The House on Henry Street: The Enduring Life of a Lower East Side Settlement

Abstract

It's been 125 years since Lillian Wald, daughter of prosperous German Jewish immigrants and a nurse, opened what became the famous Henry Street Settlement on New York's Lower East Side. To celebrate, the settlement, which now consists of buildings on Henry Street and neighborhood social service centers, developed a digital and onsite exhibition. Snyder-Grenier, who curated the exhibitions, has written an impressive history of the institution, through the twentieth century and beyond. Since the 1960s, when challenges to top-down reform projects helped propel grassroots mobilizations, scholars have often dismissed the settlement movement as elites ministering to the poor. Snyder-Grenier contributes to what is now a large body of revisionist scholarship that, while acknowledging the limitations of twentieth-century middle-class reforms, also appreciates those committed to social change.The American settlement house movement, an initiative borrowed from England, reflected middle-class reformers’ commitment to truly engage with poor people rather than simply ministering to them. It was fraught with contradiction. Settlement house workers never meant to incorporate poor neighbors into their middle-class households, but they took seriously the need to live among and learn from the neighbors about the problems they faced. They represented a new approach to reform, moving beyond philanthropic projects that brought wealthier volunteers into poor parts of the city intermittently, if at all. Throughout its history, which saw many changes in organization and social services, the Henry Street Settlement continued to focus on neighborhood services.Snyder-Grenier divides the history into three periods. The first covers Wald's founding and development of the settlement during the heyday of Progressivism, as well as post–World War I conservatism. The second focuses on the settlement's work during the Great Depression, World War II, and the early postwar years until the beginning of community mobilization during the War on Poverty. The last part covers the final years of the 1960s, and the conservative backlash against social welfare spending, lasting until today. In each section, the author highlights how the Henry Street Settlement endured and adapted to shifting political climates, changes in the neighborhood, and transformations in funding sources. In providing so much historical context for Henry Street developments, Snyder-Grenier shows how the history of one institution is connected to the wider history of social work, social welfare, the state, and social justice movements.In the Progressive Era, for example, the author covers not only Wald's contributions to the settlement movement, such as her institution of an extensive visiting nurse service, but also how she exemplified the experience of middle-class female reformers. Wald, like other educated white women, sought to confront a variety of social problems associated with the growth of industrial capitalism, including squalid tenement conditions, poor working conditions, and lack of access to health care. Living in settlement households of mostly single women, Wald and other activists—Jane Addams of Hull House is the most famous example—carved out lifestyles outside traditional gendered expectations. Like other settlement houses, Henry Street depended on wealthy donors. Wald made use of her connections to the prosperous German Jewish community of New York and her close relationship with Jacob Schiff, who purchased the house for her.But if settlement house activists were dependent on private welfare initiatives, those on the left end of progressivism, like Wald, wanted to expand public responsibility for social welfare. She pushed for greater regulation of sweatshop working conditions, supported trade unions, and helped institute the US Children's Bureau, which developed government family programs. Among leftist social workers, the push to expand government responsibility increased during the Depression. Helen Hall, Wald's successor, served on the advisory panel to FDR's Committee on Economic Security, which drafted the Social Security Act. Hall fought unsuccessfully for the inclusion of health insurance in the legislation.By the mid-1960s, the challenges for Henry Street changed, along with its response. For example, the Lower East Side, once home to Eastern European Jews and some Italians, was now home to new African American migrants and immigrants from Puerto Rico, the West Indies, and China. However, the working-class jobs that once provided decent unionized employment for earlier generations were gone. New Lower East Siders now faced a shrinking affordable housing market. To meet the growing crisis, in 1972 the settlement house turned its attention to homelessness, creating the Urban Family Center. It provided temporary shelter and social services for families, becoming a model for New York City. Facing severe local and federal cutbacks in funding since the 1970s, Henry Street now depended more heavily on national foundations and individual donors.This is a relatively short history of a multifaceted institution that provided numerous services, from mental health care to summer camps, to arts, music, and theater classes. It was home to the first Mobilization for Youth program in the late 1950s, a precursor to War on Poverty initiatives, and in the 1970s began special services for domestic violence victims. This readable book is written for a wide audience—indeed, it contains a foreword by former president Bill Clinton—and provides examples of New Yorkers across generations who benefited from Henry Street.In covering so much, the author necessarily discusses issues where scholars would want more depth. For instance, Wald was a fierce defender of immigrant rights, an opponent of immigration restriction, and among the minority of prosperous social reformers who tolerated ethnic customs. But her attitudes toward immigrants remained complicated. Marjorie Feld's fine biography of Wald shows she had trouble understanding religious practices among her Eastern European Jewish neighbors, and she sometimes romanticized “the supposed simplicity of immigrant cultures” (Lillian Wald: A Biography [2009], 83). When it came to African Americans, Snyder-Grenier rightly lauds Wald's commitment to Black rights. She integrated her own dining table and hired Black nurses. However, “working within the constraints of her time,” she situated the nurses in a segregated branch of the institution (39). There were some integrated activities at the Harlem site, which was unusual, but Feld tells us that Black nurses could only enter Black homes and were denied supervisory positions. As Elisabeth Lasch Quinn and Khalil Muhammad have detailed, most liberal white reformers believed that Black culture, an inheritance from slavery, made African American social problems particularly intractable.In examining the arts programs and political activities at the settlement during the Depression, the author notes the “baseless charges of communism” with which director Hall had to contend (93). Without endorsing Red-baiting, historians know that communists and their allies played an important role in many progressive initiatives; they might want to learn about this interesting aspect of Henry Street.While it can only touch on so many topics, this book's wide-ranging look at settlement house work during different historical moments makes it a valuable resource for scholars of social reform and community mobilization. And in these mean times, celebrating this enduring institution and its breadth of services, which still reflect Lillian Wald's commitment to social justice, is important.