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Betty Boyd Caroli, "A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing" (Oxford UP, 2026)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Caleb Zakrin, CEO and publisher of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with historian Betty Boyd Caroly about her new book, A Slumless Mary Kay Simkiewicz and the Dream of Affordable Housing. Betty's book tells the story of Mary Kingsbury Simkiewicz, an important figure in the progressive and New Deal era, dedicated to making adequate housing available to all. Mary's story is highly resonant today amidst the ongoing fights to build more housing, especially in crowded and expensive cities like New York. Her dedication to the poor and tireless efforts to find practical solutions to seemingly intractable problems will surely inspire readers and scholars. Betty, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network.
- [00:45]
B
Thanks, Caleb. Good to be here.
- [00:47]
A
This is, I feel, like a really timely and important book, especially for someone like me who lives in New York City, where every single day people are debating housing and how can we alleviate the, you know, the expensive rent here. And. And there's all sorts of different solutions that people are. Are putting forward. Fierce debates. And, you know, your book really showed me that. That people have been having these debates for a very long time. And in many cases, the conditions that people were dealing with and observing, like. Like how what Barry was seeing were way worse than. Than what people are dealing with today. But before even jumping into Mary's life, I would just wondering if you could tell us a little about yourself and your career as a scholar.
- [01:25]
B
Well, I got interested in Simkovich a long time ago. In fact, this book has its beginnings about 40 years ago when my husband started teaching music at the Greenwich House Music School. And he came home and said that they're talking about Mary Kay, and I was teaching women's history, and I thought I knew a lot about women in New York, but I didn't know anything about Mary Kay Simcovich. So not long after that, we were invited to the home of the director of the Greenwich House at that time, talking the 1970s or early 80s. And he said, do you want to sit on a chair that Mary Kay sat on? So that's how the whole thing started. The question for me was how a woman who was that important? Because at the time, you know, DC Comics, the one that put out Wonder Woman, Diana Prince, they used to put occasionally inside those comic books which sold in the millions, they used to put a little insert on Wonder Women of history, and they put one on Mary Kay Simkiewicz, and they called her the most important person in Greenwich Village, the mother of public housing. I mean, they made her out to be really an outstanding and important and significant individual. And yet I'd never heard of her, and lots of other New Yorkers hadn't. So that's how I got interested in the topic. And I've lived in Greenwich Village for 60 years now, so Greenwich Village has always been Greenwich Village and Greenwich House. It's music school, it's pottery recitals. Those have always been part of my life for a very long time.
- [03:02]
A
Yeah, I love this.
- [03:02]
B
But I, of course, have written other books on other subjects. This is my tenth book, actually, so.
- [03:08]
A
Right. And you've done lots of. Lots of biographies. So this is, you know. Yeah, Another. Another volume. And a very interesting person who's, you know, I. I love these sort. The. You know, these sorts of biographies that really go and focus on a person's intellectual development and worldview. I feel like oftentimes, you know, maybe it's just because I like books, but I like. See, I like hearing about how, you know, the various thinkers that someone was engaged with and seeing how that shaped their. Their approach to life as much as the practical as well, because obviously she was a very practical person, too. I was wondering if you talk a little bit about Mary's early life, where she came from, what her family was like.
- [03:51]
B
Well, she came from right outside Boston in an area that they didn't use the word suburb then. She was born 1867, so right after the Civil War ended. And she was born in what we call Newton, Massachusetts, which was really a string of villages, I don't know, 10 or so in the northern ring and the southern ring. And her early years were very rural. I mean, she went into Boston, but she had a very narrow view of the world. And when it came time to go to college, she didn't want to leave home to go to college. She and her good friend from high school, Ida Ripley, decided that they would commute into Boston University. So by then, there was a train from the town where she lived, which we now call Chestnut Hill. She could take classes by just taking the train each day. And she married in Latin. I mean, talk about looking to the past. She taught Latin, and when she graduated, she did what most women did in 1890 who graduated from college. She went back and lived with her parents for 18 months and basically didn't do anything. She was sick a lot. She seemed to have headaches, and they called it rheumatism. She didn't do anything for about 18 months. And then she got a job teaching as a substitute teacher in a. Teaching Latin. And she hated it. You Know, you think about how few jobs were open to women in the 1890s, and she was pretty limited. And her mother loved teaching. Her mother was a very popular teacher and couldn't understand why Mary didn't like it, too. But she confessed that she got so tired of reading papers, she just threw them away sometimes and made up the grades because she just hated teaching. And then something happened. In 1895, her minister actually at the church suggested that she go to what was then called the Harvard annex. It was now called Radcliffe, and it was a college where women could go and basically get advanced training. In other words, they didn't call it a graduate school. They called it the Harvard Annex because professors from Harvard would teach there for extra money. So she got into a completely different way of thinking. She took social science courses, History of women, more courses on European history. I mean, she just really changed her outlook that year. And at the end of that year, she got a small fellowship that she could go wherever she wanted with it. So she went to Berlin to study for a year. So I really think that was the turning point in her life. I mean, she had not been exposed to poverty or urban problems. In fact, I said she hadn't been exposed. When she was in school, her class was taken to see a poor family in Boston. And it was an old lady living in the. It was at Thanksgiving time, and there was this elderly lady living in a place with no heat and she had no food. And Mary thought it was so strange. That must have been staged just to get their attention. She didn't believe it was real. You know, she thought she was being led to a drama production. So that's how far she was from poverty. And it was in Berlin that she not only saw what poverty could do, but she saw what government programs and housing could do. And she was won over. But we're talking 1895, 96. That was the year that she was in Berlin. And when she got back to the US in the fall of 96, she understood that most people didn't think like she did, that people were supposed to build their own houses on their own land and take care of them. And that was not the view in Berlin. You know, government subsidies for housing were considered absolutely necessary. And that was her view, too, that when you have a dense city, there's no way you can build housing that people who work there can afford to buy. She would say, the numbers just don't add up. And yet people have a right to decent housing. She would say they have a right to decent housing. Like, they have a right to clean air and clean water. It's part of the infrastructure, and if they can't afford it, then government steps in. When she got back to the United States, one of the first. Well, she attended Columbia University for a while, so it may have been a paper she wrote for Columbia, but it was published. Her first. First published article in 1898 said, State Intervention is necessary, and you can't make it any clearer than that. And yet she knew that most Americans did not agree. I mean, you know, I think it comes from our rural background that you can. Everybody can have their own house. There's all that land out there, you know, and if you just get your piece of land, you can be responsible for your own house. They called it socialistic and un American. And, you know, she was smart enough to realize that she was. Her thinking was ahead of most people's thinking. And she really waited. From 1898, she didn't wait. She did things to expose people to how bad housing was. She had a lot of exhibitions. She wrote articles. She gave speeches. She helped hold the first conference ever held on the national level on housing in Washington and was the only female speaker who was there. I mean, I don't mean that she did nothing, but she understood that she had to go slowly because people had to catch up with her.
- [09:29]
A
Right. Yeah, she was very much. You know, there was this upswell of the progressive movement with various thinkers that you mentioned throughout the book, like people like Felix Adler and others that had John Dewey that also had similar ideas to her. And she was right there with them, seeing the same thing, seeing that. That the country was changing very rapidly and that the change would. Would necessitate new. New approaches. I wanted to ask you a little bit about her time in Berlin because this is where she. She met her husband. And I sort of. If you talk a little about her relationship with him, what he was like, you know, his influence on. On her. You know, obviously they were together for. For a very long time, you know. Who is Vladimir Simkovich?
- [10:18]
B
Well, Vladimir Simkovich was a very important person in her life. And how to describe him, really? There are people. His grandson, Mary's grandson, described him as somebody who always thought he was entitled to live at a level higher than he could afford, and he had princely ambitions. And other people said, oh, he was the most witty, engaging individual they ever met. She met him soon after. I forgot to say that when she went to Berlin in the fall of 1895, she took her mother with her because the family felt that she Needed a chaperone and they couldn't afford one and the mother wanted to go. The mother had a yen for travel. She'd not traveled very much. And so the family, you know, they're described in many books as being wealthy real estate people. They certainly were comfortable. They had land and their families had always had land, but they didn't have much cash. In fact, they owed money, they had mortgages and so forth. And so they had to carefully put together a budget that would allow the mother to go to and stay for a year with Mary in Berlin. And of course the mother said, well, she would make the money last. And she was very tight with money. I mean, she watched every cent. Anyway, in spite of the fact that Mary lived with her mother, who basically was anti Semitic and anti foreign and everything that Mary was not. Mary spent a lot of time with Vladimir Simkovich, who happened to be the head of the. They call it the Political Science Club, basically is how we would translate it. And no women. Well, first of all, I should say that when Mary got to Berlin, women were not admitted for matriculation. She was a non matriculated student, which meant she got no credit. She paid for the classes, but got no credit towards the degree. And she was there with Emily Balch, one other woman. And so they said, how are we going to behave in this situation? The popular professors were getting like a thousand students in some of their classes and how do two women. So they resolved to not get much attention, to sit in the back row and just be kind of melt in. In spite of that, it's fair to say that within weeks of moving into a pension in Berlin with her mother, she met Vladimir, who was not staying at the same pension, but there were Russians staying there. And it was quite clear that Mary was quite attracted to Russians. She said, I find them very interesting. And so when the opportunity came to join the Political Science Club in January, Mary and her friend Emily were admitted into Vladimir's club. And they obviously spent a lot of time together. But in spite of that, the mother seems unaware of what was going on, of how much in love they were. At Christmas time, she took her mother to Dresden. In the spring, she took her mother on a trip through southern Germany, Bavaria and into Italy. They went all the way down to Capri, Naples. So she was away quite a bit. But Vladimir would write her and he would send her photographs and he was sending gifts to her friends in New York. So obviously he was quite committed to a long term relationship. At the end of the academic year, the mother returned and Mary stayed on. It was not quite clear if she would take another year in Berlin or find a cheaper German city to study. Because Berlin was one of the costlier places, not just for enrollment, but also for a place to live, particularly for living conditions. It was expensive, so she wanted more training. But she wasn't decided about whether to stay in Europe or to come back to the U.S. so the mother returned, and Mary went to Paris, and Vladimir went to Paris. And they had two weeks together. We don't know much about it, but we know that they at that point had committed that she would return to the United States. And he would go back and finish a degree at Halle, not at Berlin. So he would get his doctorate. He did his degree on Russian agricultural developments in his time in the late 19th century. And she came then back. She and her friend attended the socialist convention in London that summer of 1896. And then she returned in. By September, she was back in New York and enrolled at Columbia University again. She was only there as an extra student. She was not working. She never worked toward a doctorate, for reasons that I don't know. Because at the time, her friends at Columbia, her female friends, were working for doctorates. But she took courses. And at that time, Columbia was famous as a school that taught. The city was your laboratory, right? You sent students out to work in the hospitals, to take political information in poor neighborhoods, to see what the city was like. So it was a great place for her to be. And then at the end of that year, the one year where she roomed with a friend, she went to live at her first settlement house, which was down Rivington street, all the time exchanging letters with Vladimir in Europe. He was in Germany at that time. And. And I don't think she told very many people about him. Because when he wrote her in the summer of 1898 that he was on his way over, she had to tell her roommates. Because, remember at that time, women in a settlement house, there were six or seven of them. They lived, like, in the dormitory. And, you know, they ate together and they had meetings. And one night when everybody was getting ready for bed, she started telling them about this Russian who was coming to marry them it her. And they were shocked. I mean, she told them he had no money. He was raised in privileged circumstances, but his family had lost all the money, and he wasn't getting anything. He said, I will be penniless, so you'll have to support us both. And they were kind of horrified. They later wrote about this. We have their letters saying when you said you were marrying a Russian and he didn't have any money, I didn't know what to think. So he arrived, and for two or years or so, he didn't earn a cent. And she supported them both. And her parents hated him. I mean, hate's the wrong word. But they were disgusted that he would let her, that she would depend on him to support her. And it was because she took another job. She had to leave Rivington House because a married woman couldn't. There was no place for a husband. It was like a dormitory for women. So she got a job where she could actually have him live, where the director had a space, you'd call it a tiny apartment at friendly aid on 34th Street. They didn't know she was bringing a husband when they hired her and he moved in. And they couldn't wait to get rid of her. They later fired her, especially after she had a baby. They said a settlement house could use that space better than for husband, child and nurse. Because the child had a nurse. Right. So the beginning of that marriage reads like a novel, really. I mean, that the whole courtship period is strange, but yes. So that takes us up to the time when they're married. After that, he did get a job at Columbia, and then he worked to full. He wasn't a faculty member until, I think, 1911. So, you know, they were married in January of. So like 10, more than 10 years. She was the chief supporter of that family. His job at Columbia was a library extra. He put together exhibits, and so he got something like $400 a year, and she made something like $1,000 a year. So that, you know. And her parents. Oh, in the middle of that, they decided to buy a farm because he got a slight increase, I think, about 1907. And so they decided they would get a place in the country. And they looked in New Jersey and they found the place they wanted. And she asked her parents for money, you know, a loan that she would pay back. And they finally. They lent her money at interest, but insisted that the farm be put entirely in her name so that he would have no claim on it. They really didn't trust him. He went on to a distinguished career, really. But that's another story. That's another book, really.
- [19:25]
A
Right. One of the lines that you have in it, that I. That's stuck in my head, and I might be misremembering parts of it, but that the mother really didn't like that he kissed men and women on the cheek. They found that they. They didn't sound it unusual.
- [19:39]
B
Yeah, it was just so foreign, which you just found him so fake. And he was one of those exuberant people that when he was in the room, you. He was the center of attention. You know, he would, somebody talked about hearing him imitate opera singers. You know, he would, I mean, he would hold forth. He was so either you thought he was charming and interesting as Mary did. I ask her daughter. You know, I have a long interview. I was fortunate to know Mary's daughter and I did interview her at their house in Maine early on in the research for this book. And Vladimir had a real reputation as a womanizer. One of my interviewees said if there was a woman in the room, he had his arm around her. You know, he was. And he had a documented affair with Crystal Eastman while Crystal Eastman was working at Greenwich House. So I asked the daughter how Mary dealt with this infidelity. And the daughter said, oh, she didn't see it. For her, it didn't exist. She just loved him unconditionally.
- [20:41]
A
She was, yeah, it seems based on this, on the account too. Like she was very focused on her work and on her broader mission. And you talk about the Friendly Aid Society experience. Obviously she gets, she's fired from there. But you know, in general, I, I think that, that this experience for her, the sort of the negative experience was good to make her realize what she, how she actually wanted to go about addressing housing issues. So could you, could you talk about just this, this experience a bit at Friendly Society?
- [21:10]
B
I, I did say she was fired from Friendly Aid. I mean, at first they said, you're reaching too widely. We want to kind of narrow our goals here. And I think they thought she was doing too much. She was doing a lot. And then the second year, when it came time for renewal, basically they said, we're not going to renew your contract. And I think technically she quit. So technically she wasn't fired, she retired. But she always said that they had a right to choose the director that they wanted. And as you put it, I think very well, it forced her to face the fact that she really wanted something different. I mean, Friendly Aid was much an organization. It was the wealthy helping the poor. And that was not what she saw a settlement house to be. It was people moving into a neighborhood unlike theirs and both sides gaining from the exchange. And, and she didn't like the, you know, Kindly Aid is so one handed. I mean, money passing from the top to the bottom. And that's how they saw, I mean, they did good work. So we shouldn't negate that, but they were. So they made, for example, the Friendly Aid parlors were particularly the ones that the board used. And the people who were paying the money to keep the thing going. I mean, they had fancy satin sofas and curtains that were just foreign to the people who were coming in there, who didn't even have curtains. And she didn't like that. She wanted something simpler, something that looked more like the people who were coming in were used to. So it did kind of force her. If she could have stayed on there. Who knows, maybe the money situation, she would have been tempted to. To stay just because he didn't have a. He wasn't making enough money for them to live on. And very few settlements hired women directors who had husbands. It just wasn't in the. In the picture, you know. So what she did was form her own settlement house, the Cooperative Social Settlement of the City of New York. I always get a little mixed up. It's such a. Because we always call it Greenwich House. But the constitution written in 1902, she put it together, and very definitely it was to be a place where the people, the staff, the people working there, she and her workers had a voice in everything that happened. It wasn't just the people putting up the money to keep it going. And she was very much to reach out to get people to give small sums of money to keep it going. You remember Jane Addams and Lillian Wald? They both had wealthy backers. I mean, Jane Addams inherited money, a lot of money. And Lillian Wald had a supporter, Jacob Schiff, who not only supported her settlement house, but paid for her to take trips around the world. You know, he thought the work, what she was doing, was so important that he forked over a lot of money. I just explained that Mary's parents weren't about to subsidize anything. So as far as I know, they never gave a cent to the grandchild. They must have. I mean, they did help, but they came and babysat and I helped that way. But they were certainly not supportive of her taking on a lot of debt the way she had to do.
- [24:37]
A
So could you describe a little bit about how the Greenwich House functioned? And I think also even this idea of settlement housing is maybe a little foreign to people. So what was it actually like? How did it function in the broader West Village community?
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B
Well, settlement house started in England, and it was in a poor immigrant neighborhood where male graduates of Oxford came and lived really as an apprenticeship to careers in politics and business. It was seen as certainly it was a help to the people living there to teach them language and how to live in a new city. Several Americans heard about this and went and visited Toynbee hall, which is what the British one, the first one was called. But the idea brought here was much more place for women. Not the first one. The first one was started by a man. But the famous ones, Jane Addams, Lynn Wald, Mary Simkiewicz, they were all women oriented. They were primarily staffed by women. And the men who taught there lived elsewhere or had rooms or came in to work from elsewhere. So in Mary's case, she decided, as I said, she was working over on Rivington street, which is the Lower east side. Then she went up to 34th Street. When came time to form her own settlement house, she chose the West Village because it was heavily Italian, becoming more. It was basically Irish. Irish was just. When she moved in in 1902, it was switching from Irish to Italian as the prominent group. But she arriving because, of course, the Italians, the big years were 1900 to 1914, particularly 1907 with them. So that area really changed. And she said, that area has no settlement house. You have no one serving the. Remember, she had traveled to Italy on that trip with her mother in 1896, and she really liked the idea of going to that neighborhood. So she had some workers who had been with. I called them workers. You now say they were social workers, but they don't use that term, social worker. They were workers at a social settlement, you know. So she had some workers with her at. Paul Kennedy was one who volunteered in the summer of 1922 to find a place, a house, a building in Greenwich Village, what we would call Greenwich Village today. It wasn't called back then for them to rent. And he found this place on Jones Street. Now, I don't know if you know Jones street, but Jones street is one block long. And at that time, it was pretty bad. It had, I think, 11 saloons and was mostly tenement houses. The houses, many of them look like nice brownstones today, but they'd been turned into basically cubicles for people to live, you know, crowded together, and so they could rent the place. It was in really bad shape. It needed a paint job. It needed really cleaning up. He found the place. He said, we can, you know, it will fit our budget. But she was up in Maine that summer with a baby boy. The boy had been born in December, so he was about six months old. She was already pregnant with the second child. And he said, we think you should come down and take a look, because We're a little worried about the neighbors neighborhood, especially with a small child, you know, you might not want to live there. So she came down, looked it over and said, yes, she thought it was good. And so that's what they took. And they opened it in Thanksgiving of 1902. If you look at it today, it's really small. I mean, you'd wonder how they could do. And they didn't do everything there. They had rooms for women on the top floor. They had a middle floor with. With you'd say an apartment kind of two or three rooms put together for the Simkiewicz family. They had. The basement was made into a kind of recreation room. And they said they had the first orange painted walls in Greenwich Village. And so they opened it technically on Thanksgiving Day in 1902. The men who worked there, and I mentioned Paul Kennedy, was a very dedicated worker. They rented rooms a few doors away and very soon they rented other places. You know, a place for pottery, a place for music, a place because it's just really small. When I think how it could have operated such a. Now it's back to being a private dwelling. I think it has three apartments in it now. But that's where they started 1920. And does that give a picture of. So these women. Some women lived upstairs, as I said, only about 6 or 7 could live there. And other women like Crystal Eastman, who when she finished her degree at Columbia and wanted to go to law school at nyu, she said, oh, I want to get into Greenwich House. If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere. It had already gained a reputation of being a very active place for women like her to, for example, get subsidies to write books because it was connected with the Columbia professors. Even though Vladimir didn't have a real job up at Columbia, he was very popular with the faculty and they relied on him for information about Russia and reviewing books about Russia. So he would invite these professors down. And by 1934, Mary had a kind of social science investigation group going and people like Crystal Eastman could. And other. Louise Boland and Mary Ovington White, these women could come there and basically get the academic expertise, a professor to guide them in their research and they could publish books. So it was really just the center for the activity. Not, not, not all the women live there, of course.
- [30:46]
A
Right.
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B
And.
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A
And as she's developing Greenwich House and you know, learning more about, in a very practical way about how to help. How to help the local community, you know, she's developing her. Her view. And you then talk about the 1909 National Conference on City Planning and the Problems of Congestion that she attends, where, you know, she. She really goes as. And I think in this way gets a. You know, starts thinking about how to address housing issues on a national level, not just in her local community. Could you talk about this conference and what she said and did there?
- [31:23]
B
Yeah, that conference in 1909, it was sponsored by a group that. By two groups, real estate people who had one view and her group. She and Florence Kelly, who's famous as a social worker and started consumer organizations and so forth. Florence Kelly and Mary Simkovich started a group called Congestion Committee. In other words, to study. It was really to report to people how congested housing affected people's lives, their health, everything, family life and so forth. And they had had an exhibit at the Museum of natural history in 1907 that all, I mean, made a big. It had a lot of publicity in New York. Thousands went to see it because it was photographs of people living in slums and how awful it was with the laundry over the dining room table and so forth. Well, they didn't have a dining room, but the table. And so this Congestion Committee and the realtors organized this conference in Washington in 1909, May of 1909. And as I said before, Mary was a speaker at the Saturday night banquet and got a lot of attention. Although if you read into the New York Times, you don't even know she was there. But the speaker of the House at the time, Joseph Cannon, because congressmen were there, you know, it was a big deal. She was the only woman speaker of the whole conference. Anyway, he said something. I can't remember the exact quote, but it was something like, I never really was so moved by women speakers, but she changed my mind. And what she did was talk about the neighborhood that she lived in. Remember, she was still living on Jones street with its saloons and tenements, and there were fights all the time. The street wasn't even paved when she moved in. It got paved, but, I mean, she said in my neighborhood. And one of the topics that was a favorite with her was the infant mortality. That area had, like, double the rest of the city. And she really made the subject real to people. People like Joseph Cannon, who came from someplace where they had never seen a tenement. It. She was very effective. Of course, it didn't change. She also wrote a book Then in 1917, City Workers World with a chapter on housing. But still, you'd have to say that most people still believed that the government didn't pay for housing. People Paid for their own housing. Otherwise it was socialistic, which is bad. She did make headlines, but as I said, when I checked the coverage in the New York times of that 1909 conference in Washington, they mentioned another speaker. They didn't mention her. She was not one who sought publicity. She ran for city council in 1937 and lost. She should have won. She was so outstanding. But she never really was one to boost her own reputation. She wasn't one. She lost out on a lot of publicity that she deserved.
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A
Yeah, you talk about, and I sort of want to pick up on that thread, a little bit of like, what started happening in 1917. Obviously there's the Russian Revolution. And, you know, for people like her in the Progressive era, thinking that society and the government at large should have something to do with, you know, improving people's lives, it didn't have the same, you know, sort of fear tinged that would later get tinged during this early red scare. How did she deal with this and, you know, what was her approach to, you know, advocating for settlement housing at a time when people, you know, were starting to beat the drum of, you know, of anti communism, anti socialist thinking?
- [35:22]
B
Well, of course she got called in that all the settlement houses got on the bad list of people like the. Well, you know, in New York State, the socialists elected in 1919 to the. To the New York State legislature, they weren't seated because socialism, socialism had no part. And there was a committee formed in the state legislature to investigate anti American feeling and the settlement houses because they dealt with foreigners and they didn't make them speak English and they didn't force them to come to night classes. They got on the list for being anti American. You're not doing all you could to make good Americans. And she was quite firm. She said one time she said there were five Russians, I believe they were arrested and kept in a cell so small that they had to stand up. They couldn't even lie down at night to sleep. That does more to make anti Americans than anything I could do. She was really outspoken on that. And, you know, there was a law passed that was later changed that made it mandatory for the programs of these settlements to be investigated. So what they were teaching and what they were not teaching, which I think has some relevance for what we're seeing today. And she really went after that and said, you can't tell me that I'm being anti American if I don't make them. The thing about attending classes at night. She said, people work all day. They don't want to come to a class at night. I've got to schedule it in a different way. And I think it's good that people continue to speak their own language. They can learn English too, but they shouldn't give up a language that they've spoken. She was very outspoken about what she believed in and that got her on some lists. In fact, she got investigated. I mean, she has a record, as you can imagine.
- [37:21]
A
Right.
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B
Later they said she was very liberal.
- [37:23]
A
All great people had a record.
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B
Yeah. Later when I got the papers, it said one person said she was very liberal in her thinking, but she was not a communist.
- [37:34]
A
Right. Yeah. I think part of it too is she seems to me, and I'm wondering if what you, you think of this framing, like she wasn't a very ideological person. She was very practical in many ways. She had her morals, but she was very focused on the, on the ground. How to improve individuals lives, not necessarily how to engage in global revolution.
- [37:58]
B
Yes, I think that's fair to say. Yeah.
- [38:02]
A
You talk then a little bit about, and this is jumping ahead a little bit, but about just trying to her how she managed, you know, both being this, this figure that was in a way, you know, almost like a mother to many people in the Greenwich Village community, but then also dealing with her own personal tragedy of her son's suicide. Could you talk a little about this experience of hers?
- [38:24]
B
Yeah, she had, she had a son and a daughter. As I said, the son was born in late 1899 and there were those, what, 14 years? No, they were married in. In. Anyway, there was, there were only about 14 months between the two kids. And she really thought that she could manage children in a settlement house. And you know, for a while it seemed to work. Many of the settlement staff were very good at taking care of them. And the daughter said, when I interviewed her, she said, you know, I really like to go out with Crystal Eastman because she. Mary, you know, was young. I mean, Mary was an old mother. She gave birth and I think her first child was born when she was 35. So she looked a lot older than the other mothers. And the daughter told me that Helena, Helena told me that she loved when one of the young women who worked there took her out, because then people would think that really was her mother. She didn't like going out with somebody who looked like she was her grandmother. So it seemed to work for a while, but then it didn't work because the son got very bad pneumonia and had to be hospitalized. And they bought the farm in New Jersey and basically put the kids there so that they would see them only on weekends. And the daughter felt really abandoned during that period. She said, I didn't feel I was getting enough attention. We were left to run wild. Nobody combed our hair. And she, you know, I have a picture in the book of her hair. Does look like it hasn't been combed. They would just. She and her brother would just sleep outside or do whatever they wanted. So that was a rough period. And the son, the daughter later tried different things. She tried acting on Broadway. She moved to Paris and married there, lived there for a while and then moved back. But the son had a very troubled. From the time of the New Jersey farm. His grandparents, who would sometimes go and stay at the farm with the kids, said he was really maladjusted. He would bite their hands if they corrected him. He would talk back. He was really a disciplinary problem. And Mary saw that and tried to do. Tried to help. For example, she took him on a trip to the West Coast. You know, she introduced him to members of her family who could get him jobs without going to college. Somehow he got into college. He got into Princeton. I found him listed in the yearbook, but I don't think he finished a semester. He just got thrown out of every place. Another time, he seems to have been enrolled in. In Columbia and didn't finish a semester there. Private school he said he attended. But when I asked for the records, they had no records. He was always talking big and not doing anything. And he got a certain amount of money from a wealthy benefactor whose daughter had been associated with. That's an interesting story. The Vereshoffer family. The daughter had worked at Greenwich House and there was. Died in an automobile accident. And her mother gave millions to Greenwich House. Hundreds of thousands. And she gave both the kids. I think it was 100,000 each as a trust fund to be given when they reached an age where they could administer it. But he would talk big about, when I have that money, I'm going to do this. And he was an operator. He moved out the. Of. Of Greenwich House because after the. When they got to a certain age and college age and so what they. They sold the farm and the kids came back and technically lived on their own. He had his own apartment for a while. He was. He was always. He was always in trouble. And Mary got him psychological. She enrolled him with a psychiatrist, a very famous psychiatrist who had dealt with men armed in military battle because she realized he had problems. And he was in treatment for several years. And that psychiatrist died in a boating accident. And Then the son, whose name was Stephen, got involved with a woman. And when she became pregnant, he basically had nothing to do with her and moved to the West Coast. And Mary. Mary tried to help the woman and then finally just had her moved to Virginia to a farm. And she got a certain amount of money each month. The son continued to live in California, said he was writing for the movies. You know, he was always talking big, married a couple times, and then in 1939, drank Lysol and died. And Mary got the call in Maine that summer. It was like June 30th. So it was like the July 4th weekend that he was dead. And she insisted on flying out for the funeral on Monday. Now, in 1939, flying from Maine to California was basically a 24 hour trip with lots of stops on the way. Nobody did that sort of thing in 1930. I mean, now we wouldn't think anything about it. You'd get your ticket and get on the plane. But she talked about she got sick on the flight, and she said most everybody. And then most of the guys did, too. And she got there for the funeral and then had the body cremated and brought back the ashes and buried in the cemetery, the family cemetery in Maine. But it's a tragic story. And you read her letters in that period. I mean, she tried. Well, Vladimir, on the other hand, had nothing to do with him. He said, oh, you know what? Another thing that the son did that got national attention, made Time magazine. He signed up for an experiment in Los Angeles where he would be put to death to be resuscitated later. And this made national news. And he was very flippant about it. He even sent his parents a letter saying, you know, I'm preparing by drinking only liquids, so that I guess he would freeze better and wake up in better shape. And during that, his mother intervened. She wrote to the authorities in Los Angeles and said, stop that experiment because my son is not capable of making decisions like this. So it was stopped. But in the publicity for the experiment, both mother and father were identified. She was identified in a very nasty way as a pompadour, adored woman who did this and that. And he and Vladimir was identified as a professor of economics at Columbia, something like that. So the parents, you know, their friends could read about it. As I said, it was a big thing in Time magazine. So everybody read about it. Anyway.
- [45:32]
A
It's such an absurd story and kind of an interesting. I mean, this is part of. I think the interesting thing that comes from doing biography is that you end up accumulating all these interesting stories that, you know, have since become completely buried. Buried to time. I just would never, you know, it almost feels unbelievable. You probably, when you stumbled across this, were like, this can't even like, what.
- [45:51]
B
Am I reading exactly.
- [45:54]
A
Yeah, I, I, you know, obviously it's, it's, you know, a sad, sad story is this fate is sad. And, and I think part of it is, you know, it adds just to the, the interesting narrative of her life. You know, obviously every, you know, with any person of that does a lot thought for, for the world. There's always going to be some, some element of tragedy buried in there. You, you, you talk quite a bit about, you know, how her work gets furthered. You know, in many ways, as you talk about, she was very ahead of her time. So, you know, her ideas and thoughts about housing only further develop. And, and we see this with the, with, with the creation of the New York City City Housing Authority and really the rise of LaGuardia, you know, the Republican mayor who comes in and really, you know, dislodges the Tammany Hall Democrats. Could you talk about, could you talk about the New York City Housing Authority?
- [46:56]
B
Right. Well, leading up to that, as we've said before, Mary was into the subject of housing or several decades. But she saw her time in 1931, because, remember, in 1931, things were very bad in her area. There were shanties around and people lining up for food and everything. And in late 1931, I think this is really important to remember, she had a meeting at Greenwich House to talk about forming a group to lobby for federal funding for housing. And she called the, the group the Public Housing Converts. In other words, we're for public housing. And she began working then once the election of 1932 happened and Franklin Roosevelt became president. And remember, she was a friend of Franklin Roosevelt's from the time he was a teenager. Their families vacationed across from each other in Maine for many years. So she reached out to Senator Robert Wagner, who was representing New York, of course, and got him to introduce into the legislation that was passed the first legislation for the New Deal, a policy for housing. She said, just a little thing, just a wedge, if we can get a wedge in. And so they did provide for money to go to cities that had an agency in place to spend the money. And that's where we get the New York City housing authority. Mayor LaGuardia appointed in 1934, just when the money would be available as his group to spend the money. The New York City Housing Authority. It was five people Mary was the only woman. She stayed on. She was the vice chairman for I think it was 14 years until basically she was fired from that job too, or, you know, was ended in a not nice way, way. So she was extremely important in the public housing in New York for 1934 to 1947. I mean, the first houses that opened In December of 1935, the first public housing project in the United States. There's some debate about that because everybody wants to be first, right? But this certainly got attention. It was over here, just a few blocks from where I'm sitting at Avenue A and Third street. And it's still operating. You can still go over and see the sign says first Houses. And there was a big celebration, as I said, On December 3rd. Eleanor Roosevelt cut the ribbon and LaGuardia spoke. It was a really cold day. And he said, somebody said it would be a cold day before the government subsidized housing. And they were right because it was a freezing day in December, but they got it open. It was only, you know, it's a modest, the project. It's about 120 apartments. And as I said, they're still operating. What is it now, 90 years later, people, you can go over and see people going in and out of that project. So the New York City Housing Authority went ahead, as we know, to find land, destroy slums. That came under different legislation because the legislation that she was working under, the 1934 law, was later declared unconstitutional. She worked with Senator Wagner to get that the 1937 housing law passed, which became the housing law that we use today to erect public housing throughout the United States. So her housing authority, it didn't change. It was always regardless of the law it operated under.
- [50:44]
A
Right. And this, you know, her role, as you point out, is quite significant. And, and you know, at this point, you know, she's, she's obviously, you know, much older now and has had a, you know, almost 40 year career and you know, such that, you know, not long afterwards she's being, you know, you know, she's, she's getting treated as a hero of history and a Wonder Woman of history in DC Comics. What was, you know, what do you sort of see as her legacy or, you know, you know, as you said, like you weren't aware of her, but, you know, her broader legacy in promoting housing, public housing, you know, how do you think about her significance for this initiative?
- [51:34]
B
Well, she was certainly important in her idea was you've got to expose people to the problem. You've got to show people what's going on and all those exhibitions that she worked on. There was one I didn't even mention in 1900 with Lawrence Beyler and her work in publishing tenants manual to tell people what rights they had and how to go about getting improvements in their housing situation. So it was a long fight to get change. And maybe she was too. What's the word? She was too controlling about it because, you know, when those first houses opened, they were pretty controlled. They were inspected, you could say, by somebody who came around to collect the rent. The idea was that it would work better. You know, there's a book, When Public Housing Worked in New York, and it talks about those years when the control is very tight. There was also a wider range of people who could live there. You know, now we set income limits for housing subsidy people who can live in subsidized housing. I just noticed the other day that there's a affordable housing program in a building being built in the West Village. And the limit is 70,000 dol. You can't make more than $70,000. That's what a beginning school teacher makes. And I think there are many beginning school teachers who would deserve a place to live, but they wouldn't qualify because they're above the limit. So in Europe, the limit was much broader. She wanted it broader, but she also wanted very tight controls over how people live lived. She had a lot to say about how the housing should be built. You know, there was many people wanted it built with shoddy, the cheapest of materials possible. And of course, after she was out of the picture, that's what happened. And that's why a lot of the public housing after she was out of the picture turned out to be completely. Well, we're hearing about it every day now. I mean, how shoddy the work was done, how repairs weren't made. So she was, for a time, when more controls over it, but yet broader access and it worked. And now it doesn't work. I mean, we need to redefine our ideas about public housing. So we have to bring her back. Right? Everybody has a right to decent housing. Housing and the beginning school teacher in New York, if you come here from the Midwest to teach in a public school in New York, you have the right to decent housing. And what do most people have to do? Team up with other people. Right. And share or whatever. Or live a long way from where you teach. Right. That's why.
- [54:24]
A
That's why we all live in. You know, me and all my friends live in Brooklyn now. The outer reaches of Brooklyn.
- [54:29]
B
Brooklyn is too expensive.
- [54:32]
A
Exactly. It's, you know, it's the housing, you know, the, the cost of living in New York is absurdly high. I mean, you do get a lot by living here. Obviously you don't have to necessarily own a car and most New Yorkers don't own a car, so there's some savings there. But it is so interesting reading this book and thinking about it in the context of today and I suppose know, you know, I obviously, you know, Mary ends up, you know, she lives, especially for that time. She, she lives to a pretty, pretty old age. And you know, her legacy in many ways I feel like is quite impressive. She was so productive in her life. And just thinking about today, you know, our current, current issues around housing in New York. Is there anything that you would sort of direct people to who are looking at our current issues today and how they can think about Mary's legacy in relation to the present day issues?
- [55:36]
B
Well, I think the same argument she came up against we still are hearing today, basically we don't accept the idea that there should be government funding for housing. I read that something like 70% of people in Vienna qualify for government subsidized housing. Housing. What do you think our numbers would be? We basically limit it to a very, we don't see it as something government should do. I think many people object to that. And so what she was arguing for 100 years ago, well, she started out, as I said, her article was 1898. Certainly for the next, her entire life she argued for it. And yet we still don't really accept the idea. Her theory was that certainly, and there are many people who wrote about this at Greenwich House, what percentage of your income is spent on housing? And the agreement generally is that if you have to spend more than 30% of your income on housing, you're going to be in trouble. And yet I just read the other day, an amazing figure. How many New Yorkers spend more than 50% percent. So, I mean, where are we? We need her back.
- [56:54]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [56:56]
B
Change our thinking.
- [56:57]
A
Yeah, right. And the, you know, the thing too is like the, the, the, the square footage, the, the cost per square footage in New York is, is, you know, if you're living, if you live anywhere outside, if you live in a rural area in America and you look up the cost per square foot in New York, you're probably going to throw up.
- [57:13]
B
Yeah. No, it's not, I don't think there's any future in that really, because people, you know, I grew up in a rural area in Ohio and We' houses and you know, that's what we think, we pay for them. But it's a whole different thing when a lot of people have to live in a very tiny area. It just as she said, the numbers don't fit.
- [57:32]
A
You know, I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, if there's some people that are working in the current administration looking at Mary's work, looking at her ideas. I know, you know, mom, Donnie has, has talked quite a bit about LaGuardia and LaGuardia's legacy. So, you know, maybe he knows about Mary Simkovich as well. And you know, we'll be curious to see, see what happens because you know, I think I, I, I think today obviously that the issues are, are similar that we've experienced, but they're also, you know, also very different too. And I think a lot of people feel like, you know, not, not everyone has the good, the good luck or the good fortune of being able to like live in a rent controlled apartment. I think only about 20% or so of New Yorkers get that. So it'll be really interesting to see how housing policy develops because there's just never been more focus, at least in my time, just even a few years living in New York. The amount of focus on affordability, on housing is really remarkable.
- [58:32]
B
I agree. And that's the reason we put it in the title of the book because even though the settlement house had many other uses, the launching of women into professions, the redefining of Greenwich Village, what it meant, the affordability of housing, I mean it was a theme there all the time. It was just like she was waiting to poun when the depression hit. And maybe I, maybe people would, maybe the time has come for a major change like then, but we're, we'll see. It's certainly an interesting time to live in New York.
- [59:03]
A
Absolutely. Well, yeah, that it was so wonderful to get the chance to speak with you. I really enjoyed hearing your story of Mary and talking to you about a slumless America. I think it's really relevant book, especially for New Yorkers, especially for, for students of urban studies and public policy. So thank you so much for being guest on the New Books Network.