By Anne M. Filiaci, Ph.D.
Wald and Brewster moved to the College Settlement at 95 Rivington Street during the height of a severe nation-wide depression known as the Panic of 1893. Stock prices had plunged to their lowest point ever in May of that year, and by August one million Americans found themselves unemployed.
During this period, most Americans did not believe it was the federal government’s business to help the poor or to interfere with the business cycle. Public officials consequently did little to respond to the crisis. Starving masses of people in New York had to rely upon the city’s patronage system and a few voluntary charity organizations for jobs, food, ice (critical in the days before refrigeration), shelter, clothing and medical care.
Rose Cohen, a young garment worker who came to the United States from Russia in 1892 at the age of twelve, later recalled the harsh realities faced by the residents of the Lower East Side during that period. “It was slack all over the city at all trades,” she remembered. The neighborhood’s unemployed “walked about idly, looking haggard and shabby.” They “avoided each other” when they met on the street, “ashamed of being seen idle…ashamed of …[their] shabby clothes,” avoiding “each other’s eyes to save each other pain and humiliation.”
Cohen’s family was desperate for food, but her father was initially too proud to ask for aid. It was only when her mother became ill that he was coerced by a doctor and a neighbor to swallow his pride and get help—
“With his usual gruffness the doctor now ordered chicken soup, milk and wine for mother. And only now father went and told our neighbour openly of our difficulties. She advised him hesitatingly to go and apply at ‘Eighth Street.’ Eighth Street was how we referred to the United Hebrew Charities.”
The United Hebrew Charities, overwhelmed by the demand, was unable to efficiently meet the needs of the neighborhood. Its inefficiency exacerbated Cohen’s father’s shame:
“Monday morning after eating some bread father started for ‘Eighth Street.’ He returned in the evening empty handed and sick with humiliation. When he reached the building there was already a long line of people. He stood all day waiting for his turn. He was nowhere near the ‘window’ when the place closed. Next morning, he left at dawn. The day passed and it was dark when we heard his footsteps in the hall. When he opened the door, we saw a pair of chicken feet sticking out of the bag. Father sat down at the table and wept like a child.”
Wald’s benefactor, Jacob Schiff, was a major supporter of the UHC and other philanthropic organizations. He introduced the young nurse to leaders in many of these groups even before she moved to the Lower East Side. Schiff’s introductions allowed all parties involved do their work more effectively.
Wald was able to help UHC by distributing goods and services to the poor. Because she brought the UHC’s donations of food, money and medical help directly to her patients’ homes, she ensured that at least a few more people did not endure the humility of Cohen’s father, spending hours waiting in line, often fruitlessly, for help. In giving aid in the privacy of their homes, she helped them to preserve their pride and dignity.
In May, 1893, Schiff wrote to Charles Frank, superintendent of United Hebrew Charities (UHC)—a “favorite Schiff cause”—to ask if Wald might rely upon the support of the charity’s physicians. The UHC agreed, loaning their doctors to her. They assisted Wald with other matters as well. The very first month she began the work, they provided her with money to help move a “man with rheumatism” from “a damp basement” to “sunnier rooms.”
Wald made sure that she helped the UHC as well. When “Dr. Blumenthal of Madison Avenue performed an unusual operation,” the UHC found itself “in some dilemma” to find “the proper care for the case.” Wald and her nurses stepped in and provided that care.
Jacob Schiff also made sure that Wald had connections with influential people in New York City’s government. In his letter asking for help from the UHC in May of 1893, he assured Charles Frank that the City’s Board of Health would be standing behind the young nurse’s work. Wald later admitted that she had, relying upon the graces of “a mutual friend [Schiff?],” “met the President of the Board of Health and,” she said, “I fear rather presumptuously, asked that we be given some insignia.” The President, “tolerant” of what Wald called her “intense earnestness,” allowed the nurses to wear “a badge which had engraved on its circle,”
Wald soon revealed her talent for diplomacy and knack for cultivating important allies by keeping the City’s Health Department informed of her activities and findings. “Every night, during the first summer,” she said, “I wrote to the physician in charge, reporting the sick babies and describing unsanitary conditions Miss Brewster and I found….” In response, the Department gave “many encouraging reminders that what we were doing was considered helpful.”
Wald settled into her new living space at the College Settlement and soon she and Brewster were working day and night caring for and comforting their patients. In addition to working with the UHC, they were helping a “typhoid patient” on Ludlow Street, tending to “two children with measles” and a sick infant on Hester Street. On a typical house call, one of them visited a sick woman at 7:00 p.m., taking her flowers and clean bedding. While there, she “made egg-nog and left her in nursing condition for the night.”
By “paying two dollars,” Wald found “two weeks at a pleasant place in the hills,” along with medical attention and a decent wardrobe, for “Sara Inlander, a young girl with heart disease.” She also found “a place at Priory Farm with the Nazareth Bros. Dutchess [sic] County N.Y.,” for another sick man, and convinced the United Hebrew Charities to pay “for his ticket there,” hoping that “a few weeks in the mountains will build him up sufficiently to be a worker again.”
During those first weeks and months, Wald also had to face and overcome fear and ignorance from patients about her intentions and her methods. Many of her new neighbors did not want to open their doors to strangers, and not a few were superstitious about modern medical procedures. When Wald tried to treat one family’s children who had measles, she reported, it was only “after much argument” that she was able to convince their worried and desperate parents that it was safe to let her bathe the youngsters.
Shortly after Wald began to confront the often dire circumstances of the neighborhood’s residents, she realized that most needed much more than nursing assistance to promote their health and well-being. When she found a fifteen-year-old boy from Liverpool living in the streets, abandoned by those who brought him to the States, she
“[g]ot him bed and food…, bath…, clean clothes…, a ticket from the proper emigration agent and in a very few days had him back to his parents in England, who though poor were not at all angry with the boy and ready to take him home.”
Seeing that “Mrs. Jacobson and her two children” were “homeless” and “without work,” Wald found a job for the mother with the Children’s Aid Society for “a few weeks as bed-maker” and located “a place for the children while” she worked. Wald also found a janitorial job for an unemployed man with her friends at the University Settlement House. When the Herald, a New York newspaper, began distributing ice to the poor, Wald visited its editor and asked him to give bread instead—explaining that the people she worked with were so poor that they had “nothing to put on the ice.”
Even during the darkest economic times for the most poverty-stricken, Wald realized that it was important to bring pleasure and fun to her neighbors as well as work, food and medical assistance. In July of 1893, she distributed tickets for a picnic sponsored by the Hebrew Sanitarium to mothers and children in her neighborhood. While doing so she noticed that “five of the seven children” chosen to go were “nearly naked.” Concluding that “the people we encounter are so wretchedly poor that clothing and carfare must be provided or the tickets are useless,” Wald was able to get additional assistance for at least some of the ticket holders, enabling them to buy clothes and transportation to attend the picnic.
During these first months, Wald was learning as well as helping. She began to absorb the culture of the Lower East Side and to respect the strength and resourcefulness of the people who lived there. Later she would recall the vitality of summer streets, streets bustling with humanity twenty-four hours a day. “It is necessary,” she said, “to spend a summer in our neighborhood to realize fully the conditions under which many thousands of children are reared.” “One night,” she remembered, during her “first month on the East Side” “sleepless because of the heat,” she “leaned out of the window and looked down on Rivington Street” at two o’clock in the morning. She later remembered the scene she witnessed:
“Life was in full course there. Some of the push-cart venders [sic] still sold their wares. Sitting on a 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 youngest and the oldest; children were asleep on the sidewalks, on the steps of the houses and in the empty push-carts; some of the more venturesome men and women with mattress or pillow staggered toward the riverfront or the parks.”
These late night/early morning summer scenes were the rule rather than the exception in her new neighborhood. “Many times since that summer of 1893,” she later revealed, “have I seen similar sights.”
Wald also made connections with her housemates, and would work closely with many of the women she met at the College Settlement throughout the coming decades. She found them “serious,” “stimulating,” and possessed with “a saving sense of humor.” Yet by the end of August she was feeling the need for her own place. She wrote to Mrs. Loeb,
Our work is not identical with the work of the College Settlement, and now that their regular winter work begins, the rooms that we occupy should be used for workers who can give their time wholly to the specific work of the house, which as you know is chiefly club work.
She and Brewster decided to strike out on their own.
NOTE:
Page for United Hebrew Charities, not available in Internet Explorer, available in Chrome. http://www.jbfcs.org/about/agency-history/#.VWh9kM9VhBc
Bibliography
Adler, Cyrus, Jacob H. Schiff: His Life and Letters, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Co., Inc., 1929, vols. I & II
Buk-Swienty, Tom, The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008
Carson, Mina, Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885-1930, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990
Cohen, Naomi W., Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership, Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1999
Daniels, Doris Groshen, Always a Sister: The Feminism of Lillian D. Wald, New York, Feminist Press, 1989
Davis, Allen F., Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914, New York, Oxford University Press, 1967
Duffus, R.L., Lillian Wald: Neighbor and Crusader, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1939
[Epstein], Beryl Williams, Lillian Wald: Angel of Henry Street [author’s name on title page is “Beryl Williams”], NY: Julian Messner, Inc., 1948
Feld, Marjorie N., Lillian Wald: A Biography, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009
Lubove, Roy, The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890-1917, np: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962
Muncy, Robyn, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991
Simkhovitch, Mary Kingsbury, Neighborhood: My Story of Greenwich House, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1938
Wald Papers, New York Public Library:
Letter/Reports from Wald:
To ?, July 7, 1893
To Jacob H. Schiff, 59 Cedar St., from LDW, 95 Rivington St., Aug. 29, 1893
Wald, Lillian D., The House on Henry Street, N:Y: Henry Holt & Co., 1915
Waugh, Joan, Unsentimental Reformer: The Life of Josephine Shaw Lowell, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997
Woods, Robert A. and Albert J. Kennedy, The Settlement Horizon: A National Estimate, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1922
Photographs and Images
NYC, Muncipal Archives Photo Gallery, 89-95 Rivington Street Link to Illustration (1980s, might not be same building) Current 9/5/13
NYPL, Rivington Street, University Settlement Library, http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?100886 n.d, Current 9/5/13
Library of Congress Digital Collections, “The Ghetto, New York,” Rivington Street, Detroit Publishing Co. 1880-1920 Link to Illustration Current 9/5/13
See also Link to Illustration Current 9/5/13
Eleanor Roosevelt Paper’s project has one of the above pictures, dated 1909, from LC:
http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/teachinger/glossary/college-settlement.cfm Current 9/5/13
NYPL, Street Peddler, Lower East Side, nd http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?806176 Current 9/5/13
NYPL, Market Day in Jewish Quarter of Lower East Side, 1912, http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?464306 Current 9/5/13
NYPL, New York, Essex and Hester Streets, 190_ http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?837003 Current 9/5/13