“My Colored House is on Fire”: Children, Housing, and the Architecture of Black Charity in San Juan Hill
By Jessica Larson
Following their displacement from the Tenderloin in the early 1900s, Manhattan’s largest Black population moved northward and sought to rebuild their community’s infrastructure in San Juan Hill, an area bounded by 59th Street to the south, 65th Street to the north, Amsterdam Avenue to east, and West End Avenue to the west.[1] Black reformers — the majority of whom were women — worked to construct a neighborhood that offered to its residents missing social welfare services. This included a series of four model tenements built between 1901 and 1912 exclusively for working class African Americans, free kindergartens, day nurseries, and churches [Fig. 1]. An examination of one component of this complex “charitable landscape” — the relationship between Phipps Houses No. 2 and a neighboring childcare institution, the New York Free Kindergarten Association for Colored Children — reveals the significance of purpose-built architecture to race-centered reform efforts. Buildings constructed for use by Black reformers prioritized spaces for children, indicating a commitment to the cultivation of an emergent generation of Black Americans.[2]
The Black charitable landscape of San Juan Hill. Key: (1) The Tuskegee model tenement; (2) Phipps Houses No. 2; (3) 202 W. 63rd Street, home to the New York Free Kindergarten Association for Colored Children and, beginning in 1909, the Stillman Branch of the Henry Street Settlement; (4) The Hampton model tenement; (5) Phipps Houses No. 3; (6) The Henrietta Industrial School, the only branch of the Children’s Aid Society that served African Americans. Modified from Plate 86, Bromley Atlas of the Borough of Manhattan, 1916. New York Public Library.
The fight for Black uplift through housing reform and childcare reflected ideas of environmental determinism that had dominated white reform efforts throughout the 1890s. This push, governed chiefly by middle-class white women including Lillian Wald and Josephine Shaw Lowell, resulted in an explosion of experimental architectural designs called “model tenements;” these structures marshalled innovative materials and floorplans in an attempt to create cost-effective housing that could simultaneously ameliorate the conditions of poverty while imposing standards of middle-class domesticity on the working poor. This logic extended to spaces for children; a moral and healthy environment was necessary for a child to eventually become a productive citizen.[3] The rise of the 19th-century middle class had produced a new conception of childhood as something special and as such required specialized spaces. These purposefully designed spaces as well as their accompanying material culture, such as dolls and toys, emphasized the importance of play and identity formation over preparation for labor; in addition, these spaces consciously insulated children from the dangerous world of adults. Women, viewed as inherently maternal, bore the responsibility for children’s welfare and thus dictated much of the architectural and spatial choices of childcare institutions. Though this reified the centrality of domesticity to women’s social role, it also legitimized women’s impact on the construction of public space.[4]
As in white reform movements, it was women who were most central to Black reform.[5] At a 1902 meeting of Christian reformers in New York, a Black woman named Virginia Matthews delivered an impassioned speech pleading for aid from both the city’s white population as well as Black men: “My house, my colored house, if you will allow that expression, is on fire. We need a bucket brigade all over this city; the colored women need some help on these lines.”[6]
202 W. 63rd Street with Union Baptist Church to the right, 1927. New York Public Library.
By 1900 the epicenter of the city’s Black life and culture had begun to shift northward to San Juan Hill. Some downtown Black institutions followed and rebuilt while some existing institutions in the neighborhood expanded to accommodate newcomers. Among these latter organizations was the Union Baptist Church, one of the most significant religious and social centers of the neighborhood until its move to Harlem in 1927.[7] Built in 1901 under the direction of Reverend George Sims to initially serve as a mission, the church expanded in 1905 to include a building for a day nursery and kindergarten in the adjoining lot at 202 W. 63rd Street (henceforth referred to as “202”) [Fig. 2]. The details of 202’s origins are murky, but comparative institutional churches offer likely answers. It would have been commonplace for the women of the congregation to both fundraise for the building’s construction and advocate for its purpose as a space for children. It is exceedingly plausible that Reverend Sims’s wife, Mary E. Davis, would have been instrumental in organizing and leading the church’s social work. This arrangement, wherein a clergyman handled the religious work of the institutional church and his wife headed the social sector, was fairly standard both in San Juan Hill and throughout Black churches in Manhattan.[8] The uncertainty of these details underscores the ways in which women’s contributions are frequently absent in extant sources.
No floorplans survive, but the exterior indicates that the first floor was used as a commercial space, rented out for revenue to fund the charitable work in the upper stories. This is supported by the fact that a plumbing business was also listed at the address.[9] The uses of the floors shifted over time to accommodate changing circumstances, but generally it seems that the second story was reserved for the kindergarten and the top floor for the day nursery; these spaces were probably modified frequently but the expectation was that this age-graded arrangement would allow children from the nursery to eventually enter the kindergarten — a system that encouraged consistency and continuity.[10] A 1915 charitable directory lists the building as also including a library, space for classes and mothers’ meetings, and a music school.[11] The second story included a large bay window facing the street; this would have afforded the children ample natural light as well as views of the street life below and, conversely, a view from the street into the productive reform work being done. Even for institutions serving poor white children it was uncommon for day nurseries or kindergartens to occupy purpose-built structures; rather, reformers generally accomplished their work in existing buildings. The construction and use of a structure specifically for Black children built by fellow African Americans expressed a dedication to the visibility of the community’s needs and a determination to direct their own methods of racial uplift.
With the intention of moving into a dedicated children’s space planned for Phipps Houses No. 2, the New York Free Kindergarten Association for Colored Children (NYFKACC) brokered a deal with Union Baptist to use their facilities at 202 while the model tenement was under construction.[12] Though the original intention was to occupy 202 only in the interim, the kindergarten remained after the opening of Phipps Houses No. 2 and ultimately operated out of both structures. The NYFKACC was jointly founded and run by white and Black women in 1895 in a bid to forge cooperation in reform between the races.[13] The NYFKACC was particularly novel in its prioritization of Black women’s perspectives on childcare; support from prominent Black activists like educator and suffragist Sarah J. Garnet and poet H. Cordelia Ray lent significant weight to its mission.
The NYFKACC had originally operated out of the home of famed educator and civil rights advocate Elizabeth Jennings Graham at 237 W. 41st Street.[14] Graham, a Black woman long active in the fight for desegregation, lived in a tenement building and conducted the kindergarten out of her basement and living room. The home was connected to a yard in the rear lot, which had been repurposed to include both an area for play and an area for the children to garden.[15] Though locating the kindergarten within a domestic setting was likely a response to funding shortages, it was also a common strategy amongst reformers. Operating the kindergarten in a domestic setting alleviated Progressive-Era concerns that institutional childcare would lead to the dissolution of the family and encourage mothers to abandon their children in order to work outside the home.[16]
In 1899 the organization began to search for larger facilities. The NYFKACC made clear their intention to operate out of Phipps Houses No. 2 upon its completion; in linking the childcare work being done at 202 with the model tenement’s kindergarten, the NYFKACC brought the work of the neighborhood’s Black institutions into the white-run, white-funded, and white-designed model tenement. White social workers in San Juan Hill often felt that they were met with suspicion and resistance by Black residents. Frances Blascoer, the former NAACP Executive Secretary and a social worker, noted in a 1915 report that the best method for helping poor Black communities was not through large, impersonal white organizations, but through the work of small Black institutions like churches and the NYFKACC. Otherwise, white reformers held African Americans to “impossible standards.” [17] Further, through interviews with social workers at the NYFKACC as well as surrounding Black churches, Blascoer concluded that it was not racial inferiority but cyclical poverty that led children to truancy and crime.[18]
Phipps Houses No. 2 at 235-247 W. 63rd Street, 1944. Museum of the City of New York.
Phipps Houses No. 2, finished in 1906 and designed by architects Whitfield & King, was the second of the four model tenements to be built for African Americans on San Juan Hill [Fig. 3]. Leaders in the Black community had been vocal in their support for the construction of more model housing; Bishop Alexander Walters, one of the city’s most prominent Black religious leaders, made this clear in a 1902 speech, stating “Philanthropists can greatly aid us by building model tenement houses to be rented to negroes… The money so invested will bring larger and better returns than any other manner with which I am acquainted.”[19] While the creation and designs of these buildings reinforce the motives of the white reformers and philanthropists funding their construction, Black reformers pushed for their inclusion in the neighborhood and worked to integrate the social work of surrounding institutions into the physical spaces of the tenement.
Phipps Houses No. 2 was six stories with a basement, which included the children’s room alongside locker storage, laundry facilities, bathtubs, and showers. The majority of the building’s units made clear the expectation that the residents would be respectable nuclear families; the designs of these units essentially replicated, in condensed form, the layouts of middle-class white homes. These apartments consisted of two bedrooms –— one for a mother and father, the other for their children — a kitchen, a bathroom and, most curiously, a separate parlor. Inclusion of a parlor had long been a staple of middle-class housing and the desire for a parlor was often stressed by tenement dwellers so that domestic duties and social activities could remain separate.[20] For the wife/mother, this allowed for more control over her family’s public presentation. Notably, such a space had not been included in the first model tenement for African Americans in San Juan Hill, the Tuskegee; it is possible that the creation of more specialized spaces in Phipps Houses No. 2 was a response to criticisms or desires expressed by those tenants.
Floorplans for Phipps Houses No 2. Included in The Brickbuilder Vol. 18 (Jan.-Dec. 1909): 101.
Analysis of the basement children’s room suggests that it was not built with the intention of being used exclusively as a space for children. The design is generic and does not include certain features associated with children’s spaces [Fig. 4]. There are no toilets designed for children in the plan and there is no direct entrance to the courtyard. Rather, this room was likely nominally labeled a children’s room to appease either the project’s socially minded funders or onlooking reformers, but in practice was meant to fulfill a variety of purposes.[21] While it is reasonable to assume that this room was occasionally used by the NYFKACC, the organization opted instead to rent two apartments on the ground floor to primarily serve as the kindergarten.[22]
Notably, Phipps Houses No. 2 lacked the most praised feature included in other model tenements financed by Phipps: a rooftop garden. Phipps Houses No. 1, built simultaneously with Phipps Houses No. 2 but finished first and located on the east side of Manhattan, was designed by famed architect Grosvenor Atterbury and intended for white immigrants. Its rooftop garden served a number of purposes, but the most significant was that it functioned as an extension of the basement kindergarten. Of his tenements built for white immigrants, Atterbury hoped for the “cultivation of national sentiment—of the American idea as exemplified in our great patriots.”[23] The inclusion of the rooftop garden in Phipps Houses No. 1 underscores not just disparities in funding allocated to Black and white model tenements, but a deeper ideological understanding of who was expected to engage in American public life. This is evidenced too by Phipps’s refusal to allow a settlement house to be built within No. 2, which would have further linked the residents with the surrounding Black charitable landscape.[24] It is apparent that from the start Phipps Houses No. 2 was not given the same resources, consideration, or financing as Phipps Houses No. 1. In a letter to W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary Ovington White, future co-founder of the NAACP, wrote during its construction “There is precious little [money] gets around to [African Americans]; even in this case of [Phipps Houses No. 1], for the Italians, is much better than the second one for Negroes… the first was over-costly, but it did seem hard luck that we couldn’t have comein [sic.] first.”[25]
It is unclear why, specifically, the NYFKACC chose to continue to operate out of both 202 as well as Phipps Houses No. 2 upon the model tenement’s completion. There were likely practical motivations — the kindergarten received a significant amount of neighborhood interest and it is reasonable to assume that multiple locations were needed, particularly given that a portion of 202 was dedicated to a nursery and could not fully accommodate older children. By locating their work in two locations, the NYFKACC gave neighborhood children a specialized space for their development at 202 as well as a space easily accessible for mothers in the model tenement and integrated into the home environment.
In the coming decades San Juan Hill would be eclipsed by the ascendancy of Harlem as the Black cultural capital of New York City. In 1909 the childcare organizations at 202 would be absorbed into Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement; whether the Black women who had based their services out of 202 willingly participated in this exchange or were leveraged out of the building is unclear. Under the new white reformers, the institution doubled their fee from five cents to ten and Black mothers expressed a hesitancy to employ their services, citing personal disagreements.[26] While urban renewal might have finally destroyed much of what remained of San Juan Hill, the life of the neighborhood had begun to wane alongside the influence of reformers long before. Like so many similar stories, the initiatives of the Black women who worked to assist their community would soon be overwritten by the work of more well-financed and influential white reformers. Few traces of life in San Juan Hill remain, but the histories of the buildings that have been erased attest to the Black community’s efforts to determine and control their own social welfare.
Jessica Larson is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her dissertation examines the architecture of Black charitable and reform institutions in 19th century New York City.
[1] A variety of factors led to Black migration northward to San Juan Hill. The 1900 Tenderloin Race Riot and the commencement of Penn Station’s construction were significant motivators, as well as the prospect of an improved and less discriminatory housing market uptown. See: Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 269; Kevin McGruder, Race and Real Estate: Conflict and Cooperation in Harlem 1890-1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 35.
[2] The term “charitable landscape” was coined by architectural historian Marta Gutman and refers to the grouping of charitable and reform institutions within close proximity, an urban trend largely developed and implemented in the 19th century. See: Marta Gutman, A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 27.
[3] Gutman, 8.
[4] Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, "Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880-1920," The American Historical Review 95, no. 4 (1990): 1079.
[5] Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 91-121.
[6] “Mrs. Virginia Matthews,” in Federation 2, Vol. 1 (1902): 57-58.
[7] David W. Dunlap, From Abyssinian to Zion: Guide to Manhattan’s Houses of Worship (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 284.
[8] “George Henry Sims, D.D.,” in The National Cyclopedia of the Colored Race, Vol. 1, ed. Clement Richardson (National Publishing Company, 1919): 266; Craig Steven Wilder, In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 64-65. Historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has firmly established the role of Black churchwomen in both the social work of the church, as well as their advocacy for the construction of buildings to support such work. For more, see: Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 2-16.
[9] “Facts and Fancies in and Around Greater New York,” in The Plumbers’ Trade Journal, Steam and Hot Water Fitters’ Review 46 (1909): 343.
[10] The photograph of 202 reproduced here clearly pictures the building as having four stories; I believe that the structure was originally three stories and at some point after its acquisition by the Henry Street Settlement the roof was raised to accommodate a fourth floor.
[11] Frances Blascoer, Colored School Children in New York (New York: Public Education Association of the City of New York, 1915), 173-4.
[12] “Field Notes,” in The Kindergarten for Teachers and Parents 20 (1907): 19.
[13] Helena Titus Emerson, “Children of the Circle,” in Charities 15, Vol. 1 (October 7, 1905): 83.
[14] In 1854 Graham boarded an all-white streetcar and refused to exit when pressed by the conductor. This led to the court case Jennings vs. Third Avenue Railroad Co., which ruled in Jennings’s favor and began the desegregation of New York’s streetcars. See: John H. Hewitt, “The Search for Elizabeth Jennings, Heroine of a Sunday Afternoon in New York City,” New York History 71, No. 4 (1990): 386-415.
[15] John Hewitt, Protest and Progress: New York’s Black Episcopal Church Fights Racism (New York: Routledge, 2000), 131.
[16] Gutman, 302.
[17] Blascoer, 40.
[18] Ibid., 40-41, 129-153; Historian Tanya Hart has thoroughly analyzed Blascoer’s conclusions regarding race and reform, which informs this analysis. For more, see: Tanya Hart, Health in the City: Race, Poverty, and the Negotiation of Women’s Health in New York City, 1915-1930 (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 101-107.
[19] “Bishop Walters, African Episcopal Zion Church,” in Federation 2, No. 1 (1902): 54-55.
[20] Tenement dwelling was often associated with deteriorated boundaries between the privacy of the home and the public nature of domestic work associated with it; women in tenements often had to perform their household duties in more public areas such as courtyards, neighboring apartments, and hallways. Further, they often had to take in lodgers to make ends meet. Consequentially, separated, specialized spaces such as parlors and living rooms became associated with respectability and a feature expressly desired by female tenants. For more, see: Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1986), 41-57.
[21] Thank you to Marta Gutman for her help with this analysis.
[22] Mary Ovington White to W.E.B. Du Bois, December 18, 1905, Du Bois Papers/U.Mass.
[23] Violette, 207.
[24] Kelley, 19-20.
[25] Mary Ovington White to W.E.B. Du Bois, May 20, 1906, Du Bois Papers/U.Mass. For more, see: Mary Ovington White, Black and White Sat Down Together: The Reminiscences of an NAACP Founder (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1996), 53.
[26] Hart, 103.