Seaside Institute
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Seaside Institute
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| Location | 285 Lafayette Avenue, Bridgeport, Connecticut |
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| Coordinates | 41°10′03″N 73°11′18″W / 41.1675°N 73.1883°WCoordinates: 41°10′03″N 73°11′18″W / 41.1675°N 73.1883°W |
| Built | 1887 |
| Architect | Warren R. Briggs |
| Architectural style | Richardsonian Romanesque |
| NRHP Reference # | 82004374 |
| Added to NRHP | June 14, 1982 |
The Seaside Institute in Bridgeport, Connecticut is a Richardsonian Romanesque rock-faced granite, brick, brownstone and terracotta building designed by Warren R. Briggs and completed in 1887 at the corner of Lafayette and Atlantic avenues, not far from Seaside Park. Originally built for the use and benefit of the female employees of the Warner Brothers Corset Company, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. The buildings is currently used by the Bridgeport International Academy.
By 1886, the corset factory founded by Drs. I. D. and Lucien C. Warner in Bridgeport employed approximately 1200 people, seven-eighths of whom were women. The Seaside Institute was designed as a dining, lecture and meeting hall with library, music and reading rooms for the benefit of these female employees. Together with similar buildings constructed for the welfare of employees such as the People's Club supported by mill owners in Lowell, Massachusetts, Seaside Institute stands as an example of 19th century philanthropy aimed at the welfare of employees or industrial paternalism. An 1887 account of the purposes of the Institute printed in The Century expresses the particular solicitousness toward women employees:
In these days, when the hearts of the compassionate are torn by so many harrowing tales of man's inhumanity towards working-women, it is pleasant to be able to set forth the good deeds of these two chivalrous employers. Under the law of competition which always pushes the weakest to the wall, women are the slaves of the labor market. They have not learned to combine; they have no power to resist the oppression of conscienceless capital; the price of their labor is therefore fixed by the most rapacious employers.... If the women who work are to be saved from their wretchedness, it must be done by the appearance on their behalf of such knightly employers as these....
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