Abstract
Within the history of the American settlement house movement, two pairs of women loom especially large: Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr of Chicago's Hull House and Lillian Wald and Mary Brewster of New York's Henry Street. In Skyscraper settlement, author Joyce Milambiling adds another duo to settlement lore, that of Christina MacColl and Sara Carson. MacColl, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, was born and raised in upstate New York. After graduating from Boston's Emerson College of Oratory, she ventured to New York City in 1893. There, she met Carson while both young women were working at the Harlem Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA). Carson hailed from a Quaker family but, craving a more hierarchical religion, she converted to Presbyterianism as an adult. Though both were staunch Presbyterians, MacColl and Carson disapproved of the YWCA's evangelism, believing that it intimidated clients, so the two began hatching plans to establish their own, more welcoming organization. Their settlement would still be Christian, but non-sectarian; its services open to Catholics and Jews who would now be under no direct pressure to convert.
Christodora House opened in June 1897, operating out of the basement of a deli near Tomkins Square Park in Manhattan's crowded East Village (a section of the Lower East Side). To drum up interest for its first meeting, Carson hastily drafted an invitation on a large piece of brown paper that read, “Will all girls over 16 who live in this neighborhood welcome us this evening at 8” (p. 91). Ninety-eight immigrant women showed up that night, anxious to share their hopes for the new organization. One attendee requested hat-making classes, another instruction in dressmaking, while a third wanted to learn how to use “that thing you play on all day like a piano only it doesn’t make any noises; it writes letters” (i.e., a typewriter) (p. 91). Milambiling takes at face value MacColl's claim that the house immediately began offering these classes, but I would have appreciated more here about how the relatively inexperienced MacColl and Carson got their operation up and running.
MacColl, like Lillian Wald at Henry Street, was eventually left on her own to lead the new settlement. Wald's founding partner, Mary Brewster, died young at the age of 37, while in MacCall's case, Carson fled New York after five years to establish her own settlement in Toronto. Under MacColl's decades-long stewardship (she led Christodora until a few years before her death in 1939), the house instituted standard settlement programs like health clinics, English classes, vocational training, and a mother's club, plus a variety of clubs and outdoor recreational activities for children. Christodora House's main contribution to the settlement movement was its unique poetry program, which the poet Anna Hempstead Branch organized “for the encouragement of the young people of the East Side tenements who possess the poetic instinct” (p. 111). In addition to teaching poetry classes and hosting readings by noted writers like Robert Frost, Branch was known for printing loose-leaf pages of contemporary and canonical poems that she sold (cheaply) to East Villagers so that they could assemble their own “individualized” anthologies (p. 112).
Toward the end of the 1920s, Christodora House moved into larger quarters in a modern, fireproof building that overlooked Tompkins Square Park, known as the “skyscraper settlement.” The skyscraper contained 16 floors, the top nine of which were reserved for middle-class renters who would supply much-needed income to the settlement. Though having a reliable source of rental income sounded good in theory, it did not work out as planned. It proved too difficult for the settlement to carry out its day-to-day work, while also acting as a landlord. In 1948, Christodora's Executive Committee agreed to sell the building to the City of New York.
After the sale, the settlement licked its wounds and promptly relocated to an office within the Jacob Riis public housing complex. Milambiling guides us through the next half century of the settlement's existence and into the twenty-first century, stressing its adaptability to changing economic, social, and political circumstances. Today, Christodora is less focused on the East Village and more geared toward teaching city children about the environment. It runs nature programs in NYC parks and at a campsite in Massachusetts's Berkshire Mountains. The author assures us that the East Village is still well looked after. She concludes with a useful survey of the many social service and community organizations that foster a “culture of resilience” in the neighborhood, such as the Lower East Side Girls Club, East Village Community Coalition, and the Puerto Rican-based Loisaida Center (p. 199).
Milambiling, an educator with a Ph.D. in applied linguistics, first learned about Christodora House when she uncovered a trove of 33 letters at the New-York Historical Society that were written by a widowed, immigrant mother named Helen Schecter in 1918. All of Schecter's letters were addressed to Ellen Gould, an English teacher at Christodora. The letters, according to Milambiling, “speak volumes about Helen Schecter's life…as she talks about daily events, including the family's involvement with activities at the settlement house” (p. 5). It is a letdown then when the author chooses to include so little from this correspondence in her book. Contemporary accounts from those who passed through settlement doors in the early 1900s are seldom preserved in the archives, so Milambiling missed an excellent opportunity here to foreground an immigrant voice.
