An addition to the building was constructed on the south end of the property in 1907, with seven Tiffany windows that are now in the Morse Museum of American Art's collection.

The Society raised private donations, and gave clothing, small stoves, and food to elderly impoverished women "to relieve and comfort those aged females, who once enjoyed a good degree of affluence, but now reduced to poverty by the vicissitudes of Providence.

At its dedication ceremony The New York Times stated that "the degree of comfort, almost amounting to luxury, manifest in every detail of the establishment, elicited from many visitors yesterday the remark that 'they would like to be old women'.

[5] Hunt's first designs for the Association for the Relief of Respectable, Aged and Indigent Females was made in 1868, though the building wasn't started until 1881.

Robert Moses proposed razing the building as part of an Upper West Side slum clearance project.

A group of historic preservationists with ties to nearby Columbia University fought to preserve the building, making it into a community cause.