Abstract
This essay argues that the settlement movement was inextricably bound up with the life and death of urban renewal. It traces the origins and development of the urban narratives that motivated and sustained settlement workers’ complex involvement in the physical and figurative processes of remaking the neighborhoods in which they lived. More specifically, the essay examines several settlement leaders’ deployment of a “sidewalk narrative” and “tenement narrative” to both advocate slum clearance and public housing and to unravel the logic of urban renewal. When we assess settlement leaders’ roles in shaping the narratives underpinning urban renewal, we become less concerned with blaming them for redevelopment’s social injuries or in excusing them because of their good intentions.
Keywords
In her “Introduction” to The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jane Jacobs credits William Kirk—head worker at East Harlem’s Union Settlement from 1949 to 1971—for giving her a “way of seeing” and “understanding the intricate social and economic order under the seeming disorder of cities.” 1 Jacobs had met Kirk in the midfifties while working as an associate editor at Architectural Forum. When Kirk approached the magazine’s editors with the hope of convincing them to look into the social and economic consequences of the extensive slum clearance and public housing construction that had radically reshaped life in East Harlem, Jacobs took him up on his invitation to walk around the neighborhood’s remade landscape. With Kirk as her guide, she discovered the “social poverty” of East Harlem’s redeveloped terrain—discoveries that she would draw heavily on just a short time later in her career-launching talk at the Conference on Urban Design in the spring of 1956. Kirk had helped her see, she explained to conference goers, that some of the most “important sides of city life, much of the charm, the creative social activity and the vitality” tend to be located in the city’s “old vestigial areas.” 2 This particular urban vision—one that locates social and economic value in the type of city real estate targeted by urban renewal for clearance and redevelopment—lay at the heart of Death and Life and would serve as Jacobs’s calling card for years to come. But, as Jacobs was quick to point out, this vision had a distinct genealogy, at least one line of which ran through the settlement house.
Although Jacobs singles out Kirk as a primary intellectual source for her deadly “attack” on “modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding,” she cites several settlement workers throughout Death and Life as influential and authoritative interpreters of city life. Jacobs praises Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch of New York City’s Greenwich House for fusing the “neighborhood networks” through which Greenwich Village acquired much of its “social capital.” She credits Frank Havey, settlement director of Boston’s North End Union, for recognizing that the city sidewalk is the space where a healthy urban “community is at its strongest.” And she characterizes settlement workers, in general, as one of many types of “public characters” on which the “social structure of sidewalk life hangs.” 3 Jacobs’s repeated references to these and other settlement leaders suggest that the particular “way of seeing” the city that she inherited from Kirk is deeply connected to the settlement movement’s approach to urban life. Given Jacobs’s personal involvement in New York’s settlement scene—she served on Union Settlement’s Board of Directors before and after the publication of Death and Life, and actively participated on several of the institution’s committees—it is not difficult to attach her influential rejection of urban renewal’s rebuilding techniques and social strategies to the brand of urbanism that settlement workers had been practicing since the late nineteenth century. Settlement workers taught Jacobs the value of public relationships and drew her attention to the types of urban space that fostered those relationships. They articulated an urban narrative that revolved around the city’s sidewalks, stoops, and storefronts, and that would become an important refrain in the efforts of city dwellers to unravel the logic of urban renewal.
Ironically, this same cast of settlement characters helped blaze the narrative paths on which bulldozers and cranes had traveled into neighborhoods like East Harlem. While their sidewalk narrative would ultimately help undermine the urban renewal order, settlement workers had simultaneously been telling a story about city life that helped form the emotional and intellectual foundations on which this order would be built. Unlike the sidewalk narrative, this other settlement story about the city dwelt on the inadequacies of the tenement home and, during the interwar period, culminated in a demand for federally subsidized public housing units. Through the tenement narrative, settlement leaders such as Greenwich House’s Simkhovitch helped to construct the legal, financial, and social apparatuses with which cities and their neighborhoods could rid themselves of dilapidated tenements and erect new, but affordable, housing in their place. Other settlement leaders such as Henry Street’s Helen Hall strove to ensure that those whose lives would be directly affected by public housing could tell their own version of this urban story. Through the institutional support and structure of settlement houses, the city’s working classes conducted studies in order to prove the economic feasibility of slum clearance and subsidized housing; organized marches and parades to protest living conditions in the tenements; wrote and performed plays about their neighborhoods; and traveled to the nation’s capital to make their needs known before the federal government. As low-rent housing projects began to rise from the tenement rubble, many settlements dedicated themselves to making life in their neighbors’ new homes a satisfying experience.
The settlement movement was, in short, inextricably bound up with the life and death of urban renewal. Rather than simply dismiss the movement’s seemingly contradictory interventions in the history of urban renewal as the result of some institutional flaw or ideological wishy-washiness, this essay traces the origins and development of the urban narratives that motivated and sustained these settlement workers’ complex involvement in the physical and figurative processes of remaking the neighborhoods in which they lived. During their Progressive Era heyday, settlement writers frequently grounded their social critiques in the physical condition of their neighbors’ tenement homes. Through maps, graphs, and the written word, these writers exposed the many ways in which urban domestic spaces had been degraded by economic, political, and cultural forces. In the interwar period, settlement workers played up what I call the movement’s “tenement narrative,” adapting and extending its Progressive Era conventions in order to lead a chorus of voices demanding slum clearance and low-rent housing. While settlement writers spent much of their energy exposing the physical condition of the tenement home in order to bring about social and political reform, they also drew their readers’ attention to and championed the value of public life that they encountered on the streets of the working-class and immigrant neighborhoods in which they lived. This “sidewalk narrative” surfaces early and often in the settlement movement’s large turn-of-the-century literary canon as a way of resisting nativist social codes and promoting its new brand of urban philanthropy. During the New Deal period, settlement workers and their neighbors underwrote their push for public housing with the sidewalk narrative in an attempt to positively describe the type of urban public that public housing would shelter. Finally, while their celebration of public life had never been quite as prominent as their condemnations of tenement living, in the postwar period settlement workers relied primarily on the sidewalk narrative to call attention to and temper the social and physical consequences of urban renewal.
Crediting settlement workers as architects of urban renewal’s intellectual infrastructure addresses significant gaps in the historical accounts of urban renewal. The settlement movement’s participation in twentieth-century city redevelopment may largely be overlooked because, as Jon C. Teaford puts it, conventional histories of urban renewal have been written primarily from the “vantage point” of “Capitol Hill” rather than “city hall”—and thus highlight the “origins of federal policies,” “legislative history,” and “administrative developments” in Washington, D.C. 4 However, even recent accounts of urban renewal’s much more localized events and participants have typically overlooked activity emanating from settlement houses. 5 Historians of the settlement movement have not been much more attentive to its practical and intellectual contributions to urban renewal, perhaps in large part because their work tends to hover around the Progressive Era. 6 In my efforts to recover the settlement movement as an important strand of urban renewal’s intellectual history, I am not suggesting that settlement workers were the most important architects of urban redevelopment and that historians have been egregiously remiss in their scholarship by not giving them more notice. Rather, given the settlement leader’s status as both a political player and culture maker, seeing urban renewal through the writings and activism of settlement workers provides access to this moment of urban history from a critical position that has not been occupied as often as it might. If we were to examine settlement workers as just another set of urban reformers that paved the way for urban renewal, it would be easy to see them, as Joel Schwartz has, as duplicitous and self-interested individuals who sold out the urban poor that they claimed to protect to the politically and economically powerful. 7 When we assess settlement leaders’ roles in shaping the narratives underpinning urban renewal, however, we become less concerned with blaming them for redevelopment’s social injuries or in excusing them because of their good intentions.
Thinking about the narratives underpinning urban renewal rather than the individuals that legislated it complicates traditional accounts of this style of urbanism. First, this narrative approach modifies the timeline within which the history of urban renewal is typically discussed by pushing it back to the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. 8 Second, focusing on the settlement movement’s narratives rather than its leaders paradoxically increases the number and type of influential actors in the drama of urban renewal worthy of consideration, namely, the urbanites who were most affected by it. Finally, examining the urban narratives that both inspired and undermined the urban renewal order allows us to see how these urban stories have persisted after the fall of that order and how they might help us think more clearly about the succeeding orders. If, as Jane Jacobs reminds us, “[p]rivate investment shapes cities, but social ideas (and laws) shape private investment,” then it seems worthwhile to pay more attention than we have in the past to the ways in which the “image of what we want” our cities to look like has been produced rather than focus exclusively on the “machinery [that has been] adapted to turn out that image.” 9
Progressive Era Settlement Narratives
In setting out to redevelop urban philanthropy, the settlement movement took not just to the city’s streets but also to the printed page. Because the movement’s birth in the late nineteenth century coincided with the rapid expansion of the mass literary marketplace, it documented its new approach to city charity to a degree unimaginable by its benevolent predecessors. 10 Writing about its efforts to improve conditions for the urban poor became one of the settlement movement’s most vital tools for doing neighborhood work. It took advantage of preexisting print venues in the newspaper, magazine, and book publishing industries, but also established a number of its own publications: newsletters and pamphlets, institutional and neighborhood newspapers, and conference proceedings. And while settlement writers are best known for working in the memoir and muckraking veins of Progressive Era print culture, they also explored a wide variety of other literary genres, ranging from the journalistic editorial to the bildungsroman novel to the sociological study. Through these various genres and print mediums, settlement writers sought to redefine habits of urban philanthropy by revising the preexisting literary conventions for describing the urban poor. The sidewalk and tenement narratives emerged as two of the early settlement movement’s principal strategies for challenging the conventional representations of lower-class urbanites and their urban environments.
By defining members of the city’s tenement districts and ethnic quarters as neighbors and citizens, rather than as the deserving or undeserving poor, settlement writers put themselves in a position to tell very different stories about these sections of the city than those being written by their contemporaries. In place of the naturalist novel’s focus on the individual urbanite battered by the city’s impersonal economic forces, or the slum tale that extracts city dwellers from the context of their community in order to relate personal tragedy or create spectacle, the settlement movement’s sidewalk narrative exposes the interdependencies of urban neighbors and shows them working together to navigate the challenges of city life. While settlement writers occasionally depicted the city’s sidewalks and other public spaces as threatening to the urbanite’s moral and social integrity, they more often celebrated the community that coalesced in these places. M. V. Ball’s brief human-interest story in the College Settlement News about “The Hand-Organ Man” illustrates the impulses of the sidewalk narrative. Ball depicts the “street-organ man” not as a nuisance or piece of local color at which to gawk but as a “public benefactor.” She credits him for teaching “thousands of city children the newest songs” and providing them with their “first ideas of music.” According to Ball, the street-organ man is just one of many public characters in whose combined presence “we can discover a certain harmony” where we might have initially detected “merely noise.” The street-organ man’s music joins the “huckster’s cry in the early morning, the song of the cream-puff man, the sand man, the fish-cake woman, the crab and sweet-corn woman, the hokey-pokey man, [and] the noisy play of children in the street” to create the “great symphony of busy life.” 11 While there is an element of the slum narrative’s tourist gaze in Ball’s depiction of her urban surroundings, there is also a recognition of and admiration for its social order. She perceives layers of social complexity that produce a symphonic harmony rather than the cacophony that so many of her contemporaries heard in the industrial city’s immigrant quarters. Ball may not know any of these individuals by name, but she nevertheless feels connected to them as members of her community—as her neighbors.
The sidewalk narrative on display in Ball’s and other early settlement workers’ writings finds its fullest and most mature expression in the memoirs published by the movement’s figureheads near the end of the Progressive Era. 12 Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910) pushes beyond Ball’s sidewalk aesthetics in an attempt to render an ethics of urban public life. Addams’s version of the sidewalk narrative climaxes in her rumination on the “value of social clubs.” In sheltering numerous clubs, the settlement’s goal was not strictly the self-improvement of the urban poor but the cultivation of neighbors and citizens capable of acting within the wider public sphere. Through the “friendly relations” that city dwellers brought to and experienced within the settlement’s social clubs, they came in “contact, many of them for the first time, with the industrial and social problems challenging the moral resources of our contemporary life.” These seemingly superfluous social clubs, Addams hypothesizes, nurture “citizens who are conversant with adverse social conditions” and who, along with similarly informed urbanites in other cities, “may in time remove the reproach of social neglect and indifference which has so long rested upon the citizens of the new world.” 13 Addams’s millennial urban vision proposes a deep connection between the vitality of a neighborhood’s social life and its ability to address the city’s most serious “industrial and social problems.” The casual contact enacted in the neighborhood’s cafes, settlements, and sidewalks laid the foundation for municipal, national, and even global political transformations.
Lillian Wald’s The House on Henry Street (1915) extends the sidewalk narrative to illuminate not just the social, but also the economic benefits of vibrant public spaces. In Wald’s rendition of the sidewalk narrative, even the “saloons of the neighborhood” come to represent something other than the dens of vice and laziness that they were so often portrayed to be in the period’s urban literature—including documents authored by other settlement writers. Wald describes neighborhood saloons as “informal club-houses” where political organizations had been gathering for years and as networking centers for “workingmen.” When Wald expresses surprise to one of her neighbors—a sober man who had been out of work for some time—that “he should have been seen going into a saloon, he explained that if a man did not sometimes go there he was likely to be out of work a longer time.” He informed Wald that the “fellows just kind of talk about jobs when they’re sittin’ round in the saloons, and sometimes you pick up something.’” 14 This neighbor upends Wald’s class-based suspicion of the saloon as an economic drain on the urban poor. Staying home, she realizes, would only have perpetuated this man’s unemployment, a condition that she and her settlement colleagues had been striving to help their neighbors overcome. Wald’s memoir works hard to pass along to her readers the epiphany that she experiences during this encounter: that healthy public spaces, perhaps even more than an orderly domestic sphere, are the city’s economic engines.
While Twenty Years at Hull-House and The House on Henry Street stand as monuments to the settlement movement’s sidewalk narrative, they also bear the marks of the movement’s other, and perhaps more prominent, habit of thinking and writing about the city: the tenement narrative. In this narrative, the same urban crowds that the sidewalk narrative celebrates become reason for concern, particularly when those throngs of urbanites return home from the city’s streets and saloons. The densely populated tenement building, with its cramped domestic spaces, anchors the tenement narrative. Wald occasionally holds the “crowded streets” and “crowded cars” responsible for instilling “distorted views of life” in the Lower East Side’s inhabitants, but she places the majority of the blame on the neighborhood’s “crowded homes.” 15 For Wald, as for many other settlement writers, the crowded tenement home is problematic primarily because it deprives its occupants of privacy. Where there is “no privacy,” she reasons, “there is inevitable loss of the support and strength that come from the interchange of confidences and assurance of understanding.” 16 Addams adds to Wald’s concerns about domestic privacy a host of other psychological and domestic ills that originate in “congested housing.” She frets over the “surprisingly large number of delinquent girls who have become criminally involved with their own fathers and uncles,” and the “school children who cannot find a quiet spot in which to read or study and who perforce go into the streets each evening.” These, Addams claims, may only be “subtle evils,” but they are “often [the] most disastrous.” 17
Wald and Addams, like many other reformers, registered the effects of overcrowded dwelling spaces primarily on the individuals and families inhabiting the tenements, but other settlement writers depicted congestion as a threat to the entire social system. During the second half of the Progressive Era, they came to see congestion as the city’s original sin—the source of the many urban problems that they had been battling since setting up shop in dense immigrant quarters in the 1890s. Their emphasis on congestion marked a distinct shift in the way that settlement workers talked and wrote about the city. In Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895), the textual culmination of the early settlement movement, writers focused their attention on topics such as the sweating system, wage-earning children, and the distribution of ethnic groups. Florence Kelley, in her contribution to this seminal text, describes urban density as an unfortunate by-product of the sweating system. 18 In 1906, after years of fighting the sweating system, she would pronounce the reverse causality—that “sweating follows crowding.” She designates congestion as “the evil most conspicuous” in the cities “in which the earliest settlements were founded,” and speculates that had she and others spent the “same amount of effort . . . dealing directly with overcrowding” that they had dedicated to fighting the sweating system, their efforts “could not possibly have proved so fruitless.” 19 By the end of the twentieth century’s first decade, Kelley and her fellow settlement workers had made congestion the central storyline of the movement’s tenement narrative. As John Martin observed, this period marked the “first time” that the “little troop of humanitarians who have been fighting against bad housing, tuberculosis, insufficient schools, dearth of parks and playgrounds, ill health, accidents, and juvenile crime—all the multifarious evils that grow with rank luxuriance in cities—are concluding that the only cure for the evils of congestion is the abolition of congestion.” 20
Given its focus on overcrowding as the city’s most “evil” attribute, this particular iteration of the tenement narrative inspired both within and beyond the settlement movement an additional set of urban reform strategies. Because early versions of the tenement narrative—perhaps most famously articulated by Jacob Riis, a close ally of the settlement movement—dwelt on the poor physical conditions of tenement buildings, settlement workers and other reformers had spent much of their time seeking new housing regulations and, occasionally, tearing down tenements. Settlement writers would continue to worry about and attempt to regulate the built environment in their efforts to address the physical consequences of congestion, but the city’s “troop of humanitarians” began seeking additional solutions to improving the lives of their urban neighbors as their concerns about overcrowding became more prominent. In 1907, Wald and her cross-town settlement colleague, Simkhovitch, spearheaded the Committee on Congestion. Although this group, which Mayor William J. Gaynor quickly promoted to the official status of New York City Commission on the Congestion of Population, was staffed by a variety of urban intellectuals not officially affiliated with the settlement movement, it became the institutional embodiment of the settlement’s tenement narrative. As the Commission on Congestion repeatedly made clear, the logic of congestion called, above all else, for the displacement of the urban poor from the city’s dense urban neighborhoods to its less crowded margins. Through its popular exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in March 1908—nicknamed the Congestion Show by its organizers—the Commission on Congestion not only exposed the “manysided evils of these various types of congestion” but also demonstrated the need for an “investigation of methods for spreading the population over wider areas.” Visitors to the exhibit left understanding that while park building, tenement reform, and increased access to public transportation might all help alleviate overcrowding, the “bodily removal of individuals and families to the country, where land is crying for men, is the most drastic and effective cure for congestion.” 21
While historians have acknowledged the ways in which the first incarnation of the tenement narrative, with its concentration on the built environment, set in motion the rationale of slum clearance that laid the foundation of urban renewal, few have paid attention to the historical implications of the second installment’s call for the redistribution of population. 22 The tenement narrative’s migration toward the rationale of congestion established an important intellectual and practical legacy for urban renewal. Perhaps most importantly, the rhetoric of congestion made the displacement of city dwellers appear to be the only reasonable response to overcrowding. These tenement narratives assumed a lack of emotional connection between overcrowded urbanites and their social and physical locations. This naturalization of a particular urban population’s unnatural mobility toned down the ethical complexity of the massive displacement of urbanites on which most urban renewal schemes would depend. On a more practical level, the tenement narrative’s call to redistribute the urban population demanded a much more comprehensive approach to urban planning than had been required up to that point. 22 Responding to this need, the Commission on Congestion helped establish the National Conference on City Planning and Congestion of Population in 1909. George B. Ford reports that during the second annual conference, all of the participants “agreed that every effort should be made to force or to induce people to move to the outskirts of the cities” but acknowledged that relocating so many city dwellers would require relocating their “means of livelihood,” building a “system of radiating railroads,” and “find[ing] out how to house them.” 24 Of course, urban renewal schemes would not explicitly seek to relocate displaced urbanites to the urban periphery; however, many of the same administrative channels through which these relocations were implemented in the Progressive Era would be used by city officials in the postwar period as they carried out urban renewal’s many complex tasks.
New Deal Settlement Narratives and the Rise of Public Housing
Limiting our view of the settlement movement to the relatively short span of the Progressive Era produces an incomplete and inadequate understanding of its contributions to city life in the post-Progressive period. As the city’s physical, cultural, and economic landscape shifted in the 1930s, settlements had to adjust their social strategies and day-to-day operations, but they continued to shape urban life and form. Settlement workers and writers became particularly involved in the push for public housing. They were, as Judith Trolander, Joel Schwartz, and Lawrence J. Vale have documented, intimately involved in developing the legal, economic, and intellectual foundations of postwar urban renewal. Several New York City headworkers sat on the advisory board of the City Housing Corporation—the limited dividend company that sponsored the Sunnyside and Radburn housing developments and that was a failed experiment along the path to public housing. 25 Through the National Public Housing Conference (NPHC), an organization that drew heavily on the personnel and institutional resources of the settlement movement, settlement leaders played a crucial role in persuading the federal government to create a housing division within the Public Works Administration (PWA). Local settlements, in turn, were involved in submitting proposals for and overseeing the construction of housing projects funded by the PWA. 26 Most significantly, settlement leaders were—both as members of the NPHC and as concerned citizens—some of the most vocal proponents of the United States Housing Act of 1937, also known as the Wagner-Steagall Act, whose passage lead to the creation of the United States Housing Authority. 27
Beyond their involvement in establishing the bureaucratic apparatuses through which slum clearance and the construction of public housing would be administered for years to come, settlement workers and writers were key players in crafting the urban story that enabled both the government and the public to support the idea of urban redevelopment. As they adapted the Progressive Era sidewalk and tenement narratives to the social and political circumstances of the 1930s and 1940s, they helped erect the intellectual and emotional infrastructure of the postwar urban renewal program. Perhaps no settlement better displays the persistence and evolution of these narratives in the push for slum clearance and public housing than Henry Street Settlement—the institution that Wald founded in 1893 on the Lower East Side. While Wald had always been concerned about the crowded living conditions of her neighbors, she had used her training as a professional nurse to ground her settlement’s institutional identity in public health matters. Helen Hall’s arrival in 1933 as Henry Street’s new headworker marked a distinct shift in the institution’s focus. Hall recalls in her memoir that “climbing the tenement stairs on the Lower East Side” shortly after settling in the neighborhood made the “improvement of housing conditions an obsession” with her. 28 Given her experience in the settlement movement—she had been the headworker for eleven years at Philadelphia’s University House prior to moving to New York—Hall brought to her new job patterns of talking and writing about city life that were grounded in the settlement’s literary tradition.
When Hall walked through the Lower East Side and climbed its tenement stairs, she would have seen fewer bodies crowded into those tenements than Wald had witnessed forty years earlier. While still relatively congested, the neighborhood’s population had been decreasing since hitting its infamous peak in 1910. Increased access to inexpensive housing in the outer boroughs through newly developed transportation networks, coupled with the halt of immigration brought about by the Immigration Act of 1924, led to the lowest density levels that the neighborhood had seen in decades. By 1925, the Lower East Side housed 536 persons per acre, down from 867 in 1910. Over the thirty-year period from 1910 to 1940, the neighborhood’s population decreased by 60 percent. 29 With no signs pointing to a reversal of this trend in the near future, the Lower East Side’s demographic downsizing made it difficult for settlement workers to push the same congestion rhetoric that their Progressive Era predecessors had used in their fight to improve living conditions. A 1939 study of the Lower East Side conducted under the direction of Henry Street’s Department of Community Studies, titled “A Dutchman’s Farm,” made the need for a new housing reform story clear. 30 Written as if the neighborhood’s days of overcrowding were in the distant past, the study challenges readers to imagine a “town of nearly 20,000 people stacked into 11 city blocks,” informing them that such a picture would give them a sense of “this section in 1910 at its most crowded stage.” Since that time, the study continues, “more and more families have moved away and fewer have moved in, so that the population has steadily declined.” 31 The study leaves no doubt that the tenement narrative’s congestion plot had become outdated.
Rather than abandon the tenement narrative altogether, settlement workers and writers at Henry Street pursued alternative rhetorical strategies for describing tenement life in hopes of persuading municipal leaders to improve housing conditions through demolition and rebuilding—not renovation. Although the “area surveyed was no longer one of the most crowded,” the study insists that it is “one of the worst on the Lower East Side from the standpoint of decay and disrepair,” and thus still deserving of the city’s attention. Housing conditions, which were bad to begin with, “have grown desperately worse.” 32 While “A Dutchman’s Farm” might sound like a return to the late-nineteenth-century habits of writing about tenement life established by Riis and settlement writers, it contains subtle but significant differences. Where Progressive Era tenement narratives consistently fused their depiction of the tenement’s physical inadequacies to vignettes of the individuals who occupied them, this study dedicates an entire section to profiling three individual tenement buildings, not their inhabitants. “A Dutchman’s Farm” avoids moralizing details about the people who had lived in and owned these buildings, focusing its attention exclusively on the state of the physical structures. Rather than blame greedy and negligent landlords or poor tenants, the study attributes the unlivable state of the tenement to old age, and the political and economic systems in which they were embedded. The buildings were, the study claims, just “too worn out”—their “walls could not hold a coat of paint six months without cracking” and the “new plumbing fitted badly into the old walls.” One of the profiled tenements “had 15 separate violations of the housing code recorded against it, some of them pending for more than three years.” According to this updated tenement narrative, improving the quality of life in these buildings was not a matter of holding landlords more accountable for keeping their properties up to code by retrofitting them with new amenities. In light of the study, the only reasonable course of action was to tear these buildings “down, violations and all, to make way for the new.” 33 When Progressive Era tenement narratives advocated demolition, they did so primarily in order to relieve congestion—most famously at Mulberry Bend. New Deal tenement narratives, however, pursued the strategy of demolition as a means to rebuilding and rehousing. The “new” in these narratives almost always signified newly constructed, low-rent public housing units. 34
The New Deal tenement narrative rehearsed by “A Dutchman’s Farm” had been forged earlier in the 1930s as settlement writers and other urban intellectuals advocated the passage of the Wagner-Steagall Act as a crucial legislative and economic step toward the construction of public housing. No settlement writer wielded this tenement narrative with more power and influence than Simkhovitch, who founded Greenwich House in 1902 and collaborated with Wald on the Committee on Congestion during the Progressive Era. In the 1930s, Simkhovitch actively campaigned for public housing on the local and national levels. She served as the first vice-chairman of the New York City Housing Authority in 1934 and was one of the driving forces behind the organization of the National Public Housing Conference. Having been an important distributor of the Progressive Era tenement narrative, her abandonment of congestion and adoption of dilapidation as the primary cause of urban disorder signaled a clear shift in the settlement movement’s habits of writing and talking about tenement life. Simkhovitch lamented that the urban poor had to “live in the left-overs,” where there was “no central heating, no proper sanitary facilities,” and far too many “dark windowless rooms.” She was now less concerned about the amount of space available to these city dwellers than the quality of that space. She tried to convince the public that dwelling in living quarters that had been abandoned both by upwardly mobile urbanites and modern technology would impede the cultivation of “decent American citizenship.” 35 Second-class housing, she reasoned, would produce second-class citizens. As she explained to Congress at the 1936 hearing of the Wagner-Ellenbogen bill, the failed predecessor of the Wagner-Steagall Act, “public housing is an incentive to a realistically good citizenship we can ill afford to neglect.” 36
In Simkhovitch’s influential New Deal tenement narrative, the demolition of old buildings and the construction of new ones was necessary not just because the buildings were too rundown to repair, but because they had become ontologically flawed. While Simkhovitch made it clear on numerous occasions that it would be “impossible to repair most of these old cold-water flats because it would be too expensive unless these buildings would then be used by higher rent-payers,” her push for slum clearance was driven by a much deeper concern with the personalities that these cold-water flats had acquired over time. 37 Even if central heating, sanitary facilities, and windows could have been installed for a reasonable sum, these remodeling procedures would not be able to transform the building’s core identity. Tenants would, she predicted, develop “scorn for a rehabilitation” of their tenements because they would see this strategy as a “façade of improvement with a high rental advance.” 38 They would know, in other words, that they were still living in the city’s “left-overs,” and this knowledge would, in turn, threaten their citizenship. They would always “wonder whether this land of freedom after all is offering any opportunity for progress to men like them.” 39 Simkhovitch’s tenement narrative produced the inevitable conclusion that the “demolition of wholly unfit buildings is a basic part of the program of rehousing.” 40
If these New Deal tenement narratives justify the demolition of “unfit” buildings and the federally funded construction of new housing by portraying these actions as necessary steps to saving urbanites on the margins of citizenship, settlement workers and writers simultaneously had to persuade others that there was a community in these neighborhoods worth preserving. In their push for public housing, settlement writers took up the task of describing and defending the type of public that these new buildings would house. On the Lower East Side, for instance, Henry Street’s staff and neighbors found themselves fending off the representational strategies of those who had an economic interest in reinventing downtown ethnic neighborhoods as middle- and upper-class territory. As Christopher Mele has pointed out, parties ranging from real estate organizations, to chambers of commerce, to business elites hoped to facilitate their profitable plans by casting ethnics who remained in the Lower East Side’s tenements as social bottom feeders that, unlike their previous neighbors who had left the neighborhood for the outer boroughs, were incapable of assimilating. Those who owned Lower East Side land developed a “sociocultural discourse that drew distinctions between a mythical dignified ghetto of the past and the ignoble and dispensable slum of the present.” They then attached this discourse to “contemporary rational planning arguments to do away with centrally located working-class housing.” 41 Henry Street’s settlement workers and their neighbors resisted these debasing representations, in part, by resurrecting the Progressive Era sidewalk narrative and fusing it to literary forms and conventions that had been written in response to the social ideals and programs of the New Deal. This updated sidewalk narrative not only portrays the Lower East Side’s community as a socially cohesive group but also as a hyperactive citizenry.
The production of a play based on “A Dutchman’s Farm” at Henry Street’s Neighborhood Playhouse in 1941 showcases some of the primary features of the settlement movement’s New Deal sidewalk narrative. Also entitled A Dutchman’s Farm, the play was produced in the style of the Living Newspaper—a dramatic form popularized in the United States by the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) through plays such as Triple-A Plowed Under (1936), Power (1937), and One-Third of a Nation (1938). 42 Adopted by the FTP because its unusually large casts and production staff provided work for numerous unemployed theatre professionals, Living Newspapers typically dramatized volatile political issues. Clearly patterned after Arthur Arent’s One-Third of a Nation, which stages the urban housing crisis of the 1930s and was the most successful of the FTP’s Living Newspapers, A Dutchman’s Farm recounts the particular history of housing in the Corlears Hook section of the Lower East Side. Much like One-Third of a Nation, which exposes the farcical and inhumane processes by which “New York City real estate [became] the soundest and most profitable speculation on the face of the earth” in order to justify government intervention in the construction of housing, A Dutchman’s Farm culminates with the construction of the Vladeck Houses, some of the earliest public housing units to be built in Henry Street’s neighborhood. 43 Both plays cast the previous three hundred years in New York as an inexorable march toward the establishment of a public housing program.
While both rehearse the argument about the demolition of tenements and the construction of low-rent public housing featured in many of the settlement’s tenement narratives, A Dutchman’s Farm is more concerned than One-Third of a Nation with enacting the settlement movement’s New Deal sidewalk narrative. Put on, as Helen Hall remembers it, by a “hundred and fifty people . . . in our neighborhood, from dramatic groups to mothers’ and fathers’ clubs,” the play literally stages for its audience the community that both needed and deserved the public housing that had been built for it. 44 The opening of the play confirms the prophecies that Simkhovitch had made about the connection between decent shelter and citizenship that public housing would consummate. As the curtains lift, a group of high school students are returning from school to their homes in Vladeck Houses. The scene tags the actors with multiple middle-class markers, which one of the teenagers makes explicit when he remarks that “ever since we moved into Vladeck, Mom wants we should eat on time. So now we got ‘Afternoon Tea.’” But more than give occupants the semblance of an Anglophonic routine through what feels more like a knowing wink than a serious gesture, residence in Vladeck Houses thrusts the expectations of citizenship on its tenants. Carole’s teacher assigns her to give the class a special report on how “three hundred years have changed my neighborhood,” because, as the teacher explains, of “all the people in this class, you should know the most about the progress of this neighborhood.” Mike makes a similar complaint about his history teacher: “All the time it’s ‘Mike, you tell us about housing on the lower East Side’, and ‘Let’s hear from Mike about immigration’, and ‘Mike will know the history of Corlear’s Hook’!” 45 The teenagers, of course, do not know much about the neighborhood’s history, and the remainder of the play serves as their education. It picks up in the early 1600s and features a long cast of the neighborhood’s inhabitants: the Mareckawick Indians, Dutch settlers, English colonists, Negro slaves, Revolutionary soldiers, land speculators, ward politicians, reformers, and immigrants.
If the dramatic action of A Dutchman’s Farm is set in motion through the conceit of transforming the students into citizens capable of bearing the responsibility of living as residents of Vladeck Houses, what follows assures them that citizenship is actually their natural birthright—part of their geographic genealogy. When the teenagers hear a Mareckawick brave confess to them that the Dutch settlers “took our houses, took our land / From our little beach of sand / To the hills that used to stand where you sit,” they begin to understand that they occupy a landscape that carries with it an obligation to restore shelter to all those who have been caught in any type of “historic gyp.” 46 Even if the portrayal of the Mareckawick braves falls prey to condescending stereotypes, the play proposes a surprising alignment between the predominantly European actors and the historically maligned Native Americans, stretching the urban community across ethnic and temporal boundaries. The drama deepens this broad communal sensibility when the teenagers witness a sidewalk soapbox scene in which a soldier from the Continental Army, Joe Smith, addresses his fellow city dwellers shortly after the 1789 inauguration of George Washington on nearby Cherry Street. In the midst of the celebration, Smith warns his audience that if they don’t “see to the right shaping” of the new nation, then others who have “no interest in the place but what he can squeeze out of it at another’s cost” will push the country down oppressive paths. Figuring “absentee ownership” as the greatest threat to the newly established government, Smith reminds his audience that they had fought for a country where citizens “keep an eye out for the way the other fellow’s living.” He translates the social ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness into “room for everybody, and time for everybody and the right kind of living for everybody!” 47 In the play’s historical revisionism, public housing stands as the culmination of the country’s founding moments and as the preservation of the sidewalk community that was celebrated by, but had existed long before, the settlement writers of the Progressive Era.
By staging the “mothers and fathers and settlements on the Lower East Side” as the force that ultimately brought public housing to the neighborhood, A Dutchman’s Farm portrays these city dwellers as the direct progeny of a democratic society, not as its stepchildren. In the play’s climax, six mothers from the Lower East Side—representatives of the “first tenant group to organize work for public housing”—travel to Washington, D.C., to appear before a Senate Committee and voice support for the “Wagner Slum Clearance Bill because we consider it the first step in the movement for permanent low-rental housing.” As the spokeswoman for this small delegation, Mrs. Ziprin summons the settlement movement’s New Deal tenement and sidewalk narratives. She informs the committee that her ten-year old son is “already estranged from his home” because “his home is not attractive to him. Now, we feel that a home should be attractive and decent enough so that no barrier springs up between our children and ourselves. They must not become strangers!” 48 In Mrs. Ziprin’s speech, the urban home functions as the linchpin of the city neighborhood’s private and public communities. Without public housing, she reasons, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, and neighbors will become “strangers.”
Mrs. Ziprin’s speech also reminds the Senate Committee (and, by extension, the play’s audience) that the tenement and sidewalk narratives that informed her arguments were not the intellectual property of settlement workers, housing reformers, and politicians. Her delegation presents “a challenge to the people who said that slum dwellers aren’t interested in improving their own housing.” 49 As Helen Hall would later recall of the real events that the play reenacted, the Lower East Side’s “consumers of bad housing” were capable of conveying “what it meant to bring children up in dark, windowless rooms” in ways that no “social worker or housing expert” ever could. 50 In using the settlement’s New Deal urban narratives to make a case for public housing, the play’s mothers also remind us that the processes of slum clearance and public housing initiated during this period were not always ruthlessly imposed on urban communities by detached and insensitive political actors and urban reformers. Mrs. Ziprin’s presentation of the sidewalk narrative feels, in many ways, like the fulfillment of Jane Addams’s prophecy that a casual social life forged in the city’s streets and cafes would enable urbanites to instigate social and political change on the municipal and national stages.
Postwar Settlement Narratives and the End of Urban Renewal
In addition to determining, to some extent, the legislative and intellectual characteristics of one of urban renewal’s most recognizable expressions—the demolition of old residential buildings and the construction of new public housing units—the settlement movement’s tenement and sidewalk narratives shaped the way that social workers and city dwellers responded to the reconfigured urban environment. Because the processes of building public housing often affected the neighborhoods into which settlement houses had woven themselves, they were often involved in helping residents make the transition from tenement life to project living. Public housing had given birth to “a new kind of life and would change as it went along,” Hall explains, “and we certainly had an obligation to make it as successful as possible.” 51 When construction began on the Lower East Side’s Vladeck Houses, Henry Street Settlement purchased a small tenement opposite the construction site in order to be in a position to better assist tenants in making the transition from the tenements to their new homes. The settlement fixed up the old tenement and installed a model project apartment on the first floor; they gave prospective residents tours of the model apartment and helped them plan for and get acclimated to their future homes. 52 Henry Street also continued to utilize the organizational infrastructure that had been developed to bring public housing to the Lower East Side in its efforts to keep its pulse on life in the public housing projects. Its Department of Community Studies—which had conducted studies such as “What Some Slum Dwellers Want in Housing” and “Can We Renovate the Slums” in the 1930s—continued to conduct surveys in an attempt to acquire information that would enable the settlement to better help its neighbors adjust to their new social and physical arrangements.
Because of their physical proximity to public housing projects—some even set up shop in the basements or other spare spaces of these new buildings—and their institutional networks, settlement houses had placed themselves in an ideal position from which to observe the unexpected problems that arose with this new style of urban living. Despite the dramatic professionalization and demographic transformation of settlement workers during this time period, they continued to be committed to the urban narratives rooted in the institutions in which they worked. Viewing their new urban reality through the lens of the tenement and sidewalk narratives, settlement workers were among the first to respond to a variety of public housing’s glitches. On learning from the residents of Vladeck Houses that the kitchens were poorly designed, for instance, Henry Street settlement workers and Vladeck residents developed a questionnaire to distribute to the female tenants. After gathering and evaluating the responses, settlement workers cooperated with the tenants to design a more practical kitchen that could be used in other housing projects. 53 Settlement workers were also, as Trolander has documented, some of the earliest urban intellectuals to call attention to more substantial issues such as “public housing site selection, tenant selection, income ceilings for tenants that resulted in the eviction of the more stable ones, the need for units for single people and the aged, discrimination against blacks, and inadequate recreational facilities for project dwellers.” 54
More significantly, when the Housing Act of 1949 accelerated the pace of slum clearance and public housing construction, settlement workers were some of the earliest to blow the whistle on the large-scale damage being wrought on the urban communities about whom they had been writing for decades. As they continued to narrate urban life through the conventions of the sidewalk narrative, settlement workers played an important role in challenging and eventually overturning the urban renewal order that they had helped create. In their efforts to draw metropolitan and national attention to the negative social consequences of urban redevelopment in their neighborhoods, settlement workers ratcheted up the decibel level of the sidewalk narrative—which had never been quite as loud as the movement’s tenement narrative. Urban intellectuals associated with East Harlem’s Union Settlement became particularly effective at broadcasting their sidewalk narrative to the public. Because East Harlem had served as New York’s premier testing ground for the construction of public housing during the postwar period, settlement workers at Union Settlement and their neighbors had reason to be alarmed by the changes they witnessed. 55 In order to remain relevant to the community of which they had been a part since 1895, Union Settlement recognized the pressing need “to find out what the coming of a modern housing project meant to the community.” Depending on what it discovered, Union Settlement realized it would inevitably have to “revamp its Agency program. If slum problems had really disappeared from the project area,” as many early advocates of public housing predicted they would, “then perhaps it was time for Union Settlement to close its doors.” However, if settlement leaders found that “these problems had not disappeared, but had altered or had taken on new forms, then Agency services would also have to be altered to meet these new needs.” 56 Settlement houses, such as Union Settlement, yoked their very existence to the success or failure of public housing.
In classic settlement fashion, Union Settlement began the process of addressing East Harlem’s shifting topography by conducting a sociological study of the area. In the tradition of Hull-House Maps and Papers and Henry Street’s Department of Community Studies, Union Settlement conducted a thorough investigation of the George Washington Houses in 1955 and 1956. Lead by Ellen Lurie and based primarily on “first-hand material gathered directly from the project tenants themselves” by settlement workers and trained volunteers, “A Study of George Washington Houses” provided the facts on which Union Settlement testified to the destruction of public life that had been a vital foundation of social and economic sustenance in East Harlem. The study reports that before the construction of Washington Houses, many “small cafes, groceries and candy stores could be found along each block; storefronts or tenement basements housed churches, political clubs and poolrooms.” Obviously, the replacement of this commercially diverse streetscape with a predominantly residential environment delivered a major economic blow to the community. Not only did many in the community lose their jobs but they also lost, as Wald had pointed out forty years earlier, the spaces through which they could network for new jobs. More alarming to Lurie, however, were the social consequences of leveling the buildings that contained these commercial institutions. In this community, the “small storekeeper [had been] the center of activity.” Like settlement workers and settlement houses, local proprietors and their stores played a vital role in supporting the neighborhood’s public life. In the process of constructing Washington Houses, the study laments, more than “1000 of these small stores” were demolished—wiping out the spaces through which the neighborhood’s informal social networks were routed. 57 While Washington Houses may have included “planned centers” for tenants to socialize with one another, the study insists that the “strongest roots of community life will not stem from such formal, institutional programs” but from the public interactions that casually occur in stores and on the sidewalks in front of these centers. 58
The study finds that the lack of economic, ethnic, and generational diversity in Washington Houses’ new residential community further enervates the neighborhood’s social vitality. Because of the “nature of eligibility requirements and the pressure of the private market,” the study observes, “the project community takes on an off-balanced family composition pattern.” Populated primarily by young families with small children, with only a smattering of older people, even those programs intended to socialize the project community cannot do so because young parents lack a sufficiently large pool of teenage and elderly babysitters that would enable them to attend social events: “Many grandchildren; few grandparents.” 59 The study’s counterintuitive logic implies that social diversity, rather than homogeneity, builds strong urban neighborhoods. A socially homogeneous neighborhood lacks residents who can attend to one another because they all have similar needs and expertise. Homogeneity demands self-sufficiency. The study faults the Washington Houses’ monotonous physical design, in part, for failing to house a sufficient cross section of the community. Composed of “building after building” of “identical tall red brick rectangles,” East Harlem’s projects attract an equally homogenous segment of the population. The study proposes that by mingling “high impersonal houses” with “smaller cosier units,” planners and architects could allow for people with “different kinds of tastes” to live together. 60 And, as Lurie and others at Union Settlement saw it, a neighborhood capable of housing a diverse population would cultivate social stability by inviting residents to fulfill one another’s particular needs—in much the same way that, according to settlement writers’ accounts, the immigrant communities of the Progressive Era had ministered to one another. “A Study of George Washington Houses” was the settlement movement’s longstanding sidewalk narrative writ large.
The study concludes that if public housing “is to be of lasting benefit to humanity, this is the time for its reappraisal.” Those responsible for selecting housing project sites must, it insists, place “greater emphasis . . . on more human considerations.” 61 Through the strength of its sidewalk narrative, the reappraisal of public housing offered by Lurie and her collaborators was, as Samuel Zipp has thoroughly documented, one of the first steps “on the way to entirely unseating earlier optimism as the reigning commonsense understanding of publicly subsidized housing.” 62 It is this settlement-based vision of public life that Jane Jacobs gives voice to in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She not only quotes extensively from the study—often without attribution—but also takes up its habits of observation. “A Study of George Washington Houses,” as much as her casual strolls around East Harlem with William Kirk, taught her how to see the city. Through this study’s sidewalk narrative, Jacobs plugs into habits of thinking and writing about the city that had been cultivated by settlement workers since the late nineteenth century. In codifying and popularizing the settlement’s sidewalk narrative, Death and Life has served as one of our culture’s most persuasive and influential arguments against the logic of urban renewal.
In reappraising public housing, though, it’s worth noting that Union Settlement wasn’t necessarily rejecting it. Although the tenement narrative had become less prominent than its counterpart in “A Study of George Washington Houses,” it had not disappeared altogether. In fact, the study begins with a hard-to-ignore disclaimer: “Before any of this is read, let this, above all, be understood: WE BELIEVE IN PUBLIC HOUSING, AND WE BELIEVE IN IT STRONGLY.” Given the settlement worker’s faith in public housing, the study explains that if we “wear kid gloves when we touch on public housing because we are afraid its roots are fragile and perishable, then, all too certainly, it is doomed.” 63 It is possible to interpret the study’s disclaimer as a move to protect Union Settlement from alienating the allies it had forged in its fight for public housing—and possible that Jacobs saw through this politicking, and decided to only pick up the sidewalk narrative and omit the tenement narrative that frames Union Settlement’s study. However, it seems much more warranted to take the disclaimer seriously and understand it as a sign of the settlement movement’s ongoing investment in the tenement narrative. Fern Colborn’s The Neighborhood and Urban Renewal, published by the National Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood Centers in 1963, clearly indicates that the settlement movement as a whole continued to be committed to the construction of public housing. Sounding as if she were Simkhovitch pleading with the U.S. Senate in the 1930s to establish a federally funded public housing program, Colborn explains that the “tragedy to people, the scars on democracy, the human and economic waste caused by slums are all well known to the settlement worker, and he believes that slum areas can be effectively removed—and must be—as part of our democratic way of life.” 64 Colborn’s treatise is a throwback to Progressive Era and New Deal tenement narratives.
Despite the national settlement movement’s continued use of the tenement narrative to guide its engagement with the urban landscape and its peoples, this particular narrative became increasingly difficult to hear beyond the confines of settlement houses and neighborhood centers. Although several variations of the movement’s sidewalk narrative still persist as meaningful ways to describe and make sense of city life, tenement narratives no longer possess the persuasive power that they held during the first half of the twentieth century—perhaps because of the inability of mid-twentieth-century settlement writers like Colborn to adapt its narrative structure to the new social and political circumstances of the 1960s and 1970s. In rejecting the urban renewal order, our culture has rejected the totality of an urban vision that both responded to and drove urban change for more than half a century. While most would agree that the sidewalk narrative served a useful purpose in slowing down the rapid rate at which slum clearance and reconstruction altered the social and physical face of American cities, there have also been negative consequences to this narrative’s exclusive success. Untethered to the tenement narrative and the context of the settlement movement, the sidewalk narrative has lost some of its ability to preserve and create urban communities that possess the kind of economic, ethnic, and generational diversity that Union Settlement claimed public housing had destroyed in East Harlem. Renovating the tenement narrative to fit the conditions of our postindustrial cities might help revitalize the moribund diversity of many of our urban communities.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.