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This work deeply interested me, and I have been a constant and frequent visitor at the house, and have supported a visiting nurse on Miss Wald’s staff for the past twenty-two years.

Some years ago Miss Wald unfolded to me the needs of a sister settlement house in the Bronx, and urged me to assist in organizing an establishment similar to hers. At a meeting at my house, which was attended by Angelo Patri and his wife, Simon Hirsdansky, and Jacob Shufro—all three of the men being now principals of schools in the Bronx—and Bernard Deutsch, and a few others, my wife and I were persuaded by their statements of the great good that a settlement house could do in the Bronx, and we agreed to finance it for a few years. We combined with it a music school under the supervision of David Mannes and Harriet Seymour who had been active in the Third Street Music School Settlement.

We established it at once at 1,637 Washington Avenue, and, as the people said, “with a golden spoon in its mouth.” The children in the neighbourhood—and there were thousands of them—flocked to it from the very day it was started. There seemed to be an insatiable demand for instruction in music, and it has been a never-ending delight to see the steady strides made by the little orchestra started in the beginning by Mr. Edgar Stowell, up to 1922, when I saw them carry the entire musical programme of the pageant of the joint settlement houses at Hunter College. Several times we have been surprised by having this little orchestra give us a performance at our house, and at other times we have been regaled with the performance of “Alice in Wonderland” by one of the clubs of the Bronx House. When I survey the progress made and the happiness given the scholars of the music schools, and the members of the thirty-odd clubs, I feel that the funds that I have invested in the Bronx House have produced far greater dividends than any of my other investments.