On a quiet block of Henry Street on the Lower East Side stands an apartment building that you’d never guess was once home to the nation’s first school for children with disabilities.
The East Side Free School for Crippled Children was founded in 1900. Over its nearly 40-year existence, the Free School grew into a comprehensive provider of education and human services in a neighborhood infamous for deep poverty and deathly disease.
Like so much early disability work in New York City, the campaign to educate disabled children owes its start to the pioneering and long-forgotten activist, May Darrach. Born in 1869, at the age of thirty, Darrach’s disability put her into the hospital. From this hospital stay she emerged forever altered, charged with a mission to do something for who she (and everyone else) then referred to as “crippled children.”
Darrach eventually catalyzed a whole movement, ran her own settlement house, became a physician, and practiced medicine. It all began in 1899, when Darrach supposedly wagered Charles Loring Brace, the Secretary of the Children’s Aid Society, that there were hundreds of disabled children hidden away in the tenements, unreached by school, church, or any other outside influence. She knew they were there — she’d shared hospital wards with them. Darrach trudged up and down the Lower East Side and documented them. It was the first survey of disability in the general population.
Darrach presented her findings to Children’s Aid and made her pitch. By the time the year was out, she had begun the nation’s first educational program specifically for children with disabilities at the Henrietta Industrial School on West 69th Street. Soon one of Darrach’s allies at Children’s Aid, Mabel Irving Jones, began a disabled kids’ class of her own, and founded what later became known as the Association for the Aid of Crippled Children (AACC).
In 1900, a group of elite socially conscious women set up a recreation program in a Lower East Side flat. Kids were brought by horse drawn carriage then carried upstairs to play and hear stories. For many, it was their first opportunity to socialize with other disabled kids. By 1902, the new group had taken a space at 29 Montgomery Street and renamed itself the East Side Free School for Crippled Children. With classes in reading and handicrafts like sewing, the school was soon providing services and transportation to 80 children a day, with no restrictions by race or religion.
In 1906, the Board of Education began the first public school class for disabled children at P.S. 67 on West 46th Street. Since the Board’s research showed that more than half the poor children too disabled for regular school lived below 14th Street, it floated the idea of building a school for disabled kids on the Lower East Side.
The standalone public school never happened. Instead, the Board partnered with the East Side Free School to create a hybrid settlement house/elementary school/medical clinic especially for disabled children in the most notorious slum in the United States.
Thanks to a gift from Emanuel Lehman (the uncle of future Governor and Senator Herbert Lehman), in 1908 the East Side Free School moved into its handsome new headquarters at 157 Henry Street. The location was in the Lower East Side’s downtown, two blocks from the Henry Street Settlement and around the corner from Rutgers Square, the political and social hub of the then mostly Jewish immigrant community.
The new building was brick with stone trim, five stories tall, with a rooftop playground and even an elevator — a long way from the walk-up tenement where the school had begun. The building’s external symmetry concealed its internal complexity. It housed four units.
First, there was a public school, funded, staffed, and equipped by the Board of Education. Second was a privately funded social work component, providing transportation, afterschool and Saturday playtimes, meals, and physical hygiene, which was important in a neighborhood where adequate bathrooms were a novelty. Third, older kids were trained in marketable skills, and there was a workroom where people earned regular wages, consistent with the Free School’s mission: “to improve the children’s physical condition, to train them to become self-supporting, and to provide them with work.” Finally, there was a privately funded health clinic with physicians and nurses, offering medical care and even some outpatient surgery. It was a complete facility for physical, intellectual, and social development.
May Darrach’s education campaign had really taken off. As The New York Times exulted in 1908, the city led the nation when it came to schooling for children with disabilities.
By 1913, the East Side Free School was flourishing. It opened a summer camp in Oakhurst, New Jersey, which is now known as Rising Treetops. But the isolation of disabled children that was documented in Darrach’s survey went on unabated. That year, the AACC conducted another survey, this time on a single block of Cherry Street between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. Home to more than 1,100 families, the survey found large numbers of disabled children. Three quarters of them had no medical care.
Given so great a need, the movement to support children with disabilities continued to grow. In 1922, an organization called the Visiting Guild for Crippled Children transformed into Blythedale Children’s Hospital. The AACC held a blockbuster fundraising street fair on Park Avenue from 46th to 50th Street, headlined by Fanny Brice and Eddie Cantor. But by 1938, the Free School had run out of time. The world had changed and enrollment was declining.
Medical infrastructure and access expanded enormously after the Polio Epidemic of 1916 and the 1917-18 Flu Pandemic, so there was less need for the Free School’s clinic. Its educational function was being duplicated at public schools across New York City. And because of the building boom of the 1920s, the beginnings of Urban Renewal, and amendments to the Multiple Dwelling Law, the Lower East Side’s bathroom shortage was diminishing, so the personal hygiene function was losing its importance.
The era of the neighborhood settlement house was done. On June 22, 1938, the Free School shut down. A few years later the building reopened as an apartment house. It continues in that role today.
I recently asked a few of the tenants whether they knew that the building once housed a school for disabled children. None of them had any idea. This building ought to have an historical plaque or marker, something to remind the world of what used to be for kids with disabilities. Today the neighborhood is largely wealthy, nearly unrecognizable in many ways. But children with disabilities are still experiencing poverty, and they deserve to know and to visit this unique supportive point of beginning.
For more of Warren Shaw’s work in disability history, please visit disabilityhistorynyc.com.