The birth of the Henry Street Settlement and how its legacy lives on

She took a house and made it into a home. For everyone.

Lillian Wald was 26 and a nurse when she moved into a tenement at 265 Henry St. Already old when she moved there 125 years ago, Wald could have lived anywhere. Her family had money.

Wald, though, wasn’t looking for a place to live. She was looking for a way to live.

Henry Street Settlement founder Lillian Wald as a student at the New York Hospital Training School for Nurses in 1889. (Courtesy of the Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Arts, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.)

And the organization she began that day, the Henry Street Settlement, would change the lives of thousands, as Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier’s “The House on Henry Street” explains.

That day, Wald became a leader in progressive causes, from affordable healthcare to the peace movement. She pioneered public playgrounds and special-needs classes. She changed the city.

But then she had always wanted to make a difference.

Born in 1867, Wald was raised in a comfortable Jewish home in Rochester, N.Y. As she moved into her 20s, her parents assumed she would focus on finding a husband. Instead, Wald applied to the New York Hospital School for Nurses.

“My life hitherto has been – I presume – a type of modern American young womanhood,” she wrote the school. “Days devoted to society, study and housekeeping duties, such as practical mothers consider essential to a daughter’s education.

“This does not satisfy me now. I feel the need of serious, definite work.”

She found it in medicine. After graduating from nursing school, she enrolled in the New York Medical College for Women. Between classes, Wald did charity work on the Lower East Side. She was teaching an adult-ed class one rainy day in 1893 when a little girl burst in.

Her mother was dying. Please, could Wald help?

Wald rushed out, following the girl to a nearby tenement. The child’s mother had just given birth. She was lying on the bed, hemorrhaging. There had been a doctor, but he had walked out when she couldn’t pay his fee.

Wald did what she could to help the woman. And then she did something for herself. She vowed to devote her life to aiding the desperately poor of the Lower East Side.

The Lower East Side in 1902. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.) (Library of Congress/)

“Deserted were the laboratory and the academic work of the college,” she wrote later. “I never returned to them.”

The idea of a settlement house wasn’t new. The first opened in 1884, in London’s slums. The next year, another began in Chicago. Workers settled among the people they were helping and often dedicated themselves to social reform.

And there was much to reform on the Lower East Side. When Wald and a fellow nurse, Mary Brewster, moved down that summer, they were appalled. The heat, stink, and noise were everywhere, and never-ending.

Even at 2 a.m., “some of the push-cart vendors still sold their wares,” Wald remembered later. “Sitting on the curb, directly under my window, with her feet in the gutter was a woman, drooping from exhaustion, a baby at her breast. The fire escapes, considered the most desirable sleeping places, were crowded with the oldest and the youngest; children were asleep on the sidewalks.”

The scene was the same for blocks.

Between 1880 and 1919, more than 23 million immigrants came to America. Most passed through New York City, and many stayed, crowded into the Lower East Side. In 1890, reporting his book “How the Other Half Lives,” Jacob Riis found a family of 14 crammed into two rooms – plus the six boarders they had taken in to help with the rent.

Adding to the crowding was the fact that entire families worked at home, paid by the piece for the cigars they rolled or gloves they stitched. There were no days off, no lunch breaks, no escape.

“I am working at neckties now,” one young girl complained in 1904. “I see nothing before me morning, noon or night, day after day, always neckties, neckties, neckties. Oh, it’s a slave’s work!”

Wald’s plans were ambitious. She and Brewster would be visiting nurses, making house calls. Fees would be on a sliding scale, and in most cases, waived. And the clients would be welcome to visit their home, too, where they could always find conversation and a garden where their children could play.

A Henry Street public health nurse crosses tenement rooftops to reach her patients. (Courtesy of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York Records, Archives & Special Collections, Columbia University Health Sciences Library/Jessie Tarbox Beals.)

None of this would be cheap, and so Wald turned to New York’s leading Jewish families – the Loebs, the Lehmans, the Morgenthaus. Soon, she had enough to buy her first tenement building at 265 Henry St. It opened in 1895, and Wald, Brewster, and a crew of dedicated young women went to work.

But nursing was not enough, so Wald expanded her efforts.

She opened summer camps so that inner-city children might get two weeks of fresh air. She put on pageants, spotlighting Russian, Chinese, and Italian culture. Seeing how much the children loved her garden, she pushed the city to open a public playground, Seward Park – the first permanent, municipal playground in the United States.

Children line up to board a bus to Henry Street’s summer camp, around 1920. (Courtesy of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York Records, Archives & Special Collections, Columbia University Health Sciences Library.)

Wald was a visionary, but also a pragmatist. Many immigrants, no matter how poor, still took out burial policies. Realizing insurance agents regularly visited hundreds of households to collect the payments, Wald reached out to the largest, Metropolitan Life.

Certainly, it was in the company’s best interest to not have to pay out death benefits, Wald observed. What if they referred any sick clients to the Settlement House? If the company paid for the first visit, the nurses would see they got better.

It was a win-win: The insurance company saved some money, and the Henry Street Settlement saved many lives.

Wald was a force for change in other ways. She hired African-American nurses and opened another Settlement House in a black neighborhood. She was on the NAACP’s first board of directors, and joined their protests of the racist film “Birth of a Nation.”

Nurse and assistant supervisor Marian Pettiford stands in front of Henry Street’s branch North Harlem, around 1926. (Courtesy of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York Records, Archives & Special Collections, Columbia University Health Sciences Library.)

Her educational reforms were influential, too. Realizing that many children went to city schools hungry or sick, she lobbied for free lunches and on-site nurses. Noticing that some students had difficulty with standard instruction, she urged the creation of special-needs classes.

And all this before 1915.

Typically, Wald kept the spotlight trained on her work, not herself. Although she had romantic relationships with women, her personal life remained private, as she labored for her neighbors decade after decade.

Sometimes this brought criticism. Wald's union activism drew grumbles from the upper-classes; her opposition to World War I left some questioning her patriotism. But she fought on until, on the 40th anniversary of the Henry Street Settlement, she turned it over to others and retired.

She died, in Westport, Conn., in 1940, at age 73.

But the Henry Street Settlement lives on, continuing to serve. Generations of new New Yorkers have found a friend inside its doors. Aspiring actors, from Jerry Stiller to Luis Guzman, have found inspiration in its arts programs. Ideas it first floated – like the Visiting Nurse Service of New York – have become institutions.

In 1991, Mayor David Dinkins was on hand to dedicate Helen’s House, which boosted Henry Street’s capacity to provide much-needed homeless services. (Henry Street Settlement Collection.)

Over 125 years, the settlement has spread to encompass 18 separate facilities. Its client base has grown too, with more than 50,000 New Yorkers annually taking advantage of its cultural programs, social services, and health care. In some ways, it is very different from what it was in 1895.

In the most important way, however, it is precisely the same.