By Anne M. Filiaci, Ph.D.
Within a year of moving to Jefferson Street, Lillian Wald had secured the money, the staff and the connections to widen her influence. Her work now expanded far beyond its initial limited scope of nursing the poor. She had become a much-valued neighborhood resource on multiple other fronts—regularly helping people to find work, distributing donations from charitable institutions, organizing outings, and hosting holiday celebrations. By the fall of 1894, the small rooms on the top floor of the Jefferson Street tenement no longer proved adequate. It was time to move.
Jacob Schiff and Lillian Wald were taking concrete action to relocate what had started to be called the Nurses’ Settlement to larger quarters. In November, 1894, Schiff wrote to Mary Brewster that he was
looking for a suitable house, either in Henry or Madison Street, which appears, under the advice of Miss Wald, to be the location where the proposed house should…be located….
By the following spring, Wald had found that “suitable” space. She would house the Nurses’ Settlement to 265 Henry Street—right next door to where she had held the fateful nursing class that brought her to live on the Lower East Side.
Henry Street had once been a good residential neighborhood, mostly inhabited by Quakers. To Wald, the “street…still bore evidences of its bygone social glory.” Because of its location and its views, it retained considerable charm. “From a point near the House,” Wald said, one could see three of New York’s bridges “and their towers, as magnificent if not as storied as the bridges of London and Paris.” The other “spots of beauty” located nearby competed “with any that can be found in the city.” Across the street from the Settlement and “to the west, one gazes upon…the roofs…of the Municipal Buildings,” a vista that also offered, according to Wald, an amazing view of the setting sun. Walking east, one encountered “a picturesque old church that has stood for more than a hundred years…and that still attracts visitors….”
265 Henry Street itself was one of a number of the street’s “splendid” old houses still in existence. Because “many of these fine old East Side Houses were built by cabinet-makers who came over from England during the War of 1812,” Wald knew that the building was solidly constructed. Lavinia Dock thought that the three-story structure was “utterly charming,” with “an open and serene expression.” At one time gardens had been cultivated in the interior blocks behind some of the old houses, and 265 Henry Street possessed a “rear…balcony that overlooked a little yard.”
In spite of its potential, charm, location and structural advantages, the building had been neglected for many years and needed a lot of work. The “little yard” that the balcony overlooked now “sprouted a rank growth of stone, brick and rotting wood, in which, physically and morally, human beings wilted and decayed.” Yet in Wald’s idealistic eyes, 265 Henry Street “readily lent itself to the restorer’s touch.” Schiff purchased the property in the spring of 1895, provided the young nurse with ample funds to refurbish the property, and “allowed” her a free hand to “repair, restore, and alter” as her “taste directed.”
By the summer of 1895, the house on Henry Street was ready. Wald’s excitement at moving was slightly dampened by regrets about leaving her neighbors on Jefferson Street. She had formed important bonds during the two years she lived in the rooms on the fifth floor—“So precious were the intimate relationships with our neighbors in the tenement” she said, “that we were reluctant to leave it.”
Many of Wald’s neighbors returned her affection. When she and Brewster “carefully selected men from the ranks of the unemployed to move our belongings,” the women hoped to pay them, but “not one of them could be induced to take a penny for their work.” And one neighbor–Mrs. McRae, the tenement’s “janitress” and Wald’s beloved protector—moved with the nurses into Henry Street, giving up the rooms in the basement that she got rent free and spreading “her warmth over the new abode.”
The young nurses’ move was overshadowed by the onset of Mary Brewster’s ill health. It was becoming evident that the work was taking a toll on her well-being as early as November 27, 1894. In February of 1895, she was hospitalized. When it began to seem possible she might not be able to continue with the Settlement, and Jacob Schiff sent her a letter of support:
Nothing would give me greater pleasure than if you find yourself in a position to give the great cause in which you and Miss Wald labor your continued cooperation, and I very much appreciate the promise contained in your to-day’s note that you intend to make an effort to remain associationed [?] with Miss Wald. Rest assured that this is a great encouragement to me, personally.
After leaving the hospital, Brewster worked for a time as a nurse at the Henry Street Settlement satellite on 312 East 78th Street. She married William Stone Booth, a librarian and literary adviser, in October of 1898. The address that appears on her marriage certificate is 265 Henry Street, and Lillian Wald is listed as a witness. Less than three years later, in early August of 1901, she was hospitalized at her alma mater, New York Hospital, suffering from “valvular heart disease, chronic nephritis, and acute colitis.” She died a little over a month later, on September 16, 1901, at the age of thirty-seven.
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Woods, Robert A. & Albert J. Kennedy, Handbook of Settlements (Russell Sage Foundation), NY: Charities Publication Committee, 1911.
Copyright Anne M. Filiaci 2016