Two score and seven years before the fictitious spinsters Abby and Martha Brewster took to offing solitary graybeards with home-made elderberry wine laced with arsenic, strychnine, and just a pinch of cyanide on Broadway, a real-life Brewster named Mary joined one Lillian Wald in setting up the Henry Street Settlement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Rather than attempting to allay human suffering via administration of poisonous libations, nurses Mary and Lillian applied somewhat more conventional methods towards improving the dire lot of the sick and the poor in this “vast crowded area, a foreign city within our own.”
The Henry Street Settlement’s commitment to providing health and social services has continued unabated ever since. Styled Glow, its annual dinner and dance blowout at 583 Park Avenue honored Glenn Dubin, Co-Founder of Highbridge Capital Management, and Sol Kerzner of Kerzner International for their philanthrophic munificence. On the heels of a stately dinner, Christie’s Lydia Fenet conducted a live auction, whereupon DJ Allstar Frank Delour pumped a sizeable load of decibels into the pulsing cochlea of Eva Jeanbart-Lorenzotti, Angela Mariani, Carol Mack, Temple St. Clair, Whitney Fairchild, Christine Schwartzman, Monica Noel, and the rest of the venerable congregation.
