Vallejo Odd Fellows once again hosting community events

VALLEJO — In February, the Vallejo branch of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows reopened its Grand Hall for events. The large space in downtown Vallejo has room for 200 people, two-story high ceilings, stained windows and ornate Victorian plasterwork, but had been shuttered due to code issues since 2016.

With a newly restored elevator it’s back open for business, and the order is working on fire escapes to open the upper floors. “We hosted the return of the Decades Dance Party on Valentine’s Day and a lot of people showed up for that,” San Pablo #43 lodge acting treasurer Hugh Kinniburgh said. “And right after that we had a Goth Festival, which was very popular. And on March 14^th we had a St. Paddy’s Dance & Rummage that was a lot of fun.”

The Odd Fellows is a fraternal organization founded by Thomas Weldy in Baltimore in 1819. At the time the welfare state and unions did not exist, so it filled a gap for people from disparate trades who didn’t have a guild. 

The group command is to visit the sick, relieve the distressed, bury the dead, and educate the orphan. 

“At the beginning we were mostly a burial society. Members’ burials were paid using members’ dues,” said Peter V. Sellars, a member of the Vallejo lodge and an Odd Fellows historian who published two books about the order. “We later expanded that role into financial benefits.” Benefits included stipends for sick members and for members’ widows among others.

The Vallejo branch was founded in 1855, four years after the city was founded. Named San Pablo Lodge #43 after the San Pablo Bay, the order had a strong presence in downtown Vallejo. At one point it owned three imposing buildings: their current headquarters at 342 Georgia St. built in 1872, a second lodge at 436 Georgia St. which consolidated with the first in 1977, and the building that today houses the Empress Theater.

In 1922, the San Pablo Lodge #43 reported 439 members, but in 1927 the Order dropped the stipulated benefits requirement and it began to decline, according to Sellars. Today, the Vallejo Odd Fellows have only 43 members but are on an upswing after facing many challenges in the last five decades. 

The traditional Odd Fellows business model is to build a lodge hall in a thriving downtown and rent the ground floor space for income. The San Pablo Lodge #43 struggled for years with inconsistent rental of the ground floor. 

After the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, the state mandated retrofitting unreinforced masonry buildings. The lodge had to mortgage the building to pay for part of the retrofit and borrow the rest. That threw it into financial disarray.

The closure of the Mare Island Navy Shipyard in 1996 and the financial crisis of 2008 brought further decline in membership, deterred potential ground floor tenants in a hollowed downtown, and deferred building maintenance. 

Chris Vardijian joined the lodge in 2013. As a new transplant to Vallejo, he and his wife thought the Odd Fellows would help them build community, but they found the San Pablo Lodge #43 in dire straits.

“The ground floor hadn’t been rented for a few years and we found out that they were about three weeks away from having their charter closed and they were going to lose the lodge,” Vardijian said. “I came up with an idea: to create an arts community center on the ground floor to raise money for the Fellows and to bring the community together.”

The center was called The Hub. This community of artists brought back a lot of energy to downtown Vallejo. They created the Friday Art Walk and the Vallejo Arts Alliance and put on exhibits and events.

“We had concert nights, open mic nights, poetry nights, theater nights… We made sure there was always something going on,” Vardijian said. Although The Hub didn’t pay rent, the money from ticket sales went to the Odd Fellows and, according to Vardijian, it saved the lodge. 

A new reversal, however, came in 2016. After the Ghost Ship fire in Oakland the fire department, fearful of another mass tragedy, enforced strict codes and red tagged the building.

The financial struggles and continuous challenges created internal turmoil. The older members, whose decisions had contributed to the lodge’s decline, didn’t like changing the traditional Odd Fellows set up and were against the Hub. The arts center closed in 2017. 

Nowadays, with the older members gone or deceased, new and younger members have brought different skills to the Vallejo lodge, and things have started to turn around. 

The Odd Fellows has more events programmed in the coming months but many challenges remain. The stained windows are in need of repair, the upper floors cannot be used by the public until they meet fire department codes, including expensive emergency fire escape stairs, and two apartments in the rear need to be renovated before they can be rented. 

Once the fire escapes are in place, the upstairs dining hall and kitchen will also be available for events. The Fellows are currently working with a chocolatier to bring the kitchen up to modern code.

Although the San Pablo Lodge #43 currently focuses on fundraising and renovating the building to achieve financial stability, the order still finds ways to fulfill its purpose of creating a supportive community for its members and benefiting those less fortunate.

To that end, the lodge lends their Grand Hall for free to nonprofit and community organizations such as the children’s theater On the Fringe, which rehearses there, and Vallejo Arts Alliance, and it rents the space for a low fee to other organizations for classes and presentations.

The Vallejo Odd Fellows also have an invitation to dinner for members of the community every first and third Wednesday of the month. “The first part of the meeting is from 7 to 8 o’clock at night and it’s open,” Kinniburgh explained. “You can come, check us out and break bread with us. After that is the closed meeting, for members only, from 8 to 9.” 

Although anyone can just show up on those days at 7, Kinniburgh said it’s a good idea to email beforehand to oddfellowssanpablo@gmail.com so they know how many people may be coming.

Sellars emphasized that the Odd Fellows still offer great benefits for members, including low interest student loans and scholarships, educational trips for high school students, parks and camps visits, and stipends for dental care among others. Many members, he added, don’t even know about these benefits, but they are detailed in the IOOF Sovereign Grand Lodge website.

In the last 35 years the Odd Fellows have also become more philanthropic. “Some lodges give to animal shelters, food banks, visual research, the Arthritis Foundation, you name it,” Sellars said. One of his favorite national programs is the Living Legacy, which promotes planting trees and gives away tree seedlings.

And the order is evolving with the times, albeit slowly. In 1971 it allowed people of color, and in 2000 it allowed women. 

Membership in the Vallejo Odd Fellows costs $65 a year, with an initial fee of $50. Sellars pointed out that you recoup that fee just with the Wednesday dinners. But the most rewarding aspect of being a member, Kinniburgh said, “is being a part of the long history of the Odd Fellows, and not only fraternally helping each other, but helping the community at large.”