92nd Street's 90th

Stuck on her first chapter, the novelist ventured to read it a few years ago at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y. The appreciation that she sensed encouraged Mary McCarthy to sail home and finish her book, The Group. The Y's famed Poetry Center is like that. There Dylan Thomas wrote the final lines of Under Milk Wood, barely in time to hand them to Y actors who were giving the play its first group reading. Robert Frost made an annual pilgrimage for ten years. Britain's T. S. Eliot made it a top stop. So have scores of other writers --Robert Graves, Thomas Mann, E. E. Cummings, Joyce Cary, Wallace Stevens, Aldous Huxley, Marianne Moore, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, John Cheever. The Budapest String Quartet first thrived there. So did Choreographer Agnes de Mille, who says that without the Y modern dance would be ancient history.

Showers & Violins. Ninety years old this week, this uniquely cultural Y is known officially as the Young Men's & Young Women's Hebrew Association. The founders, leading Jewish philanthropists of the 1870s, aimed at "the cultural and intellectual advancement of Jewish young men." At first that meant luring immigrant kids off the streets with hot showers and 50 violin lessons. Later it meant developing the New York Pro Musica ensemble, harboring dancers from Martha Graham to Jose Limon, and attracting some of the most literate audiences in the U.S. While salvaging such once-poor Jewish boys as Bernard Baruch and Billy Rose, the 92nd Street YMHA has always refused to be parochial. In 1880, for example, it led New York Jews in raising cash for "the starving people in Ireland." Nowadays about 15% of its membership is non-Jewish. Unlike Christian Ys, this one has been unabashedly coed since World War II. Mixing is the rule in everything from the swimming pool to the residence halls, which in a recent year produced eleven engagements that broke the shower-giving Happy Day Fund.

Greek & Judo. Each year more than a million people use the worn buff building that the YMHA now hopes to expand at a cost of $3,400,000. The place throbs with judo, handball, bar bells and basketball, but no other Y has gone so far beyond the swim-gym syndrome. With 50 teachers and 700 students, it has a music school that most universities would envy. It runs a nursery school with a waiting list a generation long, a mammoth teen-age program of art, drama and discussion. It teaches thousands of Jewish adults to renew their religious roots, and offers everyone courses ranging from Greek tragedy to the psychology of love. To cap it all, 300,000 people a year now attend the YMHA's plays, concerts and poetry readings. It is the country's biggest Jewish center, perhaps the world's. For New Yorkers of every faith, it is a center of opportunity that hopefully will endure as long as Bach and brawn.

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