On her third-floor apartment door in Greenwich House hangs a sign: "Come In Without Knocking." Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, who has been preaching what she calls "Neighborhood" for 44 years, also practices it. Last week some 500 friends & neighbors came in without knocking, to honor 78-year-old "Mrs. Sim."
Mrs. Sim remembers the Thanksgiving morning in 1902 when a moving van drew up to 26 Jones Street, which had been an anarchist hideout on "the Street of 40 Thieves." She and her Russian-born husband had picked this vermin-filled, draughty place for a settlement house. Greenwich...