[Illustration: THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET]
THE HOUSE ON
HENRY STREET
BY
LILLIAN D. WALD
With Illustrations from Etchings and Drawings by
Abraham Phillips and from Photographs
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1915,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
November, 1938
Printed in U. S. A.
TO
THE COMRADES
WHO HAVE BUILT THE HOUSE
PREFACE
Much of the material contained in this book has been published in a
series of six articles that appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ from March
to August, 1915. And indeed it was due to the kindly insistence on the
part of the editors of that magazine that more permanent form should
be given to the record of the House on Henry Street that the story was
published at all.
During the two decades of the existence of the Settlement there has been
a significant awakening on matters of social concern, particularly those
affecting the protection of children throughout society in general; and
a new sense of responsibility has been aroused among men and women, but
perhaps more distinctively among women, since the period coincides with
their freer admission to public and professional life. The Settlement is
in itself an expression of this sense of responsibility, and under its
roof many divergent groups have come together to discuss measures “for
the many, mindless, mass that most needs helping,” and often to assert
by deed their faith in democracy. Some have found in the Settlement
an opportunity for self-realization that in the more fixed and older
institutions has not seemed possible.
I cannot acknowledge by name the many individuals who, by gift of money
and through understanding and confidence, through work and thought and
sharing of the burdens, have helped to build the House on Henry Street.
These colleagues have come all through the years that have followed since
the little girl led me to her rear tenement home. Though we are working
together as comrades for a common cause, I cannot resist this opportunity
to express my profound personal gratitude for the precious gifts that
have been so abundantly given. The first friends who gave confidence and
support to an unknown and unexperimented venture have remained staunch
and loyal builders of the House. And the younger generation with their
gifts have developed the plans of the House and have found inspiration
while they have given it.
In the making of the book, much help has come from these same friends,
and I should be quite overwhelmed with the debt I owe did I not feel that
all of us who have worked together have worked not only for each other
but for the cause of human progress; that is the beginning and should be
the end of the House on Henry Street.
LILLIAN D. WALD.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE EAST SIDE TWO DECADES AGO 1
II. ESTABLISHING THE NURSING SERVICE 26
III. THE NURSE AND THE COMMUNITY 44
IV. CHILDREN AND PLAY 66
V. EDUCATION AND THE CHILD 97
VI. THE HANDICAPPED CHILD 117
VII. CHILDREN WHO WORK 135
VIII. THE NATION’S CHILDREN 152
IX. ORGANIZATIONS WITHIN THE SETTLEMENT 169
X. YOUTH 189
XI. YOUTH AND TRADES UNIONS 201
XII. WEDDINGS AND SOCIAL HALLS 216
XIII. FRIENDS OF RUSSIAN FREEDOM 229
XIV. SOCIAL FORCES 249
XV. SOCIAL FORCES, _Continued_ 270
XVI. NEW AMERICANS AND OUR POLICIES 286
INDEX 313
FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET _Frontispiece_
Etching by Abraham Phillips
LILLIAN D. WALD AND MARY M. BREWSTER IN HOSPITAL UNIFORM, 1893 6
WITH PRAYER-SHAWL AND PHYLACTERY 22
Etching by Abraham Phillips
THE NURSE IN THE TENEMENT 28
A SHORT CUT OVER THE ROOFS OF THE TENEMENTS 52
AND THEIR ECSTASY AT THE SIGHT OF A WONDERFUL DOGWOOD TREE 78
IT HAS BEEN CALLED THE “BUNKER HILL” OF PLAYGROUNDS 82
THE CHILDREN PLAY ON OUR ROOF 82
THE KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN LEARN THE REALITY OF THE THINGS THEY
SING ABOUT 90
USES OF THE BACK YARD IN ONE OF THE BRANCHES OF THE HENRY STREET
SETTLEMENT 162
HERE AND THERE ARE STILL FOUND REMINDERS OF OLD NEW YORK 170
Etching by Abraham Phillips
ESTHER 182
Drawing by Esther J. Peck
THE NEIGHBORHOOD PLAYHOUSE 186
Drawing by Abraham Phillips
IN A CLUB-ROOM 192
Drawing by Abraham Phillips
AFTER THE LONG DAY 204
Drawing by Abraham Phillips
AN INCIDENT IN THE HISTORICAL PAGEANT ON HENRY STREET,
COMMEMORATING THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SETTLEMENT 214
THE OLDER GENERATION 218
Etching by Abraham Phillips
PRINCE KROPOTKIN 234
BABUSCHKA, LITTLE GRANDMOTHER 242
THE SYNAGOGUES ARE EVERYWHERE—IMPOSING OR SHABBY-LOOKING
BUILDINGS 254
Etching by Abraham Phillips
A MOTHER IN ISRAEL 268
Etching by Abraham Phillips
THE DRAMATIC CLUB PRESENTED “THE SHEPHERD” 272
A REGION OF OVERCROWDED HOMES 298
AT ELLIS ISLAND THERE IS A STREAM OF INFLOWING LIFE 308
Photograph by Louis Hines
THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET
CHAPTER I
THE EAST SIDE TWO DECADES AGO
A sick woman in a squalid rear tenement, so wretched and so pitiful
that, in all the years since, I have not seen anything more appealing,
determined me, within half an hour, to live on the East Side.
I had spent two years in a New York training-school for nurses; strenuous
years for an undisciplined, untrained girl, but a wonderful human
experience. After graduation, I supplemented the theoretical instruction,
which was casual and inconsequential in the hospital classes twenty-five
years ago, by a period of study at a medical college. It was while at the
college that a great opportunity came to me.
I had little more than an inspiration to be of use in some way or
somehow, and going to the hospital seemed the readiest means of realizing
my desire. While there, the long hours “on duty” and the exhausting
demands of the ward work scarcely admitted freedom for keeping informed
as to what was happening in the world outside. The nurses had no time
for general reading; visits to and from friends were brief; we were
out of the current and saw little of life save as it flowed into the
hospital wards. It is not strange, therefore, that I should have been
ignorant of the various movements which reflected the awakening of the
social conscience at the time, or of the birth of the “settlement,” which
twenty-five years ago was giving form to a social protest in England and
America. Indeed, it was not until the plan of our work on the East Side
was well developed that knowledge came to me of other groups of people
who, reacting to a humane or an academic appeal, were adopting this mode
of expression and calling it a “settlement.”
Two decades ago the words “East Side” called up a vague and alarming
picture of something strange and alien: a vast crowded area, a foreign
city within our own, for whose conditions we had no concern. Aside from
its exploiters, political and economic, few people had any definite
knowledge of it, and its literary “discovery” had but just begun.
The lower East Side then reflected the popular indifference—it almost
seemed contempt—for the living conditions of a huge population. And the
possibility of improvement seemed, when my inexperience was startled
into thought, the more remote because of the dumb acceptance of these
conditions by the East Side itself. Like the rest of the world I had
known little of it, when friends of a philanthropic institution asked me
to do something for that quarter.
[Illustration]
Remembering the families who came to visit patients in the wards, I
outlined a course of instruction in home nursing adapted to their needs,
and gave it in an old building in Henry Street, then used as a technical
school and now part of the settlement. Henry Street then as now was the
center of a dense industrial population.
From the schoolroom where I had been giving a lesson in bed-making, a
little girl led me one drizzling March morning. She had told me of her
sick mother, and gathering from her incoherent account that a child had
been born, I caught up the paraphernalia of the bed-making lesson and
carried it with me.
[Illustration]
The child led me over broken roadways,—there was no asphalt, although
its use was well established in other parts of the city,—over dirty
mattresses and heaps of refuse,—it was before Colonel Waring had shown
the possibility of clean streets even in that quarter,—between tall,
reeking houses whose laden fire-escapes, useless for their appointed
purpose, bulged with household goods of every description. The rain added
to the dismal appearance of the streets and to the discomfort of the
crowds which thronged them, intensifying the odors which assailed me
from every side. Through Hester and Division streets we went to the end
of Ludlow; past odorous fish-stands, for the streets were a market-place,
unregulated, unsupervised, unclean; past evil-smelling, uncovered
garbage-cans; and—perhaps worst of all, where so many little children
played—past the trucks brought down from more fastidious quarters
and stalled on these already overcrowded streets, lending themselves
inevitably to many forms of indecency.
[Illustration]
The child led me on through a tenement hallway, across a court where open
and unscreened closets were promiscuously used by men and women, up into
a rear tenement, by slimy steps whose accumulated dirt was augmented that
day by the mud of the streets, and finally into the sickroom.
All the maladjustments of our social and economic relations seemed
epitomized in this brief journey and what was found at the end of it.
The family to which the child led me was neither criminal nor vicious.
Although the husband was a cripple, one of those who stand on street
corners exhibiting deformities to enlist compassion, and masking the
begging of alms by a pretense at selling; although the family of seven
shared their two rooms with boarders,—who were literally boarders, since
a piece of timber was placed over the floor for them to sleep on,—and
although the sick woman lay on a wretched, unclean bed, soiled with a
hemorrhage two days old, they were not degraded human beings, judged by
any measure of moral values.
[Illustration: LILLIAN D. WALD MARY M. BREWSTER
In hospital uniform, 1893]
In fact, it was very plain that they were sensitive to their condition,
and when, at the end of my ministrations, they kissed my hands (those who
have undergone similar experiences will, I am sure, understand), it would
have been some solace if by any conviction of the moral unworthiness of
the family I could have defended myself as a part of a society which
permitted such conditions to exist. Indeed, my subsequent acquaintance
with them revealed the fact that, miserable as their state was, they were
not without ideals for the family life, and for society, of which they
were so unloved and unlovely a part.
[Illustration]
That morning’s experience was a baptism of fire. Deserted were the
laboratory and the academic work of the college. I never returned to
them. On my way from the sickroom to my comfortable student quarters
my mind was intent on my own responsibility. To my inexperience it
seemed certain that conditions such as these were allowed because people
did not _know_, and for me there was a challenge to know and to tell.
When early morning found me still awake, my naïve conviction remained
that, if people knew things,—and “things” meant everything implied in
the condition of this family,—such horrors would cease to exist, and I
rejoiced that I had had a training in the care of the sick that in itself
would give me an organic relationship to the neighborhood in which this
awakening had come.
* * * * *
To the first sympathetic friend to whom I poured forth my story, I
found myself presenting a plan which had been developing almost without
conscious mental direction on my part. It was doubtless the accumulation
of many reflections inspired by acquaintance with the patients in the
hospital wards, and now, with the Ludlow Street experience, resistlessly
impelling me to action.
Within a day or two a comrade from the training-school, Mary Brewster,
agreed to share in the venture. We were to live in the neighborhood as
nurses, identify ourselves with it socially, and, in brief, contribute to
it our citizenship. That plan contained in embryo all the extended and
diversified social interests of our settlement group to-day.
[Illustration]
We set to work immediately to find quarters—no easy task, as we clung to
the civilization of a bathroom, and according to a legend current at the
time there were only two bathrooms in tenement houses below Fourteenth
Street. Chance helped us here. A young woman who for years played an
important part in the life of many East Side people, overhearing a
conversation of mine with a fellow-student, gave me an introduction to
two men who, she said, knew all about the quarter of the city which I
wished to enter. I called on them immediately, and their response to
my need was as prompt. Without stopping to inquire into my antecedents
or motives, or to discourse on the social aspects of the community, of
which, I soon learned, they were competent to speak with authority,
they set out with me at once, in a pouring rain, to scour the adjacent
streets for “To Let” signs. One which seemed to me worth investigating
my newly acquired friends discarded with the explanation that it was in
the “red light” district and would not do. Later I was to know much of
the unfortunate women who inhabited the quarter, but at the time the term
meant nothing to me.
After a long tour one of my guides, as if by inspiration, reminded the
other that several young women had taken a house on Rivington Street
for something like my purpose, and perhaps I had better live there
temporarily and take my time in finding satisfactory quarters. Upon that
advice I acted, and within a few days Miss Brewster and I found ourselves
guests at the luncheon table of the College Settlement on Rivington
Street. With ready hospitality they took us in, and, during July and
August, we were “residents” in stimulating comradeship with serious
women, who were also the fortunate possessors of a saving sense of humor.
Before September of the year 1893 we found a house on Jefferson Street,
the only one in which our careful search disclosed the desired bathtub.
It had other advantages—the vacant floor at the top (so high that the
windows along the entire side wall gave us sun and breeze), and, greatest
lure of all, the warm welcome which came to us from the basement, where
we found the janitress ready to answer questions as to terms.
Naturally, objections to two young women living alone in New York under
these conditions had to be met, and some assurance as to our material
comfort was given to anxious, though at heart sympathetic, families
by compromising on good furniture, a Baltimore heater for cheer, and
simple but adequate household appurtenances. Painted floors with easily
removed rugs, windows curtained with spotless but inexpensive scrim, a
sitting-room with pictures, books, and restful chairs, a tiny bedroom
which we two shared, a small dining-room in which the family mahogany did
not look out of place, and a kitchen, constituted our home for two full
years.
The much-esteemed bathroom, small and dark, was in the hall, and
necessitated early rising if we were to have the use of it; for, as we
became known, we had many callers anxious to see us before we started on
our sick rounds. The diminutive closet-space was divided to hold the bags
and equipment we needed from day to day, and more ample store-closets
were given us by the kindly people in the school where I had first given
lessons to East Side mothers. Any pride in the sacrifice of material
comfort which might have risen within us was effectually inhibited by
the constant reminder that we two young persons occupied exactly the same
space as the large families on every floor below us, and to one of our
basement friends at least we were luxurious beyond the dreams of ordinary
folk.
[Illustration]
The little lad from the basement was our first invited guest. The simple
but appetizing dinner my comrade prepared, while I set the table and
placed the flowers. The boy’s mother came up later in the evening to find
out what we had given him, for Tommie had rushed down with eyes bulging
and had reported that “them ladies live like the Queen of England and eat
off of solid gold plates.”
We learned the most efficient use of the fire-escape and felt many
times blessed because of our easy access to the roof. We also learned
the infinite uses to which stairs can be put. Later we achieved “local
color” in our rooms by the addition of interesting pieces of brass and
copper purchased from a man on Allen Street whom we and several others
had “discovered.” His little dark shop under the elevated railway
was fitfully illuminated by the glowing forge. On our first visit the
proprietor emerged from a still darker inner room with prayer-shawl and
phylactery. He became one of our pleasant acquaintances and lost no
occasion of acknowledging what he considered his debt to the appreciative
customers who had helped to make him and his wares known to a wider
circle than that of the neighborhood.
[Illustration]
* * * * *
The mere fact of living in the tenement brought undreamed-of
opportunities for widening our knowledge and extending our human
relationships. That we were Americans was wonderful to our
fellow-tenants. They were all immigrants—Jews from Russia or Roumania.
The sole exception was the janitress, Mrs. McRae, who at once dedicated
herself and her entire family to the service of the top floor. Dear Mrs.
McRae! From her basement home she covered us with her protecting love
and was no small influence in holding us to sanity. Humor, astuteness,
and sympathy were needed and these she gave in abundance.
[Illustration]
It was vouchsafed us to know many fine personalities who influenced and
guided us from the first few weeks of residence in the friendly college
settlement through the many years that have followed. The two women who
stand out with greatest distinction from the first are this pure-souled
Scotch-Irish immigrant and Josephine Shaw Lowell. Both, if they were
here, would understand the tribute in linking them together.
Occasionally Mrs. McRae would feel impelled to reprove us for “overdoing”
ourselves, and from our top story we were hard pushed to save visitors
from being sent away when she thought we needed to finish a meal or go
to bed. Cautious as we were not to make any distinctions in commenting
upon the visitors who came to see us, she made her own deductions. At
whatever hour we returned, she would be at the door to welcome us and to
report on the happenings during our absence. “So-and-so was here”: shrewd
descriptions which often enabled us to identify individuals when names
were forgotten. “Lots of visitors to-night,” she would report. “Were
messages left, or names?” we would naturally inquire. “No, darlints,
nothing at all. I know sure they didn’t bring you anything.”
The key to our apartments, usually left with her, was one day forgotten,
and when, upon unlocking the door, we saw a well-known society woman
seated in our little living-room, we were naturally puzzled to know how
she had arrived there. Mrs. McRae explained that she had taken her up
the fire-escape!—no slight venture and exertion for the inexperienced.
We suggested that other ways might have been more agreeable and safer.
“Whisht,” said Mrs. McRae, with a smile and a wink, “it’s no harm at all.
She’ll be havin’ lots of talk for her friends on this.”
When her roving husband died at home, the funeral arrangements were given
a last touch by Mrs. McRae, who placed on the casket his tobacco and pipe
and ordered the procession to pass his tenement home twice before driving
to the cemetery, “So he’d not think we were not for forgivin’ him and
hurryin’ him away.”
Her first love went to my comrade, whose beauty and humor and goodness
captured her Celtic heart. During our second year in the tenement
Miss Brewster was taken seriously ill, and one evening we had at last
succeeded in forcing Mrs. McRae to go home and had locked the door.
Unknown to us the dear friend remained on the floor outside all through
the night, trying to catch the sound of life from the loved one.
Bringing up a large family, with no help from the “old man,” and with
stern ideals of conduct and integrity, was not easy. Some of her
children, endowed with her character, gave her solace, but she was too
astute not to estimate each one properly.
When we moved from the tenement to our first house Mrs. McRae and her
family gave up the basement rooms, which were rent free because of her
janitor service, in order to be near us, and she spread her warmth over
the new abode. When, some years later, she was ill and we knew that the
end was near, one close to me in my own family claimed my attention. Torn
between the two affections, I was loath to leave the city while Mrs.
McRae was so ill. She guessed the cause of my perturbed state and advised
me to go. “Darlin’, you ought to go. You go. I promise not to die until
you come back.”
Letters kept up this assurance and the promise was fulfilled.
* * * * *
Times were hard that year. In the summer the miseries due to unemployment
and rising rents and prices began to be apparent, but the pinch came
with the cold weather. Perhaps it was an advantage that we were so early
exposed to the extraordinary sufferings and the variety of pain and
poverty in that winter of 1893-94, memorable because of extreme economic
depression. The impact of strain, physical and emotional, left neither
place nor time for self-analysis and consequent self-consciousness, so
prone to hinder and to dwarf wholesome instincts, and so likely to have
proved an impediment to the simple relationship which we established with
our neighbors.
It has become almost trite to speak of the kindness of the poor to each
other, yet from the beginning of our tenement-house residence we were
much touched by manifestations of it. An errand took me to Michael the
Scotch-Irish cobbler as the family were sitting down to the noonday meal.
There was a stranger with them, whom Michael introduced, explaining when
we were out of hearing that he thought I would be interested to meet a
man just out of Sing Sing prison. I expressed some fear of the danger to
his own boys in this association. “We must just chance it,” said Michael.
“It’s no weather for a man like that to be on the streets, when honest
fellows can’t get work.”
When we first met the G⸺ family they were breaking up the furniture to
keep from freezing. One of the children had died and had been buried
in a public grave. Three times that year did Mrs. G⸺ painfully gather
together enough money to have the baby disinterred and fittingly buried
in consecrated ground, and each time she gave up her heart’s desire in
order to relieve the sufferings of the living children of her neighbors.
Another instance of this unfailing goodness of the poor to each other
was told by Nellie, who called on us one morning. She was evidently
embarrassed, and with difficulty related that, hearing of things to
be given away at a newspaper office, she had gone there hoping to get
something that would do for John when he came out of the hospital. She
said, “I drew this and I don’t know exactly what it is meant for,” and
displayed a wadded black satin “dress-shirt protector,” in very good
condition, and possibly contributed because the season was over! Standing
outside the circle of clamorous petitioners, Nellie and the woman next
her had exchanged tales of woe. When she mentioned her address the new
acquaintance suggested that she seek us.
Nellie proved to be a near neighbor. There were two children: a nursing
baby “none so well,” and a lad. John, her husband, was “fortunately” in
the hospital with a broken leg, for there were “no jobs around loose
anyway.” When we called later in the day to see the baby, we found that
Nellie was stopping with her cousin, a widower who “held his job down.”
There were also his two children, the widow of a friend “who would have
done as much by me,” and the wife and two small children of a total
stranger who lived in the rear tenement and were invited in to meals
because the father had been seen starting every morning on his hunt for
work, and “it was plain for anyone with eyes to see that he never did
get it.” So this one man, fortunate in having work, was taking care
of himself and his children, the widow of his friend, Nellie and her
children, and was feeding the strangers. Said Nellie: “Sure he’s doing
that, and why not? He’s the only cousin I’ve got outside of Ireland.”
Mrs. S⸺, who called at the settlement a few days ago, reminded me that
it was twenty-one years since our first meeting, and brought vividly
before me a picture of which she was a part. She was the daughter
of a learned rabbi, and her husband, himself a pious man, had great
reverence for the traditions of her family. In their extremity they had
taken bread from one of the newspaper charities, but it was evidently a
painful humiliation, and before we arrived they had hidden the loaf in
the ice-box. My visit was due to a desire to ascertain the condition of
the families who had applied for this dole. Both house and people were
scrupulously clean. It was amazing that under the biting pressure of want
and anxiety such standards could be maintained. Yet, though passionately
devoted to his family, the husband refused advantageous employment
because it necessitated work on the Sabbath. This would have been to them
a desecration of something more vital than life itself.
[Illustration]
We found that winter, in other instances, that the fangs of the wolf were
often decorously hidden. In one family of our acquaintance the father,
a cigarmaker, left the house each morning in search of work, only to
return at night hungrier and more exhausted by his fruitless exertions.
One Sabbath eve I entered his tenement, to find the two rooms scrubbed
and cleaned, and the mother and children prepared for the holy night.
Over a brisk fire fed by bits of wood picked up by the children two
covered pots were set, as if a supper were being prepared. But under the
lids it was only water that bubbled. The proud mother could not bear to
expose her poverty to the gossip of the neighbors, the humiliation being
the greater because she was obliged to violate the sacred custom of
preparing a ceremonious meal for the united family on Friday night.
If the formalism of our neighbors in religious matters was constantly
brought to our attention, instances of their tolerance were also far from
rare. A Jewish woman, exhausted by her long day’s scrubbing of office
floors, walked many extra blocks to beg us to get a priest for her Roman
Catholic neighbor whose child was dying. An orthodox Jewish father,
who had been goaded to bitterness because his daughter had married an
“Irisher” and thus “insulted his religion,” felt that the young husband
and his mother were equally wronged. This man, when I called on a Sabbath
evening, took one of the lights from the table to show the way down the
five flights of dark tenement stairs, and to my protest,—knowing, as I
did, that he considered it a sin to handle fire on the Sabbath,—he said:
“It is no sin for me to handle a light on the Sabbath to show respect to
a friend who has helped to keep a family together.”
[Illustration: WITH PRAYER-SHAWL AND PHYLACTERY]
There was the story of Mary, eldest daughter, as we supposed, of an
orthodox family. When we went to her engagement party we were surprised
to see that the young man was not of the family faith. The mother told
us that Mary, “such a pretty baby,” had been left on their doorstep
in earlier and more prosperous days in Austria. “The Burgomeister had
made proclamation,” but no one came to claim her, and the husband and
wife, who as yet had no children of their own, decided to keep her. “God
rewarded us and answered our prayers,” said Mrs. L⸺, for many children
came afterward; but Mary, blonde and blue-eyed, was always the most
cherished, the first-comer who had brought the others. When she was quite
a young girl she was taken ill—a cold following exposure after her first
“grown-up” party, for which her foster-mother had dressed her with pride.
It seemed that nothing could save her, and the foster-mother in her
distress thought with pity of the woman who had borne this sweet child.
Surely she must be dead. No living mother could have abandoned so lovely
a baby. And if she were dead and in the Christian heaven, she would look
in vain there for her daughter. “So I called the priest and told him,”
said Mrs. L⸺, “and he made a prayer over Mary, and said, ‘Now she is a
_Krist_.’ The doctor, we called him too, and he said to get a goat, for
the milk would be good for Mary; and she get well, but no so strong, as
you see, and that is why she don’t go out to work like her brothers and
sisters. We lose our money, that’s why we come to America, and Mary, now
she marry a _Krist_.”
[Illustration]
Gradually there came to our knowledge difficulties and conflicts not
peculiar to any one set of people, but intensified in the case of our
neighbors by poverty, unfamiliarity with laws and customs, the lack of
privacy, and the frequent dependence of the elders upon the children.
Workers in philanthropy, clergymen, orthodox rabbis, the unemployed,
anxious parents, girls in distress, troublesome boys, came as individuals
to see us, but no formal organization of our work was effected till we
moved into the house on Henry Street, in 1895.
So precious were the intimate relationships with our neighbors in the
tenement that we were reluctant to leave it. My companion’s breakdown,
the persuasion of friends who had given their support and counsel
that there was an obligation upon us to effect some kind of formal
organization without further delay, finally prevailed. As usual the
neighborhood showed its interest in what we did; and though my comrade
and I had carefully selected men from the ranks of the unemployed to
move our belongings, when all was accomplished not one of them could be
induced to take a penny for the work.
From this first house have since developed the manifold activities in
city and country now incorporated as the Henry Street Settlement.
I should like to make it clear that from the beginning we were most
profoundly moved by the wretched industrial conditions which were
constantly forced upon us. In succeeding chapters I hope to tell of the
constructive programmes that the people themselves have evolved out
of their own hard lives, of the ameliorative measures, ripened out of
sympathetic comprehension, and, finally, of the social legislation that
expresses the new compunction of the community.
[Illustration]