Sherman Avenue in Evanston, the street where Alpha Phi's executive office stood at a different address. Photo: Nick Number / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
For decades, one of the country’s oldest women’s fraternities ran its national operations from a building on Sherman Avenue in Evanston. Alpha Phi sold that building in November 2022 and now works from Denver, a change that is easy to miss because some reference pages still list Evanston as its home.
The fraternity began at Syracuse University in New York. It was founded on Sept. 18, 1872, by a group of ten women, and was the fourth Greek-letter organization for women. Alpha Phi today counts 175 chapters. How does a society born in upstate New York end up headquartered in a Chicago suburb? Largely through Northwestern University.
The Northwestern connection
According to the Evanston Women’s History Project, the fraternity’s Beta chapter was established at Northwestern in 1881, after Jane Bancroft Robinson became the university’s Dean of Women. The same source says Frances Willard, the temperance leader who lived in Evanston, was initiated into Alpha Phi in 1875, and that four Alpha Phi members later served as Northwestern’s Dean of Women. It describes the fraternity as establishing its headquarters in Evanston, at 1930 Sherman Ave., in the 1950s. Earlier headquarters locations are not something this article can pin down.
Alpha Phi also created a separate foundation in 1956, which supports cardiac care education, scholarships and leadership training. Cardiac care became the fraternity’s philanthropic focus in 1946.
What a national office means to a college town
A sorority’s national office is not the same thing as a chapter house. It typically handles membership records, chapter support, volunteer training and foundation work. That means salaried staff and a building, even if the numbers are modest. Evanston has hosted a number of national organizations. Institutions in the city include Rotary International, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, the National Lekotek Center and the Sigma Alpha Epsilon and Sigma Chi fraternities, and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union is based there too.
Offices like these are quiet neighbors. They add weekday payroll and daytime customers for nearby businesses, and they give Northwestern graduates a local employer connected to the Greek system. They also move when their needs change, as Alpha Phi’s did.
The move west
Alpha Phi’s own magazine says its international executive board voted in 2021 to relocate the office, and that the Evanston building was sold in November 2022. The magazine adds that the fraternity operated without a dedicated space after the sale. The new office, at 1985 S. Josephine St. in Denver, opened with a ribbon cutting in October, according to the same page. The Denver address is listed as the international headquarters.
The pages reviewed for this article did not state the reasons for the move, so none are suggested here. What the record does show is that a national organization can leave a college town without erasing its history there. The Beta chapter at Northwestern, Willard’s membership and the long run of Evanston-based leadership remain part of Alpha Phi’s story.
Daniel Okafor covers business, startups and the Innovators section for The Evanston Edge.
