The Children of the PoorRiis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
History
The Children of the Poor
Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
Child welfare -- New York (State) -- New York; Poor; Poor -- New York (State) -- New York
These bigger boys come usually out of the Society's lodging-houses for
homeless children. Of these I spoke so fully in the account of the Street
Arab in "How the Other Half Lives," that I shall not here enter into any
detailed description of them. There are six, one for girls in East Twelfth
Street, lately moved from St. Mark's Place, and five for boys. The oldest
and best known of these is the Newsboys' lodging-house in Duane Street,
now called the Brace Memorial Lodging-house for Boys. The others are the
East Side house in East Broadway, the Tompkins Square house, the West Side
house at Seventh Avenue and Thirty-second Street, and the lodging-house at
Forty-fourth Street and Second Avenue. A list of the builders' names
emphasizes what I said a while ago about the unostentatious charity of
rich New Yorkers. I have never seen them published anywhere except in the
Society's reports, but they make good and instructive reading, and here
they are in the order in which I gave the houses they built, beginning
with the one on East Broadway: Miss Catharine L. Wolfe, Mrs. Robert L.
Stuart, John Jacob Astor, Morris K. Jesup. The girls' home in East Twelfth
Street, just completed, was built as a memorial to Miss Elizabeth
Davenport Wheeler by her family, and is to be known as the Elizabeth Home.
The list might be greatly extended by including the twenty-one Industrial
Schools, which are in fact links in the same great chain; but that is not
to the present purpose, and probably I should not be thanked for doing it.
I have already transgressed enough. The wealth that seeks its
responsibilities among the outcast children in this city, is of the kind
that prefers that it should remain unidentified and unheralded to the
world in connection with its benefactions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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