The Henry Street Settlement is a non-profit organization located in three federal townhouses at 263 through 267 Henry Street, just off Montgomery Street where the Degruthe's Rope Walk once ran through. The New York Times in 1922 named Henry Street Settlement's founder Lillian Wald, one of the 12 greatest living American women. “Nursing was love,” Lillian said, and her life reflected the sentiment.Lillian Wald was born March 10th, 1867, in Cincinnati, Ohio, but never felt like she had a hometown until her family moved to Rochester, New York, in 1878. Lillian was educated in Rochester at Miss Cruttenden’s English-French Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies and Little Girls. Because she was only 16, Vassar made the mistake of rejecting this amazing soul. Lillian became inspired about nursing after watching her sister Julia's baby in the cared of the attending nurse.
Lillian moved to NYC in 1889 to attend the nursing program at New York Hospital Training School. After graduating in 1891, she became a nurse at an orphanage called the New York Juvenile Asylum. In 1892, she enrolled at the Women's Medical College of the New York Infirmary. Luckily for millions of New Yorkers, one of her college assignments was to design a community-based plan of care for poor immigrant families. In 1893, after she earned her nursing degree at the age of 22, Lillian and a friend and colleague named Mary Brewster founded the Visiting Nurse Service. Lillian started teaching a hygiene and home nursing class in the Lower East Side in 1893, where she coined the term “public health nurse” for those who worked in poor neighborhoods.
Lillian came from a wealthy Jewish family from Germany but never had any formal religious training. In the summer of 1895, she gave up her life of privilege, determined to live among the poor. She regarded the Lower East Side as a foreign city within NYC and regarded the world as a larger, more culturally diverse version of the Lower East Side. To be close to the community they assisted, Lillian and Mary moved into a fifth floor walk-up apartment at 27 Jefferson Street, just two blocks away from her future settlement location. By 1894, the pair had visited 125 tenement families, reinforcing Lillian's idea of neighborhood service. Mary Brewster fell into poor health and couldn't take being overworked, so she decided to leave Lillian's Visiting Nurse Service.
Lillian started to solicit Lower East Side German Jewish community leaders for financial aid, using the line “Have you ever seen a starving child cry?” Philanthropist Jacob Schiff recognized her mission of public health nursing and helped her start the Henry Street Settlement from the three converted federal style houses he owned since the spring of 1895. Lillian hired a staff of six nurses piad $15 a month, and they moved into one of Jacob Schiff's Lower East Side houses at 265 Henry Street. Lillian Wald always tried to charm the rich in an attempt to enlarge her programs to improve tenement dwellers’ living conditions.
Lillian's first project was to create one of NYC's first playgrounds in the small backyard. The first playground in NYC was opened in 1890 by the University Settlement. An 1895 NY State law decreed that no schoolhouse could be constructed in NYC without an attached or nearby open-air playground. Lillian helped start the Outdoor Recreation League, which pushed to organize public playgrounds and parks. The League raised money for Seward Park, which in 1903 became America's first permanent public municipal playground.
In 1902, the Henry Street Settlement added three more buildings to the fold, 299, 301 and 303 Henry Street, and one of them included a gymnasium. Henry Street Settlement offered English classes for new immigrants, vocational training, public lectures, a library and activities for children of all ages. The settlement also established various clubs and a savings bank, and help launched a NYC playground building boom.
Henry Street Settlement wasn’t designed for just the poor and families beset with problems; it was created to be a place everyone could attend. Visitors were not called clients, but simply neighbors. Providing quality services was not all the Henry Street Settlement wanted to accomplish; they sought to be involved in social change as well.
In 1909, Lillian offered the Henry Street Settlement to the National Negro Conference, which became the founding meeting for the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). The settlement also used its facilities for union meetings (after the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire), drafted Child Labor Laws, created the Mobilization for Youth, and helped develop public housing. Lillian Wald was an early feminist who became very active in the campaigning for women’s suffrage and fought for better conditions for pregnant workers. She was also very involved in antiwar activism. On August 29th, 1914, Lillian led between 1,200 and 1,500 women protesters down Fifth Avenue during a women’s peace parade to draw attention to their disgust with the 1st World War. This, combined with her endorsement of socialist candidates and association with radicals such as Emma Goldman, made her a target of the 1919 Red Scare campaign that labeled her an undesirable citizen.
In 1902, Henry Street Settlement influenced NYC's Board of Education to pay the salary of Lina L. Rogers, the first public school nurse. After that nudge, the Board of Education and NYC's Board of Health started their own program to pay for 12 school nurses (the first such service in the world). Lillian also lobbied for free lunches for all children in the public school system and helped push the Board of Education to create the first Department of Special Education. Henry Street Settlement had a staff of 11 full-time workers by 1898, nine of whom were nurses. By 1906, the Henry Street Settlement had a team of 27 nurses aiding the Lower East Side. By 1914, the Henry Street Settlement had 100 nurses onboard. By the year of her death in 1940, nearly 300 nurses worked out of 20 branches around NYC.
In 1908, Henry Street Settlement opened two summer camps, Camp Henry for boys and Echo Hill Farm for girls. The Lewisohn sisters build the Neighborhood Playhouse (now called Harry De Jur Playhouse) in 1915, still used for Henry Street Settlement art programs. The Henry Street Music School opened in 1927.
After Lillian Wald retired in 1930, she was succeeded by Helen Hall. In 1940, the settlement started the Homeplanning Workshop to help the community make and mend clothing and repair their broken appliances and furniture.
When Wald turned 70 in 1937, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia presented her with the key to the city and an honorary degree. Lillian also created the Federal Children's Bureau, working with President Theodore Roosevelt, and she was instrumental in creating the Women's Trade Union League, the National Organization for Public Health Nursing, and Columbia University's School of Nursing.
Lillian Wald suffered a stroke in 1933 and died at her Westport, Connecticut, home on September 1st, 1940. She was 73 and had remained unmarried. On her headstone is the Japanese insignia she designed while traveling abroad in 1910. It says “universal brotherhood” or “we are all one family.”
The three Henry Street buildings still standing are the original buildings started by Lillian Wald, and they are America's oldest existing settlement houses. In 1989, the three original Henry Street Settlement buildings were given National Historic Landmark status. The Carnegie Corporation made the Henry Street Settlement part of the 530 NYC arts and social service institutions that divided up a $30 million grant in 2007.
The first social settlement, Toynbee Hall, opened in the East End of London in 1884. Two years later in 1886, America’s first settlement house, the Neighborhood Guild or the University Settlement, was opened by Stanton Coit on the Lower East Side. America’s next settlement house was the Hull House in Chicago, which Ellen Gates and Jane Addams opened in 1889. By 1900, more than 100 settlement houses nationwide were helping the urban poor and tackling the forces of poverty.
Another Lower East Side visiting nurse was Margaret Sanger, whose work starting the world’s first family planning clinic got her arrested in 1916.
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