Ellen Collins
Ellen Collins was a significant housing reformer born in New York City to a family with a philanthropic background. Her father was involved in life insurance and charity work, while her mother came from a merchant family. During the Civil War, Collins engaged in extensive charitable efforts, particularly with the Woman's Central Association of Relief, organizing supplies for invalid soldiers. Following the war, she focused on improving educational opportunities for freed slaves and inspected public charitable institutions. In the 1880s, Collins began a notable project to rehabilitate old tenements in Manhattan's Lower East Side, where she utilized her inheritance to renovate abandoned properties, successfully keeping rents low while fostering a sense of community among her tenants. She demonstrated that it was possible to reform housing conditions while also achieving financial viability. Although her methods were not widely adopted, her emphasis on rehabilitating neighborhoods over demolition has gained recognition in modern urban planning. Collins passed away at the age of eighty-three and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn.
Subject Terms
Ellen Collins
- Ellen Collins
- Born: December 31c., 1828
- Died: July 8, 1912
Housing reformer, was born in New York City to Joseph B. Collins and Sarah (Minturn) Collins. Her father, the son of a Quaker publisher, was president of two life-insurance companies and a benefactor of numerous charities for relief of the poor, including the New York Juvenile Asylum. Her mother came from a family of New York merchants
Ellen Collins began to do extensive charitable work during the Civil War with the Woman’s Central Association of Relief, a subsidiary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission; she headed a committee that was responsible for organizing the distribution to invalid soldiers of supplies collected by civilian women. After the war she sought out other women to help in improving educational opportunities for freed slaves. With the philanthropist Josephine Shaw Lowell, Collins went to Virginia as a representative of the New York National Freedmen’s Relief Association to inspect schools for blacks. In the 1870s she inspected hospitals, poorhouses, and other public charitable institutions in Manhattan as an appointed visitor. Her work laid the factual basis for many of the reports that Lowell issued as a member of the New York State Board of Charities
For most of her remaining years Collins devoted herself to a combination of philanthropic and reform activity that enabled her to have an influence on the housing of the poor. In contrast to Alfred Tredway White and others who built “model” apartment houses, Collins set out to reconstruct old tenements. She began in 1880 on the Lower East Side of New York City in Cherry Hill, an area that seemed especially difficult to rehabilitate. Using more than n $20,000 of her inheritance and basing her work on that of the English housing developer and reformer Octavia Hill, Collins leased and renovated seven abandoned row houses. Her astute management of the property enabled her to keep rents low. Her tenants, aware that she was not in business to exploit them, responded, as she had predicted they would, by helping to keep the houses clean and orderly and by obeying her rule against drinking. In the end Collins proved that she could be a reformer and earn a reasonable profit on rent at the same time. She sold the properties in 1903; they eventually became the site of the Alfred E. Smith public housing project.
Although Collins succeeded in providing relief for and contributing to the welfare of her own tenants, her approach was not widely applied, as it depended upon the initiative of individual entrepreneurs, few of whom were motivated by her principles. Her idea that rehabilitation of rundown districts does more good than their destruction has become more accepted as urban planners have acknowledged the importance of continuity and familiarity in maintaining stable inner-city neighborhoods.
Collins, who became a Quaker in 1899, died of arteriosclerosis in New York City at the age of eighty-three and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn.
Some of Collins’s letters are in the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. An autobiographical article is “Housing Reform through Enlightened Management,” Municipal Affairs, September 1902. Her views are also set forth in A. T. White, “Better Homes for Workingmen,” National Conference of Charities and Correction, Proceedings, 1885. For biographical material see Notable American Women (1971), which also contains a bibliography.