In this episode of The Gotham Center podcast “Sites and Sounds,” Marjorie Feld talks about Henry St. Settlement. This neighborhood agency has been providing immigrant, poor, and working class people from Manhattan’s Lower East Side with social services, art programs, education and health care for 125 years. It was founded by pioneering social worker Lillian Wald, at whose table, you’ll soon hear, presidents and businessmen from around the nation, and the world, came to visit -- occasionally even sitting down alongside labor organizers and radicals to discuss solutions to the various problems of the day. Feld, the author of a prize-winning biography of Wald, discusses the origins of this nationally path-breaking New York City institution, and the many ways in which its founder’s spirit still appears to animate the Settlement -- which sprang into existence to face the mass immigration and inequality of the First Gilded Age, and is now grappling with the Second.

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