Club house “Glockenhof” (translated: courtyard of bells)
The basic principle of YMCA, to register humans both as a whole (body, spirit and soul) as socially, didn’t just effect the program offers but also the planning of the YMCA clubhouse (today: Cevi Zentrum) in 1911. In the first 25 years YMCA moved three times until they moved in in their own suitable clubhouse, called “Glockenhof”. The builder’s idea was not just to give room for the different association’s activities but to offer a home for a few young people. They were concerned about the homelessness of many young people and the difficult situation of many young men, who have an education or a job in Zurich, but no suitable home or leisure activities. Therefore YMCA offered beside the general rooms also rooms for 40 young men, bathrooms, a gym, a library, a non-alcoholic restaurant, small and big halls and and a wide range of activities.
Due to the central position of Cevi Zentrum, new groups, clubs and organizers always kept discovering the Cevi Zentrum for their events.
In the course of 100 years (now 120 years) club history, the social and economic environment changed again and again and once important services of Cevi were no longer in demand and were abandoned. The post-war generation can hardly imagine the misery during the interwar period of 1919-1939. The unemployed lived in the cheapest, unheated apartments and when they could no longer pay the rent, they crawled into the brick yards at the foot of the Üetliberg and into vacant furniture vans. For some years, the halls and the reading room of the club house served as warming rooms for the unemployed and a club secretary organized afternoon programs. Thanks to the help of the population, it was possible to deliver simple warm meals and coffee at lunchtime every day. From October 6th. 1932 to March 31th 1933, 34300 cups of coffee were served. The heated rooms had a maximum frequency of 240 visitors per day. In the early years many members came from commercial professions. At that time, the state offered no commercial education and training. Already in the founding year, educational courses for commercial employees were introduced and a library was set up. The courses counted initially 60 - 70, later in the new clubhouse, the Glockenhof, up to 160 participants. When the state started to subsidize local business schools , the task of commercial education, which the YMCA had carried out for about 35 years, came to an end.
Until around 1914, the youth squad of the YMCA was the only Protestant group for school-leavers and confirmands. On Sunday afternoons, up to 150 young people gathered. After the First World War many new youth groups were formed and later also sports and gymnastics clubs. The adolescent could now choose from a wide range of activities. The members of the youth groups often brought their younger brothers into the clubhouse. The YMCA recognized as early as 1900 that another task appeared: A group of young boys (up to 15 years old), later called “Jungschar”, gathered on Sunday afternoons. 100 to 200 boys listened to a biblical history in the first half hour. Then table games or running games were played. In 1912, the YMCA commissions decided to take over the scout system for their work with young boys. In Zurich, Emil Dändliker, a helper of the YMCA Zurich 1 and fascinated by the scout idea, got permission to make a test run with some boys.
