How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New YorkRiis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
History
How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York
Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
Poor -- New York (State) -- New York; Tenement houses -- New York (State) -- New York
The Society maintains five of these boys' lodging houses, and one
for girls, in the city. The Duane Street Lodging House alone has
sheltered since its foundation in 1855 nearly a quarter of a million
different boys, at a total expense of a good deal less than half a
million dollars. Of this amount, up to the beginning of the present
year, the boys and the earnings of the house had contributed no less
than $172,776.38. In all of the lodging-houses together, 12,153 boys
and girls were sheltered and taught last year. The boys saved up no
inconsiderable amount of money in the savings banks provided for them
in the houses, a simple system of lock-boxes that are emptied for
their benefit once a month. Besides these, the Society has established
and operates in the tenement districts twenty-one industrial schools,
co-ordinate with the public schools in authority, for the children
of the poor who cannot find room in the city's school-houses, or are
too ragged to go there; two free reading-rooms, a dressmaking and
typewriting school and a laundry for the instruction of girls; a
sick-children's mission in the city and two on the sea-shore, where
poor mothers may take their babies; a cottage by the sea for crippled
girls, and a brush factory for crippled boys in Forty-fourth Street.
The Italian school in Leonard Street, alone, had an average attendance
of over six hundred pupils last year. The daily average attendance
at all of them was 4,105, while 11,331 children were registered and
taught. When the fact that there were among these 1,132 children of
drunken parents, and 416 that had been found begging in the street,
is contrasted with the showing of $1,337.21 deposited in the school
savings banks by 1,745 pupils, something like an adequate idea is
gained of the scope of the Society's work in the city.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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