University Settlement House, 184 Eldridge Street, ca. 1900.

Stanton Coit and Charles Bunstein Stover established the University Settlement in 1886, in a tenement on Forsyth Street. Originally known as the Neighborhood Guild, since its founding, the institution has provided social services and education for the waves of immigrants who settled on the Lower East Side. President Franklin D. Roosevelt — who, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, spoke at the 1898 dedication of the Settlement's present Eldridge Street building — once described the University Settlement as "a landmark in the social history of the nation."