 1996, Veselka took over several storefronts on 9th Street; during the pandemic, it expanded again into the space once occupied by the toy store Dinosaur Hill. Plast still occupies those upper two floors, which are in the midst of a $1.5 million renovation. There are offices and rooms for kids to have their Scout meetings; it’s where members meet for film screenings or eggdecorating lessons; and it has played host to Plast debutante-ball rehearsals. The fact that the Plast Foundation still owns the building comes with certain advantages for Veselka, too. Birchard declined to comment on the specifics of his rent but says, “Let’s just say I have favorable terms.”