Longtime women’s advocate and member of Women’s City Club of New York.
Nina Untermyer (1921-2015)
Nina had a lifetime sense of social awareness and a hunger for justice. She was raised in an intellectual family in Manhattan, one of three daughters of Eugene Untermyer and the former Elise Steyne. Eugene Untermyer, who received his LLB from Columbia University in 1915, was an attorney at Guggenheimer, Untermyer, & Marshall, which Nina’s great-uncles Samuel and Isaac Untermyer founded. The firm lasted more than a century and represented many notable clients, including garment manufacturers, Broadway actors and producers, and giants in the mining industry.
Nina’s mother, Elise, graduated from Smith College in 1919. Elise was active in philanthropy related to women, work, Palestine, and conservation. During World War II, Elise served on the U.S. Treasury War Finance Committee. She also worked at the War Savings Staff in New York City, part of the U.S. Treasury Department, which implemented war loan drives and savings bond campaigns.
Nina and her sisters were educated at distinguished private schools. Nina attended Madeira School, a prep school for girls in McLean, Virginia; the University of Wisconsin; the Columbia University School of General Studies; and the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts (which later became Parsons School of Design).
She built a successful career in merchandising, and, though she never married or had children, she was deeply interested in education.
She was a longtime supporter of the School Volunteer Program. Founded in 1956, it was an experiment in using unpaid volunteers as assistants to teachers and public school students and was later adopted by the New York City Board of Education. Volunteers helped with reading improvement and teaching English as a second language. As part of Nina’s work there, she created a peer tutor program for elementary schools.
Nina also served on the New York City School Chancellor’s Task Force on Sex Equity in Education, established in 1983 to offer advice on eliminating sex discrimination bias and stereotyping in the public school system and to promote sex equity for students and employees.
One of her most important associations was with the Women’s City Club of New York (now Women Creating Change), which was founded during World War I as a social club for women who sought to respond to urgent political problems. During several decades as a member, Nina served on the board of directors and as secretary. She chaired its Committee on the Status of Women, Committee on Full Rights and Access to Education, and its Committee on Public Education and Religious Liberty.
Nina’s great-uncle Samuel J. Untermyer, the prominent New York lawyer, purchased an estate called Greystone in Yonkers in 1899, and hired an Ecole des Beaux Arts-trained architect and landscape designer to create the “finest garden in the world.” In 1946, the Untermyer family conveyed 16 acres to the City of Yonkers as a public park, and though the estate declined over the years, it was restored in the 1970s. Within a few decades, it deteriorated again, and in the mid-’90s, community leaders Nortrud Spero and Joe Kozlowski, working with the Open Space Institute, persuaded the City of Yonkers, under Mayor Terence Zaleski, to acquire more land to form the 43-acre Untermyer Gardens Conservancy.
Nina Untermyer Fund in The Trust supports programs for women and girls. Grants have helped improve conditions for women in city jails, provide mental health support to women in domestic violence shelters, and reduce maternal morbidity among Black women in New York City hospitals.