Three years later, the credit union's name was changed to Municipal Credit Union, and by January 1920, MCU grew to 3,400 members with total shares of $216,432 and $234,506 in total loans. The $216,432 in shares and the $236,506 in loans, by the way, were worth $2.7 million and $2.9 million, respectively, in 2016 dollars, according to DollarTimes.com.

"The whole notion that an institution survived 100 years and was actually the creative idea of an elected politician, sort of goes counter to what we believe or what is put in the press these days about the capacity of elected officials to come up with sustainable and real ideas that work," MCU Board Chair James Durrah said. "We are living proof that it works and it can be done.''

Despite numerous ominous challenges over the last 10 decades, including in its recent history, a conservatorship, 9/11, Superstorm Sandy and the Great Recession, MCU not only survived but managed to grow to $2.5 billion and more than 409,000 members.

Since January, MCU has been celebrating its Centennial year with members, employees and the New York community through a variety of programs such as the 100 Member Stories initiative. On Facebook, members hold up a placard to show how many years they have been members and explain why they like MCU and how it has improved their financial lives.

MCU also sponsored 100 Acts of Kindness in which employees and members do something such as donating food, clothing, supplies, time and money to support local charities, schools and other organizations. Over the summer, MCU gave $100 gift cards to members and held Community Appreciation and Board Walk Celebration on Coney Island.

Heavy member foot traffic kept employees of this MCU branch busy in the 1940s.

The Centennial celebration will culminate on Oct. 15, MCU's official birth date, at a gala event at the Midtown Hilton Hotel in Manhattan.

Throughout the decades, MCU continued to attract new members even during the Great Depression in the 1930s when it became the largest credit union in the Empire State with 12,467 members with total shares of $1.4 million and total loans of $1.4 million.

Despite being in the epicenter of the Great Depression, MCU reported no charge-offs for bad loans in 1933 and MCU's 12 employees agreed to donate 1% of their bimonthly salary to a special fund to help unemployed civil servants.

After WWII, MCU offered returning U.S. soldiers loans of up to $5,000, nearly $65,000 in today's dollars, at an interest rate of 4.5%. The credit union also did not charge delinquent interest on loans to members who served in the armed forces.

During the 1950s, MCU's reputation drew board members such as William A. Shea, a politically powerful attorney who brought National League baseball back to the city with the New York Mets. When the team moved into its new stadium in Queens, the stadium was named in his honor.

By 1966, MCU's 50th anniversary, the credit union approved more than $250 million in loans to 175,000 members and paid more than $9 million in dividends.

Though the credit union continued to enjoy growth during the economic struggles throughout the 1970s, it ran into trouble in 1981. In that year, MCU was placed into conservatorship for 12 months by New York state regulators.

"They made some bad decisions on loans, and they weren't making appropriate loan charge-offs," MCU President/CEO Kam Wong said, who joined the credit union as a staff accountant during that troubling year. "The finances were in a kind of mess back then. At that time, they did not really have a good quality management system in place, meaning they did not want to charge off bad loans and they had other issues."

Wong said the accounting staff worked closely with the CFO to establish a solid and reliable financial accounting system, which initially was created manually by the staff with ledgers, documents and typewriters.

When Wong was promoted to a supervisory position, he convinced management to computerize the accounting and finance system.

Another turning point for the credit union came in 1986 when Hyfin Credit Union was merged into MCU following a fraud case that involved Hyfin's lawyer, who pleaded guilty to embezzling $3.7 million from the Brooklyn-based cooperative.

The merger expanded MCU's membership reach to hospital and university employees throughout New York.

Fortuitously, MCU's management decided not to take over Hyfin's taxi medallion portfolio because MCU's management was unfamiliar with the medallion loan business.

From January 1980 to January 1990, membership grew from 137,774 to 194,000. The savings and loans crisis allowed MCU to enter the mortgage market by leveraging interest rate risk management to maintain the safety and soundness of the mortgage portfolio. To test the waters, Wong, who became CFO in 1989, capped the mortgage portfolio to no more than 5% of the credit union's assets. That cap has since been raised to 30%.

During the 1990s, MCU introduced its credit card with lower rates than competitors and it did not assess penalty pricing for late payments. The feature is not only popular with members, but it also helps MCU differentiate it from banks, Wong said.

Despite the challenges of the 9/11 disaster recovery and the hardships that befell its members during the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent Great Recession, MCU continued to grow in members and assets.

"I think the reason we continued our growth is that we did not close our doors and people had a lot of trust and confidence in us because we overcame the 9/11 crisis," Wong recalled. "By the end of 2001, we saw deposits increase to nearly $1 billion and by February 2002, we reached the billion dollar mark for the first time."

In December 2008, the credit union experienced some of its largest deposit growth in the years since opening its doors with member funds increasing by more than $75 million, and by December 2009, total loans increased by $127 million, bringing the portfolio to $1.2 billion.

During the financial crisis, MCU worked with members who were struggling financially and deferred loan payments for up to six months. For MCU's management, it didn't make sense for them to manage foreclosed homes. More importantly, the deferments built up a lot of goodwill among members.

Because the financial crisis involved the major banks headquartered in New York City, MCU launched a marketing campaign with its slogan, "strong, trusted, growing."

"We told the public that MCU is still strong, trusted and growing despite all of the other banks that were having problems," Wong explained. "I think we were very successful in getting that across to the public and we experienced all of that growth."

As for the next 100 years, MCU, like all credit unions, will face challenges and opportunities. The only difference is that MCU has been there and done that over the last century and is looking forward with optimism in its new century.

"I don't have any doubt about our future," Durrah said. "I think that the business model makes sense. If we continue to operate with soundness, and I don't have any reason to believe that we won't, we will continue to grow. We are developing quality young leaders, so I don't have any concern about the future leadership. Regulations, technology and digitalization, and all of that, will change the tools of the trade, but the basic model of people helping people, and finding ways, big and small, to improve their personal financial lives, I think that's going to continue to work and the notion of doing it on a non-profit basis, is going to continue to prove attractive."