An Ideal Settlement House

Greenwich House Is Fighting Valiantly for Beauty and the Arts

ARTHUR LORING BRUCE

WHAT is, in some respects, the most important settlement house in the United States has just been completed in the heart of the region known as Greenwich Village, New York. The district has for four score years been the most picturesque of the early villages and farms out of which the present city of New York was composed. It possesses as a region, the charm that Charles Dickens speaks of as "the beauty that inheres in any tangle of ill-assorted, contraryminded and nowhere - leading streets and byways."

Much of the Colonial charm of Greenwich Village still survives in it. More has been added to it by the large and ambitious colony of artists and artisans who have, for nearly a hundred years, singled it out as the scene of their varied artistic activities.

Fifteen years ago a "settlement," which was called Greenwich House, was organized in this quaint village. The settlement began its career in Jones Street. But it has so enlarged and multiplied its useful activities that a new and more ambitious home has become an imperative need. The new building, on Barrow Street, is the result of that happy sociological expansion.

BUT this new structure is much more than. the usual "settlement," now a familiar and beneficent social phenomenon in all of our great cities. It is that, to be sure; but, in extending the settlement idea to include the study and the fostering of all the arts, to encourage the ennobling influences of beauty, to teach painting, modelling, and pottery making, to foster the drama, and to instil in the minds of everybody having to do with the activities of the community, the need for beautiful architecture, furniture and decoration, Greenwich House has blazed a trail which all other settlements in America would do very well to follow.

Insistence on this artist-artisan note in the work of Greenwich House, and in its new building itself, was due largely to three causes; first, the inspiring leadership of Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, the Vice-President of Greenwich House; second, to the large number of artists, dramatists, decorators, artisans, writers and students who allied themselves with Mrs. Whitney in her effort to make beauty an integral part of the Greenwich community plan; third, to Chester Aldrich—of the architectural firm of Delano and Aldrich— who, in erecting the structure, has had constantly in mind the need of carrying on two great works in Greenwich House, that of improving the civic, hygienic and social status of the residents in the district, and at the same time fostering in them the love of beauty and of all the arts.

And it is Mr. Aldrich's and Mrs. Whitney's success in so perfectly achieving this second ideal which, to the mind of Vanity Fair, makes Greenwich House the extraordinary important institution which it is today.

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Good taste is everywhere apparent in it, as well as good decoration, good painting, good furniture and good architecture. Everybody in America, who is at all interested in the problem of so-called settlement houses ought to make a pilgrimage to it. Let us hope that the day of dreary, desolate, and inartistic settlement houses is soon to come to an end in this country, and, when it does, let us not forget the conspicuous' part that Mrs. Whitney, Mr. Aldrich, and their loyal co-workers have played in ending it.

IN the new seven-story building there is nothing of the aspect of the usual "settlement house," an institution whose ideal of decoration seems always to have been the arid refinement of grass cloth walls hung with plaster casts and large brown photographs, and the massive dignity of Morris furniture.

The outside of Greenwich House has the red brick walls, the wrought iron railings, the heavy wooden shutters and the doorways flanked with slim white columns, characteristics of the old type house of the neighborhood. The only note of exuberance is in the marble medallions between the big arches, which are being carved by Mrs. Whitney.

Upstairs, across the whole front of the building are the drawing and dining rooms with windows opening on the balcony. At each end is a fireplace with enchanting decorations by Augustus V. Tack.

On the floors above are the rooms of the ten or twelve residents, the apartments for the director, Mrs. Simkhovitch, and Dr. Simkhovitch,—two geniuses to whose ability and far vision the inception of Greenwich House was solely due—and for the guests of the house. Above these are club rooms for the boys and girls of the neighborhood, the kindergarten room, and on the fifth floor a "Common Room" for games, and a council room, at whose generous fireplaces the young people of the neighborhood foregather.

On top of all is the gymnasium, two stories high, covering the whole building. Opening from it a small sun parlor filled with plants looks out over the tangled streets of Greenwich Village.