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Mary K. Simkhovitch and the effort to create housing for all in New York City

Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of an Affordable New York

A new book revisits the public housing programs of the 1930s.

Today, Mary K. Simkhovitch is little remembered. But in the first half of the 20th century, her name was everywhere. As an advocate for New York’s poor and a friend of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, she appeared often in the press. As a leading member of the settlement-house movement alongside Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, and Florence Kelley, she founded Greenwich House, a bustling social-services and arts center. As the author of numerous studies on urban poverty and slum conditions, she became a prominent advocate for government-supported housing and helped launch New York City’s public housing system. Upon her death, The New York Times noted that she’d “occupied an important place in the life of this city for fifty years.” The NBC Radio Network broadcast a play reenacting her funeral, with a crowd of children standing outside the church, in rain and sleet, to pay their respects.

A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing

Greenwich House is still going strong, but the ideas that once animated the settlement-house movement no longer have much purchase in a world of neo–social Darwinism and radical critiques of capitalism. In her new biography of Simkhovitch, A Slumless America, Betty Boyd Caroli attempts to recover the life of this formidable figure. Her book provides a window into a set of views that seem both hopelessly archaic and yet still useful in thinking about our future. We can learn much from the strengths and limitations of Simkhovitch’s approach to social change. For all her accomplishments, Simkhovitch’s efforts nevertheless left in place the social structures that continue to undermine further advances.

Like many settlement-house workers, Simkhovitch—née Mary Melinda Kingsbury—came from an old-line Protestant family, one not rich but thoroughly respectable. Born in Newton, Massachusetts, during the Reconstruction era, she lived into the early days of the Cold War.

Simkhovitch’s commitment to reform stemmed from her religious belief. A devout Episcopalian, she attended church almost every day of her adult life. As a 14-year-old, she first witnessed urban poverty when she volunteered at a Sunday school that her church sponsored in an African American neighborhood in Boston. During a post-undergraduate year she spent at the Harvard Annex (later Radcliffe College), Simkhovitch embraced the Social Gospel: the belief that religion had to go beyond a relationship with God to encompass helping others in need.

She began to put this idea into practice working at Denison House, an early settlement house in what is now Boston’s Chinatown. One of her Harvard Annex classmates, Gertrude Stein, went in a very different direction, but both represented a cohort of young women trying to carve out careers and identities independent of men. Settlement houses were meant to help poor city dwellers with education, social services, and cultural enrichment. But equally important, they provided an opportunity for adventurous middle-class women, who otherwise would have been restricted to domestic life, to live with their peers in female-led, cosmopolitan communities, secular orders for social reform.

A year spent at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin from 1895 to ’96 broadened Simkhovitch’s political perspectives. There, she was exposed to a brand of socialism centered not on revolution but on the expansion of the existing state to provide needed services to the citizenry. Rapid industrialization and urbanization had led to poverty, overcrowding, and unsanitary conditions in many parts of Europe. State action, a growing number of German socialists argued, could alleviate suffering and stabilize society by providing housing, transportation, and recreation. Simkhovitch, after touring some publicly financed housing of the kind that the United States wouldn’t have for another four decades, declared that “the municipal socialism of Berlin” was “well worth copying.”

It was at university in Berlin that the young American also met her future husband, Vladimir Gregorievitch Simkhovitch. Caroli devotes as much attention to Simkhovitch’s personal life as she does to her professional activity. In many ways, Simkhovitch—even as she embraced a politics of radical reform—remained remarkably conventional, true to her proper, middle-class, New England upbringing. Her marriage to V.G., as his friends called him, was the one big exception. Of Russian and Jewish background, Vladimir lived a life of grand gestures, some of them outside his means. Though he was very different in temperament and lifestyle from Mary, the couple remained loyal to one another, even in difficult times.

In 1902, after moving to New York City, Simkhovitch founded Greenwich House in what is now the West Village. It was far from the first such establishment in the city, and in many ways it was typical of the 400 settlement houses that would eventually spring up in the country. (Four hundred!) Located in what was then a poor, predominantly Italian immigrant neighborhood (and which, these days, you must be rich to afford), Greenwich House provided social services, a kindergarten, a wide array of clubs and classes, vocational training, and recreation to community........

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