Skyscraper Settlement: An Interview with Joyce Milambiling

Today on Gotham, David Huyssen interviews Joyce Milambiling about her recent book, Skyscraper Settlement: The Many Lives of Christodora House (New Village Press, 2023). Joyce Milambiling is a writer and educator. Retired since 2021 from the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Northern Iowa, she also taught within the CUNY system as an Adjunct Instructor while pursuing a doctorate in Linguistics at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her articles have appeared in such publications as Academe and English Teaching Forum, and she contributed a chapter entitled "The Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights" to the 2018 book, Language and Social Justice in Practice.

The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

In a nutshell, what was the Skyscraper Settlement? What was Christodora House’s mission at the time of its founding?

Christodora House was one of the early settlement houses established in New York City. Beginning at the close of the nineteenth century, Christodora, like other settlement houses (such as the University Settlement or Henry Street Settlement), provided educational, medical, and other services to the thousands of immigrants flocking to U.S. cities. The settlement house workers also developed relationships with their neighbors across socioeconomic, ethnic, and religious divides.

At that time, there was no such thing as a social safety net—this was before the government, at any systematic level, assisted residents with services such as healthcare or what is now known as social work. Christodora House, in fact, housed one of the first Red Cross stations in Lower Manhattan.

In 1928, the philanthropists Arthur Curtiss James and his wife, Harriet Parsons James, helped Christodora House expand its work in the Tompkins Square Park neighborhood by funding a new, 16-story structure at 143 Avenue B. Calling it “the skyscraper settlement” was a way of calling attention to how Christodora House, then and now, is a distinctive structure that towers over the other buildings in the neighborhood.

Who were the central figures in founding Christodora, and what shaped their orientation toward the social problems of turn-of-the-century New York?

Skyscraper Settlement: The Many Lives of Christodora House
by Joyce Milambling
New Village Press
September 2023, 288 pp.

Christodora House was founded in 1897 by Christina MacColl and Sara Carson, two young women who had worked together at the YWCA in Harlem. They recognized the need to provide the type of support and social services on Avenue B that a handful of other settlement houses were already providing elsewhere in the city. These two individuals were drawn to the settlement house movement’s idea that living alongside the urban poor was the only way to truly understand the living conditions in the tenement neighborhoods, and that residing there was essential to determining what was most needed.

For MacColl and Carson, their Christian faith and the Social Gospel provided motivation for the type of work to which they were committed at the YWCA and Christodora House. The Social Gospel was a movement that emerged in the late 1800s combining religious principles with calls for social justice and reform. MacColl did not view what they did as proselytization for a particular religious sect. For her, the settlement house was ultimately “a social center that should be tolerant, educationally effective, and conducted without evasion on a truly religious, non-sectarian basis.”

How did Christodora compare to other well-known settlements of the period, such as Hull House in Chicago or the Henry Street Settlement in New York?

The staff at Christodora House, like every settlement house, tailored their focus and activities to the specific people they served and with whom they worked. Like Jane Addams in Chicago and Lillian Wald to the south on Henry Street, Christina MacColl and the other workers at Christodora House had a significant and lasting impact on their neighborhood in particular ways.

For example, Christodora House was the home of the Poets’ Guild, a distinguished group of authors, including Robert Frost and Sara Teasdale, who brought poetry and literature directly to the adults and children who came through the settlement house doors. Later, during the New Deal, its programs became a vehicle for the WPA Writing Project. As with the other settlements, New York news outlets frequently reported on the activities of Christodora House, from its founding in 1897 and throughout its years of operation.

What do you think historians have gotten wrong about Christodora House?

Christina MacColl image courtesy of Christodora (christodora.org)

Some historians, in my view, have exaggerated the importance of Christodora’s interest in Christian proselytizing and assimilation of its immigrant neighbors to the “American way of life.” Christodora House put up Christmas decorations and held prayer and Bible meetings, particularly in the early years. These practices, along with the fact that the name, Christodora, means “gift of Christ,” have contributed to the assumption that it actively sought conversion of its patrons.

Yet its leadership embraced the fact that those patrons, year after year, came from and maintained different faiths. As Christina MacColl once stated, “Enough of God’s love can make Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Gentile live in harmony, each expressing the religious belief which he daily learns from God. The settlement ever seeks to emphasize the common grounds, never to emphasize differences.”

Christodora House provided a safe space where immigrants and other city dwellers could avail themselves of classes, clubs, and medical treatment, among other non-sectarian services. On a broad scale, the settlement house provided a pathway for many immigrants to a better education, citizenship, higher-paying jobs, and a more secure foothold in their new surroundings. Mina Carson’s conclusion in Settlement Folk (1990) still applies: “People came to the settlement because they needed what it had to offer.”

As you explain in the book, Christodora runs into financial difficulties in trying to sustain itself as a settlement house through Depression, war, and the loss of its primary benefactor, Arthur Curtiss James. How did this change the focus of its activities?

The federal government's cancellation of the WPA Writing Project in 1943 and the sale of the 16-story building in 1948 to the City of New York amounted to loss of funding and physical space, both of which were crucial to the arts programs and medical clinics for which Christodora had become known. Furthermore, financial pressure and changes in neighborhood demographics led to a greater demand for counseling and age-specific programs for which the settlement house had neither staff nor sufficient budget.

However, there was a growing demand for Christodora’s outdoor programs and day camps in the city as well as the camping and nature programs at Northover Camp in New Jersey. The organization’s Board came to realize that nature and outdoor programs were a strength they could build on, and this contributed to a new vision for the organization after it ceased to be a traditional settlement house.

Christodora Settlement House opposite Tompkins Square Park, Avenue B, New York City. Photo 1929 by Irving Underhill, Museum of the City of New York

In addition to selling the 143 Avenue B building to the City, Christodora defrayed expenses by forming a partnership with NYCHA (New York City Housing Authority) in 1948. What was the nature of that arrangement? What were its advantages or disadvantages in your view?

The relationship between NYCHA and Christodora was not so much a “partnership” as a marriage of convenience for both. In effect, Christodora received the benefit of NYCHA’s space in the Riis Houses without the burden of paying rent or utilities; NYCHA residents benefited in turn from Christodora’s services. Either party, however, could end the arrangement with ninety days’ notice, and NYCHA took advantage of this option to try to influence Christodora over which services were delivered on its premises. This kind of outside pressure was new.

Nevertheless, the staff of Christodora House continued to deliver its programs and services independently in other venues in the city, and at its summer camp in New Jersey.

Tell us a little bit about how you came to this project. How did you get inspired to work on it, and how did that inspiration intersect (or not) with your previous work?

Several years ago, I came upon an electronic listing for a collection of letters written in 1918 by Helen Schechter—an Eastern European immigrant who was learning English at Christodora House—addressed to her English teacher, a volunteer by the name of Ellen Gould. The letters were in the New-York Historical Society (NYHS) archives and had not been digitized; thus, only a description and summary were available online.

I am a linguist by training and initially knew little about the settlement houses, and I had never heard of Christodora House. I subsequently explored, in person, the letters at NYHS and a rich collection of material at Columbia University to expand on what the letters had only hinted at. I was particularly interested in how and why Helen Schechter and Ellen Gould came into contact, and what they meant to each other. It was a logical next step to widen the scope of my inquiry to Christodora House, the settlement house movement, and their significance to the communities they served.

My impression from the book is that you have a fairly sympathetic view of Christodora’s history, and of settlement houses more generally as a useful model of social service. What do you think are the distinctive redeeming qualities of settlements, or of Christodora more specifically?

My purpose is to put a face on settlement houses and the vital work in which they were and continue to be engaged. I do try to acknowledge the movement’s controversies and shortcomings, while also situating Christodora in historical context.

I also think that Christodora House has an amazing history, too much of which has become obscured by time and influenced by what the building has come to represent to many people.

The building at 143 Avenue B deteriorated in the 1960s and 70s after the City abandoned it, making it a symbol of urban blight. Later, its 1986 conversion to condominiums associated it with conflicts over gentrification in the East Village. It took center stage in those conflicts when protesters from Tompkins Square Park broke into and vandalized the building in 1988. Although its architectural and historic value have since earned it spots on both the National Register and the State Register of Historic Places, its settlement-era history remains under-appreciated.

The settlement house movement, despite its flaws, confronted social problems head-on and provided entire communities with both urgent social services and opportunities for growth and development. Christodora is an important part of that story.

Many contemporary commentators have observed that the levels of inequality in New York have reached levels not seen since the first Gilded Age. Does Christodora, or institutions like it, have a significant role to play in addressing that inequality in our own day?

The settlement houses and community centers that operate today play a critical role in offering the kinds of services and welcoming premises that have always been their hallmark. Hamilton-Madison House in the Two Bridges/Chinatown area of Manhattan's Lower East Side, as one example, is a leading provider of behavioral health services, including extensive community outreach, for New York City’s Asian community.

When it was a settlement house, Christodora offered English as a Second Language instruction to immigrants, and these types of classes are still much in demand at today’s settlement houses and other community organizations in NYC and across the country. Settlement houses have always depended on building reciprocal relationships among people of different backgrounds, and these institutions were, both in the past and present, based on goals rooted in principles of equality and social justice.

Christodora, as a foundation that provides educational services to youth in New York City schools with a focus on ecology and outdoor education, is an example of how the spirit of settlement house work lives on, even when it has evolved in form and function.

David Huyssen is a historian of political economy, inequality, capitalism, labor, and urban life, specializing in the United States. His first book, Progressive Inequality (Harvard UP, 2014), examines class relations in New York and the U.S. during the Long Gilded Age. He is currently completing a history of Alfred Winslow Jones, the socialist creator of the modern hedge fund.