Was Greenwich House Founder Mary K. Simkhovitch a “Wonder Woman”? New Bio Says Yes

By Phyllis Eckhaus

Greenwich House founder Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch unsettled me. For years, her portrait was the fusty focal point of the lobby of the settlement house’s main building at 27 Barrow Street ─ and as that large, looming, oh-so-respectable matron looked down on me from on high, I felt judged! And then relieved when the portrait disappeared (I’m told it’s in a conference room somewhere).

Knowing nothing of Simkhovitch but that portrait, when I learned that a young Crystal Eastman — Greenwich Villager extraordinaire and future co-founder of the ACLU ─ had an affair with Simkhovitch’s husband Vladimir, my reaction was kneejerk sympathy for the lovers.

So I felt compelled to read Betty Boyd Caroli’s just-published biography of Simkhovitch, perhaps to confront and transcend my prejudices.

A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing is, overall, a model biography: eminently engaging, sympathetic and savvy in its well-researched judgments, felicitous in its phrasing. And fascinating: a window on the early to mid-20th century Village focused on the working people and immigrants who lived here, a salutary reminder that the Village was so much more various in its denizens than the “bohemians” who gained fame.

Plus the book is an antidote to reductive, romantic thinking. People are complicated. Social change is hard. It’s near-impossible to judge yesterday’s success stories by today’s standards.

All this to say that Caroli’s book made me admire the deft author ─ her subject not so much. Still, I can appreciate that Simkhovitch, a woman born in 1867 to middle-class parents in small-town Newton, Massachusetts managed to make a big, juicy life for herself and accomplish considerable good in the process.

Early Ambitions

Young Mary Kingsbury, recently graduated from Boston University, was so bored by substitute teaching, she would toss her students’ papers rather than grade them. Seeking more, she boarded with the family of an activist “social gospel” minister, enrolled in the Harvard Annex, and became deeply involved in Boston’s Dennison House, a settlement house that rocked her world, introducing her to the poor and the possibility of work on their behalf, a career that could fully deploy her smarts and devout sense of purpose.

But Kingsbury also had intellectual and cosmopolitan ambitions. When she got a few-strings-attached $600 grant in 1895, she — and her equally starved-for-stimulation mother — took off for Berlin, where Simkhovitch enrolled at university. In a class on socialism, she met Vladimir Simkhovitch, seven years her junior, a poor, Jewish, witty, self-aggrandizing aesthete and scholar. Attempting to explain Simkhovitch’s attraction to Vladimir, Caroli recalled young Mary’s childhood request that an uncle bring her a monkey and an accordion from his travels. Despite Simkhovitch’s apparent respectability, she yearned for unconventional entertainment.

Fast forward to 1897, when Simkhovitch enrolled in a nondegree program at Columbia, moved into the College Settlement on the Lower East Side, and rapidly became head worker. Marriage to Vladimir, soon followed with a child, compelled her to leave first the College Settlement, then the Friendly Aid Society on East 34th Street, where in 1902 she was fired for being too ambitious and installing husband and baby in the director’s suite.

Launching Greenwich House

Simkhovitch had already been plotting to start a settlement of her own. Two weeks after termination, she’d incorporated Greenwich House, with tenement reformer Jacob Riis and Ethical Culture founder Felix Adler on her board. Within months, she and her team had rented and overhauled “filthy” 26 Jones Street, which opened on Thanksgiving Day.

Greenwich House immediately thrived under her leadership. Set in a dense, diverse, increasingly Italian neighborhood, the settlement offered kindergarten, boys clubs, a bank, a small circulating library, lunch for factory workers, classes in English, carpentry, sewing and upholstering, basket-making, and cooking. Offerings rapidly expanded, as did the settlement’s footprint as it took over nearby buildings. When the street got streetlights, Greenwich House sponsored outdoor dancing. The settlement’s cold storage space and regular milk deliveries protected babies from spoiled milk, rapidly reducing their death rate.

Greenwich House was also distinguished by its close ties to Columbia and commitment to research. Famed educator John Dewey headed the Greenwich House Committee on Social Education, which supported landmark work and publications, among them an early guide to tenants’ rights and future NAACP co-founder Mary White Ovington’s pioneering research into Black families.

Never one to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, Simkhovitch excelled in pragmatic accommodation. When tensions between neighborhood Blacks and Irish arose, she moved Blacks out of the settlement house, offering them only home visits.

She was equally pragmatic about her own two children, parking them on the family farm in New Jersey. Substantially unparented by ever-changing caregivers, the children became difficult. The 1915 census placed the kids in the care of the couple hired to run the creamery.

Philandering Vladimir became close to a number of the young women who staffed Greenwich House, Amelia Earhart among them. Heiress Anna Woerishoffer was another. When Woerishoffer, on a social research mission, crashed her motorcar in the rain and died from her injuries, her grief-stricken mom honored her by underwriting a grand new Greenwich House home on Barrow Street.

Spurring Affordable Housing

Caroli contends that what made Simkhovitch truly great — worthy of being celebrated as a real-life Wonder Woman in the comic of that name — was her early and continuing advocacy for government-supported affordable housing, a concept widely derided as socialism. She not only believed housing was a human right, she helped create the movement to make public housing happen, founding and heading the National Public Housing Conference. When Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia established the New York City Housing Authority, Simkhovitch — who became vice-chair — forcefully pushed to construct the first public housing in the nation, First Houses on Avenue A and 3rd Street. Other public housing projects followed.

But here’s the thing. Simkhovitch didn’t just want to build; she was a fervent fan of “slum clearance,” meaning displacement. To raze neighborhoods, often of Black and brown families, with no regard for where they might move was supposedly progress. This reform zeal run amuck is like the prohibition impulse of temperance campaigners disgusted by drunkenness or the eugenics ideology of those who combined pro-birth control sentiment with fear that the poor are genetically debased. It takes power away from poor people. It’s the worst kind of patronizing obliviousness, and it’s what I imagined I saw in Simkhovitch’s portrait.

My big beef with Caroli is that she doesn’t delve into this issue of displacement, preferring to look away. I still like and highly recommend her book. But I don’t like Mary K. Simkhovitch and hope Greenwich House keeps her portrait off their walls.