The House on Henry Street: And Interview with Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier
Interviewed by Marjorie N. Feld
Today on the blog, Marjorie N. Feld interviews Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier, author of The House on Henry Street: The Enduring Life of a Lower East Side Settlement. This book moves Snyder-Grenier into Manhattan and the rich history of a settlement house, founded by a dynamic Progressive activist named Lillian Wald, in 1893. Unlike so many of the settlement houses founded in that fascinating historical moment, Henry Street is still very much alive as a social service agency, still helping its Lower East Side neighbors after over a century.
Talk a bit about the founder of Henry Street, Lillian Wald. You tell us that she’s someone who really defied conventional expectations of gender, race, and class, who saw a population in need and decided to dedicate her life to meeting those needs. What was the Lower East Side like when Wald first encountered it, and what about that historical moment made her see Henry Street as a possible remedy to broader social ills?
The House on Henry Street: The Enduring Life of a Lower East Side Settlement
By Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier
NYU Press, 2020
256 pages
In 1893, when Lillian Wald founded Henry Street Settlement — which would become one of the nation’s most renowned social welfare agencies — the Lower East Side was a vibrant, bustling immigrant neighborhood known for its large population of recently arrived Eastern European Jews. It was also crowded and poverty stricken. Newcomers had to grapple with the challenges forged by skyrocketing industry, rapid urbanization, and greed: jobs that demanded grueling hours in cramped surroundings for paltry pay; rundown, overcrowded housing; streets strewn with garbage and raw sewage; and more. Wald witnesses this numbing poverty up close in 1893, when she tends to a young mother in a tenement home. The woman, hemorrhaging after childbirth, had been abandoned by her doctor because she could not pay his fee.
That moment, what Wald calls her "baptism of fire,” leads her to do what would have seemed outlandish for a young (she was 26) middle-class woman of her time: she decides to live in the heart of the Lower East Side in the belief that by tending to the sick, providing preventative healthcare, and coming to personally know her neighbors and the troubles they faced, she could help address poverty’s problems.
Like other Progressive-era reformers, Lillian Wald believes that the environment is to blame for poverty — not the immigrant newcomers (as many held). She decides that to really make a difference, it’s not just about treating the sick, it’s about improving the environment. She realizes, for example, that nursing a tailor with tuberculosis back to health matters little if he is only to return to working 12 hours a day in an airless room; the solution lay in labor reforms. She realizes that bandaging a child’s burn — a burn suffered in a tenement blaze — is stopgap if reforms aren’t enacted to make tenements safe.
Wald believes that the nurse’s job is not only to cure illness but, as she says, to “help in seeking out the deep-lying basic causes of illness and misery” and do something about it. For Wald, problems lead to action. Case becomes cause. And like other Progressives, Wald looks to government and society to address the systemic inequality that undergirds the conditions on the impoverished Lower East Side.
In some marvelous turns of phrase, you call Wald a “gifted executive, a savvy networker, and a charismatic connector.” You also refer to her life story as an “anthem.” I (Marjorie Feld) have written about Wald and served on the NEH team that led to your Henry Street exhibit. And as I read this book I wondered: what about Wald’s life story continues to captivate us?
I’d have to start by saying that Lillian Wald clearly captivated people in her own time. Jacob Riis, the photographer and social reformer who exposes the poverty of the Lower East Side to the nation in How the Other Half Lives, calls Wald New York City’s “heart” and “wise head.” When civil rights activist and NAACP leader Walter White visits the Settlement, he writes in the guest book that “Inscriptions to ordinary mortals are easy—to one so great as Lillian Wald, to express adequately one’s admiration, impossible.” Rose Gollup Cohen, a child who Wald encounters on a nursing visit and draws into the Settlement’s fold, rejoices in Wald’s “affectionate kindness.” Jacob Patent, who immigrates with his impoverished mother from Minsk, Russia in 1907, attends Henry Street clubs and recalls how “When Wald visited, we almost choked her with our affections! She was known as Mother Henry.” Another club member, Abraham Davis, remembers how captivated he was by her and the lessons she shared — “that democracy was a social unit; that race was unimportant but that people were; and that democracy was an evolving process, and that improvement did not come as a result of lip service but out of active doing.”
But as you say, Lillian Wald’s story continues to captivate us today. Like you, I find her to be incredibly inspiring, and your seminal work on her, Lillian Wald: A Biography, gives us many reasons to feel that way. But let me share a few things that come immediately to mind for me.
For one, I think Lillian Wald is an accessible hero. This is a person who administered a vast nursing enterprise; who fought for immigrants, for education, and against exploitive labor at the highest levels; who publicly confronted racism alongside W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells; whose studies on poverty helped inspire the goals of the New Deal. But for all her global renown, she feels real and relatable. Those who knew her say she exuded joy and warmth. One of the favorite documents I came across in my research is a one-page, typed ode to Wald titled “The Settlemental Queen.” It has little hand-drawn illustrations around the borders that show her out in public, fighting for immigrant and labor rights — but also at home in her “lady overalls,” painting the walls at the Settlement. Wald feels as if she could be one of us, today.
Second, I think her life is inspiring to anyone who ever was told they couldn’t do something and shouldn’t bother to try. She confronted and bent or overcame so many of the societal barriers of her time. Her actions, her aspirations, and the words she writes about these moments are uplifting, and feel eerily but wonderfully relevant to our own times.
Third, I think that the event that inspires her to create Henry Street — her “baptism of fire” — inspires us to ask ourselves (as many great stories about people responding to crisis do), what would I have done? How would I have responded? And from there, it helps us think about how we might react to what we see around us now. What would Lillian Wald do? What could I do?
You call Wald’s vision of Henry Street Settlement an “enduring blueprint.” You chart HSS’s changing leadership alongside changing approaches to philanthropy and neighborhood cooperation, to the goals and methods of social work over time, to today. How is it that Wald’s vision, her blueprint, continues to endure? What keeps its work relevant and important?
I think that there a few things that have helped Henry Street Settlement endure and, in enduring, continue to serve a vital role on the Lower East Side and in New York City. For one, unlike other settlement houses founded in the late 19th and early 20th century, Henry Street began life as a visiting nurse service. By traveling through the city and into people’s homes and lives, it allowed them to know people’s challenges in ways other organizations could not. Even after the visiting nurse service separates from the Settlement in 1944 and becomes the stand-alone Visiting Nurse Service of New York, that idea of being on the ground in the community — talking, listening — continues to characterize Henry Street today.
Second, the Settlement moved with the times. That mattered a lot as attitudes about poverty shifted, the city changed, and newcomers began to arrive from other places — such as African Americans from the South and Puerto Ricans who arrive in the mid-1900s, a new wave of Chinese immigrants that emerges in the late 1900s, and others. Henry Street welcomed and embraced these new arrivals and carried on.
And third, I think there are timeless core values that undergirded Wald’s work: that poverty is a social issue; that there is power in bridging differences; that neighbors matter; that in times of need, we should act. These values still guide Henry Street’s work today.
Tell us how you used the archives, and what stories you found there that are, perhaps, still there for other researchers to mine.
The archival resources are incredible. I spent most of my time in two especially rich repositories: the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and Columbia University’s Health Sciences Library in New York City (their respective archivists, Linnea Anderson and Stephen Novak, were enormously helpful).
On the topic of Henry Street Settlement, there is so much yet to be mined — on Lillian Wald, her successors, and the people and life of the organization — that it’s really hard for me to pull out just a few stories, but let me mention two.
I think there are myriad opportunities in exploring the worlds of the public health nurses who made up Lilian Wald’s early corps, especially the worlds of the Settlement’s Black nurses. While some great work has been done, I think there’s room for more. There are reports, employment records, photographs, newspaper articles, and even film to explore. I remember when I first watched a Henry Street promotional film in the collections of the Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive at USC — a film of a Black nurse climbing over docks to reach a patient on a houseboat — and I thought, wow, this is a window onto daily city life that is truly remarkable, and probably one that is not well known among historians.
Another great project, I think, would be to explore the arts program at Henry Street through time. While there has been some excellent work done on elements of it, following its trajectory from the late 19th century to today would be a fascinating lens onto culture and society. Wald believed that the arts were essential to a full life, and the arts have always been a focus at Henry Street, from the leadership of the Lewisohn sisters and the early Neighborhood Playhouse, to the tenure of Alwyn Nikolais and his leadership in avant-garde dance, to the groundbreaking work of Woodie King Jr. and the New Federal Theatre, to today’s Abrons Arts Center, which opened in 1975 as the first arts center to be designed and built specifically for a predominantly low-income neighborhood.
As you note, Wald worked tirelessly to establish health care as a human right. I can’t help but note that we are talking about a public health advocate in a moment of a HUGE public health crisis in a country that in so many ways is stumbling, failing, to address the needs of its diverse populations. What is it like to be thinking about your work on Wald in this moment? Dare I ask what you think she might make of this moment, what she’d say?
I think she would be taken aback — and then she’d get to work. I also think we can imagine her response by looking at how she responds to a crisis in her own time. In 1918/19, the Spanish flu killed between fifty and 100 million people worldwide. When it hits New York City, what does Wald do? First, she affirms that her own visiting nurse service will not refuse a call. She exudes calm: “There is nothing in the epidemic of Spanish Influenza to inspire panic,” she asserts; “there is everything to inspire coolness and courage and sacrifice.” Then, she galvanizes others: called upon by the city, she heads a coordinated response by hospitals, nursing schools, social work agencies, and religious organizations. And then, just as importantly, she pushes those in power to plan ahead. “The time must come,” she says in 1919, “when all peoples of the world will combine to solve these questions which know no boundaries. Typhus and influenza have no respect for frontiers, and world-wide epidemics must be met by united force.” With Wald, it was never just about that moment but about creating a better future for generations to come, and about bridging divides of race, class, and culture, to do so. That is what she what would challenge us to do today.
Finally, I want to end on a note of hope, because ultimately I think your book is about hope. Is there a Henry Street story that you think encapsulates its role as a “vital and caring neighbor in a vibrant and always changing neighborhood”?
Absolutely I believe it is a story about hope. Henry Street is still facing some of the most intractable social issues of the day, but as David Garza, the Settlement’s President & CEO puts it, hope is what drives him: he wants to give people hope for a better future. That’s what Henry Street has always done, and continues to do; it helps to balance an unbalanced playing field and to open up opportunities.
While you can see it in the stories that play out every day throughout Henry Street’s programs, perhaps the best example is its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. When the pandemic struck, the Settlement nimbly pivoted to address the dire need by opening up a hotline; expanding its Meals on Wheels service to reach older and immunocompromised people directed to stay home; provided emergency cash assistance to those in need; opened a food pantry; and made myriad calls to housebound seniors who were isolated and alone. This kind of help is essential in a neighborhood where one half of Henry Street’s neighbors are income insecure, nearly one-third of adults live below the poverty line, and systemic racism has led to people of color suffering disproportionately from the pandemic. The Settlement is also planning ahead, so that it can respond to the economic trauma that follows in the pandemic’s wake.
So it all comes back to that idea that there is hope — hope in neighbor helping neighbor and acting in times of need, as Henry Street has always done and as each of us can do. Lillian Wald would, I think, strongly agree.
Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier is a national-award winning curator and writer, and the principal of REW and Co. She directs research projects, develops museum exhibitions, and writes on urban history, with a focus on social justice. She is the author of an award-winning history of Brooklyn and a Fellow of the New York Academy of History.
Marjorie N. Feld is a professor of History at Babson College and the author of Lillian Wald: A Biography.