Association Residence for Women

History and architecture

The Association Residence for Respectable Aged Indigent Females, a prominent feature of the Manhattan Valley neighborhood of Manhattan's Upper West Side, was constructed in 1881-83 for one of New York City's oldest charitable institutions. The design, in a French-inspired style which recalls the Victorian Gothic, was by the "dean" of nineteenth-century American architects, Richard Morris Hunt. The building remains one of Hunt's few surviving significant New York City structures and a fine example of nineteenth-century institutional architecture.

The Association

In the midst of the nation's involvement in the War of 1812, a group of socially prominent New York City women formed an association in 1813 to aid women who were left poor widows by the current war or by the previous Revolutionary War. Chartered in 1814 as one of New York City's earliest charitable institutions, it became known as the Association for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females. The aid initially took the form of money, food, and clothing "to relieve and to comfort those aged females, who once enjoyed a good degree of affluence, but now reduced to poverty by the vicissitudes of Providence."

1 A subscription list was started in 1833 for the construction of an asylum building. John Jacob Astor gave the first monetary donation, while Peter G. Stuyvesant donated three lots. The asylum was finally erected at 226 East 20th Street in 1837-38 (an infirmary building was added in 1845). The asylum was intended as an alternative to "the common almshouse, filled as it usually is with the dregs of society, which is not a place of comfort to persons of refined sensibilities."