The Sociable City. Jamin Creed Rowan

and black settlement workers together in a single domestic space, Ovington sought an alternative to the standard settlement house model. Rather than occupy a Victorian mansion as if it were a “big boarding house,” Ovington hoped to “get a model tenement built in one of the crowded Negro quarters, preferably the Sixties, and to have room in it for settlement work.” She envisioned that she and her fellow black and white settlement workers would occupy separate self-contained flats in the tenement and that together they would conduct settlement work among the building’s tenants and neighbors in the tenement’s basement. She planned to have the partition between the front two rooms of her three-room apartment removed to allow more space for settlement workers and neighbors to congregate.⁵⁵ Ovington persuaded philanthropist Henry Phipps to build a model tenement, but he insisted that she not carry out settlement work there. After several delays in construction, Ovington moved into the Tuskegee Apartments at 233 West Sixty-Third Street in the predominantly black San Juan Hill neighborhood in February 1908. She lived there for eight months and did what little settlement work she could, allowing children and mothers to use her rooms during the day and hosting conversations among black and white men and women about the city’s and nation’s racial problems during the evenings.⁵⁶ When the social barriers to the kind of interracial contact on which her vision of settlement work rested proved too great to allow her fully to actualize that vision, Ovington left the Tuskegee Apartments to establish the Lincoln Settlement House in one of Brooklyn’s black neighborhoods with Dr. Verina Morton Jones, an accomplished middle-class black woman. Although Lincoln Settlement served as an important place of exchange for its black neighbors, it did not provide the opportunities for interracial social exchange that had been so important to Ovington and Du Bois. The real condition of the industrial city—its physical and social environments—made it very difficult for black and white urbanites to participate in the processes of public sympathy that would lead to the friendships that Du Bois claimed were capable of solving many of the city’s social problems.

      Ovington’s failure to establish Du Bois’s vision of an interracial settlement house calls attention to some of the blind spots and inadequacies of the settlement movement’s discourse of sympathy. Its confidence in the ability of personal contact to generate fellow-feeling rested, to some degree, on a naïveté about the possibility of bringing urbanites into personal contact with one another. Settlement intellectuals could not have anticipated that the political and economic forces that would drive patterns of urban growth throughout the twentieth century would only make it increasingly difficult to experience the kind of cross-class and interracial exchanges on which the sympathetic process they described depended. Intense suburbanization, the restructuring of the urban core, and the unequal distribution of home loans would harden the color line that separated urban blacks from other urbanites and suburbanites. But settlement residents seemed unaware, on some level, of the ways in which the real conditions of the industrial city interfered with the sympathetic process in which they had become so invested. They occasionally underestimated the power of the physical and social environments of their own cities to prevent urbanites from interacting with one another on terms that would allow them to obtain the kinds of fellow-feelings privileged in settlement discourse. The settlement movement’s passionate investment in personal contact as the foundation of valuable urban relationships also failed to account adequately for the dramatic growth of the urban population that was already well underway in the Progressive Era. At a certain point, the industrial city’s demographics did not match up with the settlement’s discourse of urban sympathy. Although many settlements would continue operating for decades, their small semi-public spaces lacked the ability to bring a considerable fraction of an increasingly large number of city dwellers into direct contact with one another. As city populations grew, the settlement movement’s discourse of sympathy provided a less and less satisfying account of the many different ways urbanites experienced being in the city with and attaining fellow-feelings for others.

      The ability of an urbanist discourse of sympathy to make sense of the wide range of social experiences and relational forms among city dwellers would only become more insufficient as sympathy once again became a term used primarily to signify the kinds of emotional intimacies that Olmsted and others had privileged. Despite the efforts of settlement intellectuals to stretch the language and logic of sympathy beyond its nineteenth-century boundaries in order to legitimate the relationships formed among urbanites in public and semi-public spaces, the conceptual work performed by the term retracted over the course of the first few decades of the twentieth century. New Deal urbanists reclaimed sympathy from the settlement movement to pursue a discourse of sympathy that accentuated the singular importance of relationships founded on emotional intimacy. New Deal political ideologies and cultural narratives calcified the conceptual possibilities of sympathy in such a way that an urbanist discourse that revolved around sympathy became nearly incapable of signifying and privileging anything other than emotionally intimate fellow-feelings and relationships. Settlement residents may have carved new channels through which sympathy could flow among urbanites in public and semi-public spaces, but many of those channels collapsed in the 1930s, forcing urbanists to turn elsewhere to discover a discourse that could more satisfactorily account for and validate interactions among urbanites in public spaces that did not necessarily engender intimacy but that nevertheless generated fellow-feelings.

      CHAPTER 2

      New Deal Urbanism and the Contraction of Sympathy

      In 1941, the Henry Street Settlement produced a play titled A Dutchman’s Farm at its Neighborhood Playhouse on New York’s Lower East Side. Put on, as settlement leader Helen Hall recalled, by one hundred and fifty of the settlement’s neighbors, “from dramatic groups to mothers’ and fathers’ clubs,” the production staged the history of housing on the Lower East Side in an effort to persuade its audience of the need for federally and state-funded slum clearance and public housing programs.¹ In the play’s climactic scene, six mothers from the Lower East Side travel to Washington, D.C., to appear before a Senate committee and voice support for public housing legislation. As the spokeswoman for this small delegation, Mrs. Ziprin summons what had become the settlement movement’s standard argument about the need for better and more affordable housing when she informs the committee that her ten-year-old son is “already estranged” from his tenement home because it is “not attractive to him.” She passionately explains that “a home should be attractive and decent enough so that no barrier springs up between our children and ourselves. They must not become strangers!”² According to Mrs. Ziprin, the physical quality of the home determined the emotional quality of the feelings that bound families together. She attempts to persuade the Senate committee that the construction of attractive and structurally sound homes through government assistance would eliminate the affective barriers that had sprung up between children and parents who occupied the city’s tenement flats. Public housing would, she assures the senators, restore emotional stability to her family and other families living in rundown buildings in cities across the nation.

      The one hundred and fifty Lower East Siders who put on A Dutchman’s Farm joined a much larger chorus of city dwellers who, during the 1920s and 1930s, pointed to inadequate and unaffordable housing as one of the most pressing issues facing U.S. cities. Although congested living quarters continued to be a problem about which city dwellers complained—especially in the neighborhoods where a rapidly growing number of black urbanites lived—many urbanists shifted their attention away from the number of people sharing a single tenement flat and focused instead on the quality and cost of a home in the city. As the labor and material expenses of urban housing rose dramatically over the first two decades of the twentieth century, lower-and middle-class urbanites found themselves in the position of having to pay a higher percentage of their income for an increasingly smaller percentage of the city’s decent housing stock. Additionally, new modes of financing real estate developments in the city made it more profitable for developers to construct large-scale and upscale commercial and residential developments, thus diminishing the proportion of affordable and livable housing available to working-class urbanites. As the city settled into its early twentieth-century form of factory districts and residential neighborhoods tethered to downtown department stores, office skyscrapers, and