Office · Champs-Élysées (8th) · 8e arrondissement

American War Relief Clearing House, 5 rue François-Ier

The buildingStill standing

Getting inOutside only

What's there nowSomeone else

A wartime organisation; it has not existed for over a century and nothing marks the address.

The Paris address to which Edith Wharton told readers of The Book of the Homeless to send donations in kind — the clearing house through which American war relief reached the French charities.

Address: 5 rue François-Ier, 75008 Paris
Years: The First World War

The place, briefly

The American War Relief Clearing House existed to solve a logistical problem: a great deal of American money and material wanted to reach French war charities, and there was no orderly way to get it there. The Clearing House received, sorted and distributed.

Edith Wharton used it directly. In her preface to The Book of the Homeless, the fundraising anthology she edited in 1915, she instructed readers who wished to give goods rather than money to send them to the Clearing House at this address. The instruction is the reason the address is documented at all.

The anthology itself was an act of formidable persuasion — Wharton got contributions from a long list of the best-known writers, artists and composers of the period, and the proceeds went to her hostels and workrooms.

The organisation is long gone. The building is in ordinary commercial use and nothing marks it.

Key facts

What it was: A clearing house channelling American relief to French war charities
Wharton's use: The address she gave in The Book of the Homeless for gifts in kind
The anthology: Published 1915, with contributions from many leading writers and artists
Access: Nothing survives of the organisation

Timeline

1915
Wharton edits The Book of the Homeless and names the Clearing House as the address for donations in kind.

On the map

Questions before you go

What was the American War Relief Clearing House?

A wartime organisation in Paris that received American donations and distributed them to French relief charities. Wharton directed readers of The Book of the Homeless to send goods there.

Writers who knew this place

Edith Wharton

American · American novelist of The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, who left New York for Paris in 1907, kept an apartment on the rue de Varenne in the Faubourg Saint-Germain — the aristocratic quarter on the Left Bank — for thirteen years, ran refugee charities through the First World War that earned her the Légion d'honneur, France's highest national honour, in 1916, and became, in 1921, the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize, America's foremost literary award, for a novel.

Worked here

In her preface to The Book of the Homeless, Wharton instructed readers to send gifts in kind to the American War Relief Clearing House at 5 rue Francois-Ier.

— The Book of the Homeless: Preface

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