Richard Abrons , whose destitute, widowed grandmother was rescued by the social reformer Lillian Wald, and who decades later returned the favor by becoming a major benefactor of Wald’s Henry Street Settlement, a storied social services agency on the Lower East Side, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 92 .

The cause was kidney failure, his wife, Iris Abrons, said.

An investment manager who later turned to writing short stories and plays, Mr. Abrons and his family underwrote Henry Street’s arts classes and college scholarships; expanded its social services, including those for the homeless; helped the settlement acquire what became known as the Boys and Girls Republic community center; and transformed vacant lots adjacent to the settlement’s original building into Martin Luther King Jr. Community Park.

He was said to have been the only person to have known every one of Henry Street’s executive directors since the settlement was founded.

Lillian Wald, an Ohio native who had moved to Manhattan from upstate New York when she was 22 to study nursing, was in the vanguard of a movement that favored giving the poor the resources to break the cycle of poverty rather than offer them temporary relief.