Former Episcopal bishop of North Carolina Levi Silliman Ives was the founder and first president of the Catholic Protectory. It began with two buildings on Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh Streets in Manhattan, for boys under the care of the Christian Brothers, a congregation founded in France, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, by St. John Baptiste de la Salle for the training and correction of wayward youth. Many of the boys received have been adjudicated truants. The Boys Department subsequently relocated to Eighty-six Street and Fifth Ave.