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This program is part of Village Preservation’s Semiquincentennial series of programs celebrating our Revolutionary Village. Revolutionary Village not only celebrates the founding of our country, but the exceptional role our neighborhoods played in its development and the realization of its ideals over the last 250 years and beyond.

Co-sponsored by Greenwich House

Betty Boyd Caroli will discuss her new biography of Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, a seminal figure in the settlement house movement, which spearheaded efforts to improve the life of immigrants and to counter urban squalor in cities around America in the early 19th century. Greenwich House, the settlement house Simkhovitch founded in 1902 in Greenwich Village, then a destination point for new immigrants to New York, quickly gained a reputation equal to that of Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago, providing services in health, recreation, education, and the arts (which Greenwich House continues to do to this day).

Simkhovitch became a tireless advocate for public housing and has been called by some “the mother of public housing.” She played a central role in designing and administering the first public housing projects in America during the New Deal, in which she was an integral figure. The National Housing Conference, which she founded in 1931, continues to operate in our current “housing crisis” as among the most prominent advocates for safe, affordable housing. She co-wrote the National House Act of 1937, the first piece of legislation to establish the federal government’s responsibility to help provide low-income families with housing.

Betty Boyd Caroli is well-known for her work on the history of First Ladies. A graduate of Oberlin College, Caroli holds a master’s degree in Mass Communications from the Annenberg School of the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in American Civilization from New York University. A Fulbright scholar to Italy, she also held fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, the Hoover Presidential Library, the LBJ Foundation, and others. After studying in Salzburg, Austria and Perugia, Italy (but before joining the faculty at the City University of New York), she taught in Palermo and Rome, Italy.

Greenwich House was founded in 1902 as a settlement house to help New York’s increasing immigrant population adjust to life in a new country, today Greenwich House offers programs in the arts, education, and social services that provide thousands of New Yorkers with personal enrichment and cultural experiences. Greenwich House programs are a valuable resource to our neighbors and those who work in, visit, or seek care in Greenwich Village and across the city.

Date
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
Time
6:00 pm
Details

In-Person
La Nacional – Spanish Benevolent Society

Free
Pre-registration required

Click here to watch the recording of this past program