Diplomats -- United States -- Biography; Morgenthau, Henry, 1856-1946; United States -- Foreign relations -- 20th century
Some years ago Miss Wald unfolded to me the needs of a sister settlement
house in the Bronx, and urged me to assist in organizing an
establishment similar to hers. At a meeting at my house, which was
attended by Angelo Patri and his wife, Simon Hirsdansky, and Jacob
Shufro--all three of the men being now principals of schools in the
Bronx--and Bernard Deutsch, and a few others, my wife and I were
persuaded by their statements of the great good that a settlement house
could do in the Bronx, and we agreed to finance it for a few years. We
combined with it a music school under the supervision of David Mannes
and Harriet Seymour who had been active in the Third Street Music School
Settlement.
We established it at once at 1,637 Washington Avenue, and, as the people
said, “with a golden spoon in its mouth.” The children in the
neighbourhood--and there were thousands of them--flocked to it from the
very day it was started. There seemed to be an insatiable demand for
instruction in music, and it has been a never-ending delight to see the
steady strides made by the little orchestra started in the beginning by
Mr. Edgar Stowell, up to 1922, when I saw them carry the entire musical
programme of the pageant of the joint settlement houses at Hunter
College. Several times we have been surprised by having this little
orchestra give us a performance at our house, and at other times we have
been regaled with the performance of “Alice in Wonderland” by one of the
clubs of the Bronx House. When I survey the progress made and the
happiness given the scholars of the music schools, and the members of
the thirty-odd clubs, I feel that the funds that I have invested in the
Bronx House have produced far greater dividends than any of my other
investments.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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