Early Connections to the Disability Rights Movement in the East Village

Three of the earliest sites connected to our nation’s long disability rights movement are situated within a few short blocks of each other in the East Village.

Beginning in 1863, an unassuming row house on 2nd Avenue between East 5th and 6th Streets was the location of the Hospital for the Relief of the Ruptured and Crippled — a moniker that sounds jarring to our modern ears, but which was, at the time, descriptive of the critical role it played for people, predominantly children, with physical disabilities in the area.

On May 1, 1863, with the support of Robert M. Hartley, then Secretary of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, and other philanthropists, the Hospital for the Relief of the Ruptured and Crippled opened out of Dr. James A. Knight’s private residence at 97 Second Avenue.

Dr. Knight focused his work on “surgico-mechanics,” or the methods of creating bandaging and support appliances for children with locomotion issues. His young patients, many of whom were impoverished and living on the street or at a poor house, were typically not admitted to hospitals, as their conditions did not fall under the definition of “illness” at the time. Dr. Knight, who favored rehabilitation over surgical intervention, recognized the need for an inpatient facility to serve this population, and many were provided critical treatment under his care free-of-charge.

The first orthopedic hospital of its kind in the United States, it was renamed the “Hospital for Special Surgery” in 1939, a rebranding of the institution, which had by then been relocated to the Upper East Side, to emphasize its role as a leader in the advancement of orthopedic surgery in the 20th century. Though the row house out of which Dr. Knight ran his hospital was razed and replaced with a tenement building at the turn of the century, the site holds lasting significance for its monumental role in early medical and disability care efforts in New York City.

Another 19th-century site that served New Yorkers with disabilities was the Home for Aged and Infirmed Deaf Mutes which, though also outdated in name, was a critical early institution related to the disability rights movement. The Home was founded by the Society of the Church Mission to Deaf Mutes of St. Ann’s Church, established by Reverend Thomas Gallaudet in 1852.

Gaulladet was no stranger to the deaf community: his parents, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Sofia Fowler Gallaudet, were the renowned pioneers of deaf education who founded the school that would become Gaulladet University, the first permanent school for the deaf in North America.

In 1873, Gallaudet rented the Anglo-Italianate row house at 220 East 13th Street from one Edward Colton Chapin and his family, who had owned and lived in the property since 1851, and opened his Home for Aged and Infirm Deaf Mutes. Jane Middleton, a caretaker who had previously worked for William Chapin, Edward’s brother, at the Ohio State School for the Blind, soon took on the role of superintendent for the home.

During that first year, nine people took up residence in the home, an early iteration of an assisted living facility. The home continued to run out of 220 East 13th Street until 1889, when the Church relocated the entirely donation-based operation, then called the Gallaudet House for Aged and Infirm Deaf Mutes, to a 156-acre farm near Poughkeepsie.

The location of Gallaudet’s institution was likely not one of pure happenstance. Its position on East 13th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues was just one block away from one of the most consequential sites in medical history in New York City, the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary. Established in 1820, it is the oldest specialized hospital in the Western Hemisphere, and one of the oldest hospitals in New York. Great advances in treatment for the visually and hearing impaired took place there, including significant achievements in the surgical fields of ophthalmology and otolaryngology. Generations of New Yorkers (often among the neediest) have received critical care at the institution.

The hospital had first moved to its East 13th Street and 2nd Avenue location in 1856, and the building was expanded to its current Richardsonian Romanesque appearance by architect Robert Williams Gibson. The hospital building’s Second Avenue facade features the Schermerhorn Aural Pavilion, which was outfitted with special rooms for patients with brain complications, several operating rooms, and a ward for children. Completed in 1903, the creation of the pavilion was made possible thanks to a large gift from William C. Schermerhorn, a lawyer and philanthropist from one of New York’s oldest families. American author, disability rights advocate, and political activist Helen Keller gave an impactful speech at the ribbon cutting ceremony on May 11, 1903. You can learn much more about this crucial site and Village Preservation’s advocacy campaign to achieve individual landmark status for the building by clicking here.

The confluence of these three sites in the late 19th century began to pave the way for disability rights efforts that would take place in the neighborhood, city, and country in the years that followed. Several more recent activists and institutions also took up residence in the East Village and Greenwich Village, and you can learn more about all of these important figures and places on our Civil Rights and Social Justice Map.