Jewish Roots of Neighborhood House, St. Paul

Women members of Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul founded Neighborhood House in 1897 to assist poor Russian Jewish immigrants. For its first sixty-five years, the settlement house operated in the West Side Flats—the neighborhood near the Mississippi River across from downtown where the immigrants first settled.

French, Irish, and German immigrants settled on the Flats starting in the 1850s. By the 1890s they had been replaced by immigrant Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. The St. Paul chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women and Mount Zion’s Hebrew Ladies Benevolent Society organized sewing classes in rented rooms on Fairfield Avenue to assist the Jewish immigrants.

Led by Sophie Wirth, the classes grew into an industrial school. Girls and boys learned home and industrial arts. They took English language and American citizenship classes. In 1897 the industrial school grew into Neighborhood House, a full-service settlement house located at 153 Robertson Street. Still led by Wirth, and supervised by Mount Zion’s rabbis, Neighborhood House added recreational activities, dental and baby clinics, and programs for adults.

People of all religions and ethnic groups flocked to Neighborhood House. In 1903 it reorganized, evolving from a purely Jewish social effort into a non-sectarian one. In 1921 the population of the Flats was two and a half times greater than it had been in 1915. This led to crowding and housing shortages.

Under Constance Currie, who became head resident in 1918, Neighborhood House added playgrounds and camping activities. Most notable was the Sophie Wirth Day Camp in White Bear Lake. The Northern Pacific Railway provided free transportation to the camp for five years after its founding in 1919. The service gave hundreds of mothers and children a rare day of leisure.

Preventing juvenile delinquency was a key part of Neighborhood House’s mission. This was also the case with another St. Paul settlement house that served the Jewish community, the Lowertown Community Center (later renamed Central Community House), which opened in 1921.

Neighborhood House was the model for a similar house on Minneapolis’s South Side that opened in 1923. The Jewish Community Centers in St. Paul and Minneapolis are descendants of these and other settlement houses in the Twin Cities.

In the early 1920s Neighborhood House undertook a major fundraising drive so it could expand. In 1923 a new building at 229 East Indiana opened. It was designed by the local architectural firm Toltz, King and Day. A gymnasium addition came in 1928. During the Depression, Neighborhood House kept its gym and showers open sixteen hours a day to “help with morale and spirit” of the unemployed.

Two generations of Jewish children and adults both affirmed their Jewish culture and assimilated into American society at Neighborhood House. Mount Zion Temple members continued to support Neighborhood House through donations and as volunteers. Mount Zion’s rabbis served on the Neighborhood House board at late as the 1960s, though Jews had left the Flats by the 1940s. Many moved to the Summit Hill neighborhood in St. Paul and, later, to Highland Park. The synagogues and Hebrew Schools moved with them.

By World War II, an estimated twenty-three nationality groups lived on the Flats. Neighborhood House’s clientele, however, was mostly Mexican and Mexican-American. The settlement house branched out to provide its services to additional sites in St. Paul.

For three years in the early 1950s, major floods hit the Flats. Neighborhood House was a focal point of rescue and recovery efforts. The St. Paul Port Authority made plans to bulldoze the Flats and create an industrial park protected by a dike system. Neighborhood House continued to provide its usual services to residents, who now added anxiety about the house’s future to their concerns. Long-time head resident Constance Currie died in 1957—another loss.

In 1963 Neighborhood House’s buildings on the Flats were sold to the Port Authority of St. Paul and razed. Remaining Flats children were bused to Neighborhood House’s locations in other St. Paul neighborhoods. An era in the organization’s history had ended.

In 2014 Neighborhood House continues to serve immigrants, refugees, and low-income people. Its modern headquarters in the Wellstone Center are near its original home on St. Paul’s West Side.