Mrs. Sim & the Neighbors

On her third-floor apartment door in Greenwich House hangs a sign: "Come In Without Knocking." Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, who has been preaching what she calls "Neighborhood" for 44 years, also practices it. Last week some 500 friends & neighbors came in without knocking, to honor 78-year-old "Mrs. Sim."

Mrs. Sim remembers the Thanksgiving morning in 1902 when a moving van drew up to 26 Jones Street, which had been an anarchist hideout on "the Street of 40 Thieves." She and her Russian-born husband had picked this vermin-filled, draughty place for a settlement house. Greenwich Villagers peering suspiciously from windows figured "we were just another family moving in," Mrs. Sim says. They were glad to be accepted that way; "we did not want to be regarded as strangers bent on uplift."

Jones Street was in need of uplift. It was one of Manhattan's most densely populated blocks, with an infant death rate of 125 to the thousand (compared with a New York City average of 58.7), and it was at the mercy of two notorious adolescent gangs known as the Hudson Dusters and the Gophers. Vice, disease, overcrowded tenements, saloons, no playgrounds--these were the problems of Mrs. Sim's neighbors.

Soap First, Then Art. Mary Kingsbury, born in Boston's suburban Chestnut Hill, and Radcliffe-educated, had been a "social worker" for several years; but she despised the Lady Bountiful attitude the term implied. Says she: "I hate to be pictured as a lovely woman doing good. I'm really pretty realistic."

For weeks, Mary and her husband shook tin cans with coin slits at passers-by until they had acquired $3,000. Gradually Mary and her neighbors got neighborly. In her first year she held parties in her front parlor, taught cooking classes in tenements, organized a penny bank, a children's reading room. In between she mopped floors.

Greenwich House concentrated on improving living conditions first, because, as Mrs. Sim said: "What was the use of bringing art to people who had little soap & water?" Infant care and dental clinics, free milk for babies, diet kitchens, public baths and sports (Gene Tunney did his first boxing in the settlement basement) were added one by one. Over the years, after the soap & water, came the art: a music school, a children's theater, woodcarving, pottery. In 1917 the settlement moved to bigger quarters on Barrow Street. Mrs. Sim agitated for slum clearance, wider streets, parks.

America in Small. Mrs. Sim, a white-haired grandmother, still chats occasionally in German with her husband, a 72-year-old professor emeritus of economic history at Columbia. German was the language of their romance 53 years ago at the University of Berlin (when he spoke no English and she knew no Russian). For relaxation Mrs. Sim attends concerts ("I'm just a musician gone wrong") or walks briskly around the Village, blithely ignoring the traffic lights.

Mrs. Simkhovitch retired as director of Greenwich House last month, but she plans to keep an eye on it; she thinks of it as "sort of America in small." Says she: "The tryout for 'one world' is in the neighborhood."

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