The Seaman's Branch of the YMCA, originally established as the Scandinavian Seamen's Mission, hosted 263 unsettled sailors, deckhands, and other maritime men from sixteen nations for Christmas dinner near the piers of Erie Basin in 1938. According to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle there were so many:

"they had to be served cafeteria style from six bells (11 a.m.) to four bells (2 p.m.) Beef supplanted turkey, but there was a package of cut plug [tobacco] with the coffee."