A walk up Pitt Street shows us several wonderful works of architecture, amid a panorama of successive waves of social reform, from the late 19th-century small-parks movement to the mid-20th-century housing projects. Pitt Street is only seven blocks long, stretching north from Henry Street to Houston Street. On the other side of Houston, Pitt continues as Avenue C. The street is named for the 18th-century British statesman William Pitt the Elder.

At the northeast corner of Pitt and Henry streets stand three gorgeous Federal-style houses from around 1830. These remind us that, at that time, this was an affluent neighborhood. By the time of the Civil War, however, the well-to-do had packed up and moved uptown, leaving their once fine houses to the Irish and German immigrants whose arrival in vast numbers over a short period of time resulted first in the subdivision of such houses as these to serve multiple families, and then in the construction of purpose-built multiple-family dwellings (one such early example being 97 Orchard St., now the Lower East Side Tenement Museum). In 1895 the nurse and social reformer Lillian Wald established the Henry Street Settlement; these houses (263, 265, and 267 Henry St.), a gift from the banker and philanthropist Jacob Schiff, served the Eastern European Jewish immigrants who made up the bulk of the neighborhood’s population. Henry Street Settlement (henrystreet.org) is still going strong today, offering housing, health, and senior services, as well as programs for neighborhood youth.

A block north, at Grand Street, just west of Pitt, we see a reminder of the neighborhood’s Irish immigrant days. St. Mary’s Church dates from 1833, though the Grand Street façade, in the Romanesque style, was added in 1864 by the prolific Catholic church architect Patrick Keely, replacing the original, quite grand Greek Revival portico. At the northeast corner of Grand and Pitt streets stands the Henry Street Settlement Playhouse, a small gem of a Georgian Revival building by Ingalls & Hoffman from 1915. Over the years, many outstanding performers, such as Fred Astaire and Isadora Duncan, have graced the playhouse’s stage. In 1938, Aaron Copland’s opera “The Second Hurricane” had its premiere there, directed by Orson Welles. Prentice & Chan, Ohlhausen’s 1975 modernist addition abuts the playhouse to the east.

Another musical note related to Grand Street is the beautiful composition of that name by the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, from 1958. Rollins lived near here on Grand Street when, in the 1950s and 1960s, he legendarily practiced on the walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge, two blocks to the north at Delancey Street.

The two blocks of Pitt between Delancey and Stanton streets are dominated on their east side by the New York City Housing Authority’s Samuel Gompers houses, built in 1964 and housing more than 1,000 tenants. The Lower East Side, especially this part of it near the East River (which is two longish blocks to the east of Pitt and Stanton streets), abounds in red-brick, high-rise “towers in a park” housing projects. When these went up in the 1950s and 1960s, Jane Jacobs decried the destruction of the tenement and row-house streets the projects replaced, saying that the neighborhood around here possessed the same potential for “spontaneous unslumming” as did her own West Village.

On the west side of Pitt between Rivington and Stanton streets stands the exuberantly eclectic pile of Victorian gallimaufry called Our Lady of Sorrows Church, designed by Henry Engelbert and built in 1867–68. Today, this Catholic church serves a largely Spanish-speaking congregation. The Lower East Side was the destination for many in the mass migration of Puerto Ricans to New York following World War II. At that time, the press and politicians lauded their arrival amid what, albeit briefly, was a shortage of factory workers in what was at that moment the greatest industrial city in the world.

The east side of Pitt between Stanton and Houston streets is occupied by Hamilton Fish Park, a four-and-a-half-acre neighborhood recreational space that was originally laid out, in 1898, by Carrère & Hastings, the architects of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street. Small parks were built around this time in slum areas as a result of an 1887 initiative by Mayor Abram Hewitt who, together with many reformers, felt that open spaces would help relieve the oppressive conditions of congested streets — the same reasoning behind all the open space surrounding the later high-rise housing projects.

The French-trained Thomas Hastings and John Carrère attempted, here and in their slightly earlier Hudson Park on St. Luke’s Place in the West Village, to bring French formal garden design to New York, where the Victorian naturalism of Vaux and Olmsted dominated. Alas, both in the Village and here, nothing remains of Carrère & Hastings’s layouts, which were amended to make the spaces more suitable for active recreation. Hamilton Fish Park’s swimming pool was built in 1936 by Robert Moses. But here Carrère & Hastings’s gymnasium remains, beautifully restored by John Ciardullo Associates in 1992. It’s often said that the gymnasium was inspired by the Petit Palais in Paris, but Carrère & Hastings designed it before the Petit Palais was built in 1900. Yet the formal vocabulary of Beaux-Arts classicism is the same, and we’re reminded, looking at this splendid structure in such an unlikely location, that the Beaux-Arts generation of New York architects was as concerned with bringing beauty to the poorer parts of the city as it was with building plutocrats’ mansions.