The ‘Skyscraper Settlement’: Home and Residence at Christodora House

Abstract

The author develops a house biography of Christodora House, New York City, to investigate the relationships between the built form of a settlement house and new forms of residence within it. Settlement houses were founded from the 1880s as centres of neighbourhood welfare and social work, and housed resident workers in the poorest parts of cities. Founded in 1897, Christodora House occupied a purpose-built ‘skyscraper’ on Tompkins Square from 1928 to 1948. This building not only provided new and modern accommodation for settlement work, but also incorporated new forms of housing. The author considers the ways in which the building itself—both as ‘house’ and as ‘skyscraper’—was not only shaped by, but also recast, embodied practices of settlement, inhabitation, and domestic life. As a skyscraper built for settlement work, Christodora House represented a new, but ultimately unsuccessful, form of dwelling in the city.