Willowtown is among the neighborhoods that still bears the physical evidence of White’s unprecedented efforts on behalf of the working poor.
The vast, beautiful brick structure that is the Riverside Apartments on Columbia Place is one of many buildings White had a hand in developing. A trained engineer, as well as a beneficiary of his family’s profitable fur trading company, White (1846-1921) worked with top architects and other philanthropically inclined associates to build sunlit, safe, ventilated housing that was in stark contrast to the disease-ridden tenements that were the dominant housing option for the working class immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century. But White’s achievements far exceed Riverside Apartments, and the seven essayists that contributed to The Social Vision of Alfred T. White believe that his vision for community building can provide a model for the city today. “The lessons of his work are still relevant. He worked with a set of ideas whose time have come again,†said Tom LaFarge, the managing editor for Proteotypes, the publishing arm of Proteus Gowanus. LaFarge also penned the biographical essay on White included in the book. The other contributors, Lisa Ackerman, Olive Hoogenboom, Kathy Madden, Francis Morrone, Benjamin Warnke and Sally Yarmolinsky write from the perspectives of social activists, architects, historians, artists, and city planners. The book, which was funded by Jonathan Montgomery, the great grand nephew of A.T. White, developed out of an event Proteus Gowanus held in 2005, A.T. White Day. “Everything we do is developed by a collaborative group of artists and writers,†said Sasha Chavchavadze, founder and creative director of Proteus Gowanus. White also co-founded the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities with Seth Low started the Brooklyn branch of the Children’s Aid Society bought the land for what later became Marine Park along with Frederic Pratt donated huge sums to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden served as commissioner of Public Works in the 1890s endowed a chair in Social Ethics at Harvard and was influential in the establishment of the City Planning Commission. He was also a big influence on Jacob Riis, whose book “How the Other Half Lives†brought a great deal of attention to the unhealthy conditions of tenement living. “He was everywhere. It’s high time he received some acknowledgement,†said LaFarge at the book’s launch at the Brooklyn Historical Society last Thursday night.
“There are no sources in print about [White] right now, so this really fills a hole,†said BHS archivist Chela Scott Weber.