Henry Street Settlement

Henry Street Settlement is a National Historic Landmark in Manhattan, New York City, since 1989. It preserves the building where new immigrants and the poor sought assistance. Henry Street Settlement continues to provide support services to residents of New York City's Lower East Side today. It was founded in 1895 by nurses Lillian Wald and Mary Maud Brewster at 265 Henry Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

History of Henry Street Settlement

Lillian Wald was a nursing student at Women's Medical College in New York City. She went to the Lower East Side, which she described as "a vast crowded area, a foreign city within our own". Two years later, she founded the Henry Street Settlement in order to provide better nursing care and other aid to the poor and immigrants.

Henry Street Settlement
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Henry_Street_Settlement_sign_and_entrance_from_east.jpg
Author: Beyond My Ken


Wald established the Henry Street Settlement in a federal-era town house. Several more such houses were subsequently purchased and maintained as part of the Settlement. This had the consequence of preserving part of the 1820s streetscape amid what later became a crowded tenement district. The block of Henry Street between Montgomery and Grand Street, which also includes the handsome, fieldstone Georgian-Gothic All Saint's Episcopal Church gives a good impression of uptown Manhattan as it would have looked in the 1820s and 1830s.

In 1915, the Neighborhood Playhouse was created nearby. The Settlement was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1989. In 2007, it was among over 530 New York City arts and social service institutions to receive part of a $30 million grant from the Carnegie Corporation, which was made possible through a donation by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

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