Looking Ahead

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

One of the neighborhood treasures is the Third Street Music School Settlement, at 11th Street and 2nd Avenue. Since Sputnik, the Soviet space effort in 1960s scared the American public about the Soviets’ technology advances into emphasizing mathematics and science studies in schools, at the cost of abandoning music and arts, community music and art schools have become most valuable resources. “Third Street” is one of New York’s oldest, harking back to the late 19th century settlement movement, and one of the most active in the modern environment, providing not only private music instruction but also supplemental musical education in public schools. And we also have their 30 free concerts a year, the School’s instructors’ gift to the community.

In the 19th century, the prevailing British social thinking that the poor are responsible for their own plight was challenged in London by some aristocratic progressive thinkers and do-gooders, such as Arnold Toynbee and Edward Denison. Influenced by the social reformer John Ruskin (“Unto This Last”), they moved into the East London slums, to assist the poor in raising themselves above their station. Both men died in the unsanitary conditions, but the idea took hold, and a social settlement, Toynbee Hall, rose in 1884. It provided a center where the laborers and the college-educated could join in addressing social issues.

Stanton Coit, an American who worked in Toynbee Hall, established the first American counterpart, the Neighborhood Guild, in the Lower East Side in 1886, servicing poor immigrants. The idea spread to US women’s colleges, and three years later their graduates, inspired by Jacob Riis’s “How the Other Half Lives,” built a College Settlement for women in NYC. Jane Addams’ Hull House in Chicago followed, and Lillian Wald’s Visiting Nurses Station, later Henry Street Settlement, in NYC, was founded in 1993.

Settlement houses organized educational classes, clubs, provided health services and public baths, fought for tenement reform laws, child labor laws and workers’ rights. The idea of art and music for immigrants’ children came later, first at Hull House in 1893. Now, enter Emilie Allison Wagner, the founder of the music school settlement movement, a minister’s daughter from New Bedford, MA who graduated in 1894 from what is presently Goucher College in Baltimore, and moved to New York, with the novel idea of teaching music to immigrants’ children, inspired by Sir Walter Besants’s “All Sorts and Conditions of Men.” She began teaching violin and piano in the basement of Old Mariners’ Temple at Chatham Square, sometimes sending children home to wash before lessons. In 1895 she became a resident at the College Settlement, 95 Rivington Street, in its basement of its Cooking School, three years later moving to the top floor at 96 Rivington, charging 5 cents for piano practice. Wagner was paid $552/yr, from the Association’s membership dues, teaching also at the nearby University Settlement. Both Associations merged music schools in 1901, at 31 Rivington, paid for by 40 members ($25/yr) and 27 associate members ($5 and up). Otto H. Kahn, patron of the Met Opera, gave $100/yr.

To give bright students an incentive, they were engaged as practice-teachers, paid 3 cents for a 15-minute beginner lesson, 8 ½ cents for 12-minute advanced lesson. Pianos could be rented for $5/month, the renter charging others 4 ½ cents/hr for practice. First student concert, soloists and string orchestra, at Mendelssohn Hall on 11 March 1904, was well reviewed in the NY Times. The school grew, and President Helen Mansfield raised $14,000 and convinced the Board to expand the school, now named Music School Settlement, to two brownstones at 53-55 East Third Street, near 1st Ave, its home until 1974, with three residents and expanding, the salaries growing to $3,489 in 1910. The name became The Society of the Third Street Music School Settlement in 1950.

The house was abuzz day and night, a resident nurse was eventually provided by the Henry Street Settlement, legal advice was provided when the kids’ families had problems. Friends and trustees donated furniture, toys, barrels of apples, blankets, concert tickets to the New York Philharmonic, the Kresel Quartet, pianist Mieczyslaw Horoszowski and Joseph Lhevine; violins, pianos, music stands, scores, all duly recorded in the Annual Report. Fritz Kreisler, Ignaz Paderewski and Eugene Isaye gave benefit concerts for the school.

The settlement houses were a mighty force in advocating social reform and moving bureaucracy in establishing parks, health services, public baths and summer camps for poor youths. The settlement houses offered clubs, libraries, banks, classes and schools, material forces in creating the city, the society and the social environment, as we know it today. Third Street had a newspaper, a summer camp in Newfoundland, NJ, outgrown in 1926, and a moving force in its head resident and librarian, Cara Stafford Kibbe, 1910-52. Its alumni included directors David Mannes and Julius Rudel. Emilie Wagner had left in 1907, to start a national movement.

We now fast forward through some tumultuous years of transformation and expansion, of arrival of professional teachers, of musical theories (Orff and Kodaly), use of video, student performances on WNYC, the Rock program, the Latin influence, the return of the Classical music, to the move to 235 East 11th Street, away from what had become a Hell’s Angels neighborhood (Marylou Francis’s recollection). The school has become an indispensable part of our lives, More to come.

Wally Dobelis kisses the hand of Mary Jo Pagano, chair of the Chamber Music Program at Third Street, whose doctoral thesis at the Manhattan School of Music provided the backbone of this survey article. This story does not imply a loss of affection for our beloved Interschool Orchestras and the Peoples Concerts at Washington Irving High School.