Henry Street Settlement (No. 267)

267 Henry Street | also 265 Henry Street | Lower East Side | built 1900

Open on the map6 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1846

    Shipbuilder Herbert Lawrence buys 267 Henry Street and lives here until his death

    Herbert Lawrence, born in Rockland County in 1778, came to New York in 1809 and co-founded the shipbuilding firm Lawrence & Sneden in 1816. The firm built the steamboat Bolona for Cornelius Vanderbilt the next year, and Lawrence bought this house in 1846. He died here in 1882; The New York Times noted that he had bought it when Henry Street was a fashionable address, though the district had since filled with Eastern European Jewish immigrants.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1888

    The Louis Down-Town Sabbath School buys the house and turns it into a schoolhouse for neighborhood girls

    In June 1888 the Record & Guide reported the sale of the house to the Louis Down-Town Sabbath School for $14,250, with another $5,000 spent on conversion. Founded in 1880 by Mrs. A. H. Louis, the school taught about 50 girls aged 8 to 15. Mornings were given to sewing, dressmaking, millinery and cooking, afternoons to stenography, bookkeeping and English, with the aim of placing the girls in respectable jobs and steering them away from sweatshops.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1895

    Lillian Wald's visiting nurses settle at 265 Henry Street, next door, with Jacob Schiff's backing

    Lillian Wald began teaching home nursing to immigrant women in 1893 and, with Mary Brewster, started a visiting nurse service that had called on more than 125 families by January 1894. In spring 1895 the banker Jacob Schiff bought 265 Henry Street, beside this house, for the group. Its attic was raised to a full third floor, and soon eleven residents lived there, among them the nurse and suffragist Lavinia Dock. A five-cent cooking class, the Good Times Club, drew neighborhood children.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1902

    Wald turns the settlement's courtyard into one of the city's first playgrounds

    Wald noticed that local children lacked space to play, so in 1902 she gave up the courtyard behind the Henry Street houses and created one of New York's first playgrounds. She also held meetings there for striking garment workers. That same year Lina Rogers of the settlement became the city's first school nurse.

    Source: The Bowery Boys

  5. 1906

    May 11

    Morris Loeb buys 267 Henry Street, remodels it in a Georgian-inspired style and gives it to the settlement

    When the girls' school moved out in 1906, the philanthropist Morris Loeb bought the house for ,000. He had the attic raised to make a third floor, the entrance dropped below street level, and the front redesigned in a Georgian-inspired manner, with arched tympana above the first-floor windows and flared lintels on the second floor. Loeb then gave the house to the Henry Street Settlement, where Lillian Wald had worked next door since 1894, for use as administrative offices.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  6. 1909

    Wald hosts an interracial dinner tied to the founding of the NAACP at the Henry Street house

    In 1909 Lillian Wald invited both white and Black guests to dinner at the settlement, bringing together the group that grew into the NAACP, according to the Bowery Boys. In her 1915 memoir she recalled that organizers feared newspaper stories about social equality if the two groups sat down together. The house was too small for 200 delegates to sit, so everyone stood, and the party went off well.

    Source: The Bowery Boys

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