Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [932]
Returning to Manhattan just as the 1886 mayoral campaign was gearing up, Coit prevailed on Adler’s Ethical Culture Society to help establish the New York Neighborhood Guild. In a four-room tenement apartment at 146 Forsyth Street, in a mixed German, Irish, and Jewish neighborhood, Coit worked to provide private services to the poor and to organize the poor themselves to demand better public ones. Coit was soon joined by Charles B. Stover, a social gospel man par excellence. A graduate of the Union Theological Seminary, Stover had been a mission worker on the Bowery, directed the Ethical Culture Society’s model tenement house, and helped organize the Society of Christian Socialists. When Coit departed in 1888 to accept a ministerial position in London, Stover became head of what would be renamed the University Settlement.
Soon idealistic and well-bred young men were flocking to the slums. In 1891 a group of Episcopalian laymen—backed financially by Robert Fulton Cutting, J. P. Morgan, and Cornelius Vanderbilt—established East Side House at 76th Street and the East River in an Irish and German neighborhood. In 1892 the Educational Alliance opened its doors, with support from Jacob Schiff, Isaac Seligman, and Isidor Straus. In 1895 alumni of the Union Theological Seminary began the Union Settlement in a tenement at 202 East 96th. Brooklyn joined the movement in 1889, when Maxwell House was established on Concord Street by members of the Second Unitarian Church. These and other groups established kindergartens, libraries, clubs, classes, concerts, gyms, and playgrounds and helped organize neighborhoods to press for public baths, parks, and cooperative stores.
At first the settlements were all-male enterprises, but in 1889 Vida Scudder, an impassioned young Wellesley instructor who had visited Oxford and been inspired by English developments, joined with alumnae from Wellesley, Smith, Vassar, and Bryn Mawr to establish the College Settlement at 95 Rivington Street, in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. For well-bred females to live among the poor was unprecedented. The first visitor was a policeman who, convinced the women were opening a whorehouse, promised to leave them alone if they paid him the customary contribution. The press sneered at the project. “Seven Lilies have been dropped in the mud,” one paper observed, “and the mud does not seem particularly pleased.”
Widespread disapproval didn’t stop over eighty college women from applying for residency. The settlement house movement was made to order for this first generation of female graduates, who, having stepped outside restrictive domesticity, found it hard to step back into it. Settlement houses offered a means to live outside the bourgeois home and to extend the freedom and comradeship of student years. The Rivington Street women, who furnished their building with pictures, books, and a piano, noted that “upstairs, in our rooms, it seemed as if we were back in college again.”
For all their challenges to bourgeois gender roles, settlement house women insisted on their place in the genteel world. They were, after all, embarked on an unimpeachably proper project—the purveying of elite culture to their plebeian neighbors—and early programs had a distinctly Arnoldian aspect. Art exhibitions diffused a sense of beauty; a Good Seed Club for girls taught about flowers; a Hero Club for boys showed how the Knights of the Round Table had learned to be “chivalrous and true.” Some classes taught the art of serving tea from a silver service or