In a Polish district, for instance, the people in the vicinity of one of the most completely equipped parks in the city have come to regard it with suspicion as the source of a type of Americanization propaganda too suggestive of the Prussians they have sought to escape. In a Lithuanian district, officers of societies which make use of clubrooms in the recreation centers say they prefer the rooms to any they can rent in the vicinity, but they often feel in the way and that their use of the building entails more work than attendants are willing to give. The Lithuanians, too, speak of feeling out of place in the parks. There has been little evidence that in any section of the city people of foreign birth feel that as community centers these parks are in a sense their own.
The social settlement, which shares with public recreation centers the functions of providing for the social life and recreation of immigrant communities, is confronted by many of the same problems, often rendered the more difficult from the fact that it is usually regarded as even more alien to the life of the group than the park, and its purposes are less understood. Members of Polish, Lithuanian, Italian, and Ukrainian groups, who have expressed their own appreciation of the aims of the social settlement, and the highest personal regard for settlement residents whom they have known, believe that the "American" settlement can never reach the masses of people most in need of the type of service it offers. Repression under autocratic government in Europe and exploitation in America have made them suspicious, and they are apt to avoid whatever they cannot understand.
It is believed that these types of service, undertaken with a more thorough knowledge of the point of view of the immigrant and with the indorsement and co-operation of recognized leaders of the groups to be served, would much more nearly meet the needs of the people least able to adjust themselves to the new situations.
[53] See Abbott, _The Immigrant and the Community_, chap. i; _Report of the Massachusetts Immigration Commission_, 1914; _Reports of the Immigrants' Protective League of Chicago_.
[54] As is contemplated in the Act creating the New York Bureau of Immigration and Industry. See Birdseye, Cummin's and Gilbert's _Consolidated Laws of New York Supplement, 1913_, vol. ii, p. 1589, sec. 153; and _Laws of 1915_, chap. 674, sec. 7, vol. iii, p. 2271.