Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch
Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch (September 8, 1867 – November 15, 1951) was an American city planner and social worker. Biography She was born in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts to Laura Davis Holmes (1839-1932) and Isaac Franklin Kingsbury (1841-1919). She graduated from Newton High School in 1886 and received her B.A. from Boston University, where she had been a member of Phi Beta Kappa, in 1890. During college she performed volunteer work in a teenage girls' club at Boston's St. Augustine's Episcopal Church, an African American congregation, and at "St. Monica's Home for old colored women." After graduation she taught Latin in the Somerville, Massachusetts High School for two years. In 1894 she started a year of graduate school at Radcliffe College. Two Boston organizations, the Church of the Carpenter, a Christian Socialist church founded by W. D. P. Bliss, and Denison House, a settlement house run by Helena Dudley, had a lasting influence on Simkhovitch. She visited black and immigrant families in Boston’s tenement slums, observed and documented their poverty, and became aware of the power and wealth of the city’s slumlords. In 1895 she attended the University of Berlin on a scholarship from the Women's Educational and Industrial Union. Her mother