Today is the 100th birthday of the Boy Scouts of America. But the cen tennial will likely pass with little fan fare in New York City, where of one of America’s largest youth organizations has become practically invisible — a loss, especially, to the city’s most needy youth.
You can still find some Boy Scouts in New York, but the number has dwindled; last year, Manhattan had fewer than 500 registered Boy Scouts with fewer than 4,500 citywide.
Forgotten are scouting’s deep roots in New York. In 1910, the organization set up its first national headquarters at 200 Fifth Ave., just off Madison Park in the building later known as the Toy Center. That year, Teddy Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller lauded Sir Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the scout movement, at a dinner held in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria.
Back then, the scouts had friends in high places here. In 1927, Franklin Roosevelt, then head of the New York City Boy Scout Foundation, arranged a deal to buy 11,000 acres of land along the Delaware that would become Ten Mile River Scout Camp — one of the largest in the world.
In 1952, Eleanor Roosevelt presented an award to the 250,000th Scout to attend Ten Mile River. In the early ’60s, more than 12,000 New York scouts camped there each summer.
Last summer, fewer than 1,400 city scouts camped at Ten Mile River. The venerable Camp Pouch on Staten Island is up for sale. And the national headquarters left Fifth Avenue long ago — the organization is now run from an office park in Texas.
A legal victory for the national group was the latest setback for New York City scouts. In spring 2000, Boy Scouts won the right to exclude gays from membership — a policy roughly equivalent to that of the US military.
New York institutions reacted by abandoning the Boys Scouts. City government barred them from meeting or recruiting in public schools. Politicians, celebrities and business leaders who had long championed scouting abandoned the program. Charitable donations — which mostly helped boys in poor neighborhoods — slowed to a trickle.
The decline doesn’t matter much to affluent kids; they have plenty of options. But for boys from lower-income families, scouting may be their only chance to camp in a tent, swim in a lake, hike up a mountain or learn to save a life.
This is certainly true for the scouts of Troop 759 in Harlem. Scoutmaster Okpoti Sowah, an immigrant from Ghana who came to New York to study at Columbia, has been a leader for more than 30 years in a neighborhood that needs male role models. His scouts have backpacked the deserts of Philmont, the wilds of Maine and the Adirondack high peaks.
Sowah pushes boys to succeed. Most of his troop members go to college; many achieve Eagle Scout.
If a boy has been in the scouts at least five years, there is a 91 percent chance he will finish high school. He is nearly twice as likely as a nonscout to earn a college degree and can expect to earn almost a third more.
Prominent ex-scouts abound in New York business and politics: Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Rep. Gary Ackerman, Wall Street great John Whitehead and entrepreneur Earl Graves are Eagle Scouts.
Mayor Bloomberg, a Distinguished Eagle Scout, writes in his biography that “Boy Scout Summer Camp was the highlight of the year . . . It was where I learned to be self sufficient, and simultaneously, to live and work with others.”
In other words, scouting produces success. It’s a tremendous shame that New York has allowed the culture wars to deny that hope to its children.
Justin Szlasa is an Eagle Scout and pro ducer of the documentary “759: Boy Scouts of Harlem.”