USA > New York > New York City > The Memorial History of the City of New York: From Its First Settlement to the Year 1892, Volume III > Part 64
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UNITED STATES CRUISER NEW YORK.
of these charities are devoted to children. We can only indicate by a few examples to what this work has grown. Some are temporary and specific in their object. When, eighteen years ago Mr. Bergh aided in establishing a society for the prevention of cruelty to children, who would have supposed that its scope could be large? City life, how- ever, has its cruelties as well as its misfortunes, and these not from strangers or guardians alone, but from parents. During that period this society has rescued from abuse-and even, in instances, from mutilation-and placed in suitable homes or in institutions, more than 25,000 children, and at the reception-rooms (opened twelve years ago) over six thousand have been sheltered, clothed, and fed! Some, again, are asylums, such as the Leake and Watts Orphan Asylum and the Ju- venile Asylum. The latter can accommodate a thousand inmates. It takes truant and disobedient children of from seven to fourteen years old, or such as have parents unfit to rear them. These it takes in and educates, or sends to permanent homes elsewhere. Broader yet in its sphere of action is the Children's Aid Society. It comprehends all children of the poor. Although established earlier, its particular line of usefulness began in 1861 with William A. Booth as its president, and Charles L. Brace as its superintendent-men admirably adapted to work together in such a field. Mr. Booth has just retired, in his eighty-eighth year, with the abundant and increasing fruits of the society visible. Mr. Brace died three years since. In 1861 there was at the top of the "Sun" building a large room used for homing
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HISTORY OF NEW-YORK
pigeons. There they started a lodging for newsboys and other such waifs and gamins of the streets, and gathered in from forty to ser- enty. It witnessed some remarkable scenes, and was for that class truly a "morning sun." It was the original of the newsboys' down- town lodging-house, among whom, also, a Sunday evening meeting soon became an institution, conducted for seventeen years by Mr. Booth and Mr. Brace alternately, and since, in other houses, by such actively engaged business men as Howard Potter, D. Willis James, the late Judge Van Vorst, and Theodore Roosevelt. Of these lodging- houses, which are also industrial schools, the society to-day has six or seven. A bad neighborhood-the worst-is selected, some liberal donor is found, and the house is built. One for girls of from twelve
Boxwill go
THE BATTERY, 1892.
. to twenty was opened in Twelfth street in September, 1892. Its cost was a donation of $70,000. And there they learn-the girls, cooking, laundering, dressmaking, type-writing, and other pursuits; the boys, printing, wood-carving, clay-molding, drawing, carpentering, and similar employments. Epidemic or contagious diseases there have been none. They have gymnasiums, savings-banks, night schools, loan-societies, a shoe-fund, drying-rooms. Is it to be wondered at that such a house, established in a neighborhood, should have its effect upon the children who otherwise would grow into "gangs" and the "dangerous classes"? Upon one evening three judges of distinction upon the bench told the children their youthful experi- ences,- not entirely different from their own. It was in "Macker- elville," where once a respectable man could hardly walk by day in
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NEW-YORK DURING THE LAST FOURTEEN YEARS
safety; but what the police could not do has been done by this society. Moreover, it has a health home at Coney Island, where, in 1891, 7498 children were cared for; at Bath, Long Island, a summer home, where were 4000 children ; a sick children's mission from which are supplied at their homes nursing, and medicines, and medical advice free; and a flower mission of importance in its work. In its lodging-houses were 6600 different boys and girls during the year; there were twenty-one day schools and twelve evening schools, and 11,638 regular or tran- sient pupils, and it furnished 579,552 meals. At a cost of twenty dollars each, it last year sent to homes in Kansas and Nebraska 2600 children, and in thirty-two years has sent to such homes 92,000. And its income, which in 1861 was $20,000, was this year $376,324. What
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SVARG LINE
DEHOR LIM
Popwill 92
BOWLING GREEN, 1892.
does not the city owe to such workers in such charities! What to Mr. Brace, the energetic superintendent and organizing manager of this especial charity !
Other societies and agencies are doing good work in their own way. The aggregate of their efforts is enormous. To prevent slipshod giving and waste, several of them will soon be located together in a building just erected on Fourth Avenue between Twenty-second and Twenty-third streets, a sort of charity exchange. But evidently those that reach down to the children, that break in upon their environ- ment -the overcrowded tenement-house from which they take them, the street, the saloon-and replace these with lifting influences,-those are doing a work almost beyond computation. A few years since the Prison Association published a chart of a single family in Ulster
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HISTORY OF NEW-YORK
County. Its history went back a hundred years, to a Revolutionary soldier and a vagrant girl of sixteen, since known as "Margaret the mother of criminals," and her four sisters. In six generations their descendants have numbered twelve hundred! Living among some inland lakes of the county, isolated, poor, ignorant, and vicious, with lunacy, idiocy, and epilepsy among them, the result of such lives,- with very few exceptions, male or female, they have shown the nat- ural effects of such a heredity and such an environment-they have Auf Street been criminals and bad. Heredity alone is not omnipotent. Ninety per cent. of those removed 1 by the Children's Aid Society have had intem- perate parents, yet have not become intemperate themselves. But the environment, to correct it early, in that is hope; and, as we have already indicated, to that work the charities of our day are very largely turn- ing their faces; yet not, certainly, to the neglect of the older poor.
The health or sickness of the body may be judged by the tempera- ture, the pulse, or some eruptive symptom; but every eruption does not imply general and radical impairment. It may be local or tem- porary. The same may be said of a great city. A case of cholera here and there, or typhus, should not be reported as an epidemic. It would not properly describe the condition of the city. Walking through our streets at any time during the last dozen years, one might easily imagine them in a perpetual fever and unable to lie still, throwing off their cover of pavements only to have them put on again. What an upturning and unearthing! Contractors' jobs, certainly, some of them, and other people's money. Nevertheless, what a weight and wear of traffic it indicates, the supplies and business of a great city! How many of the conveniences of our life lie underground-water, sewage, gas-in mains that must be kept in repair! What new appli- ances for motion, heating, living, growth itself requires! All this means progress, but progress in frequent collision with public conve- nience. Doubtless the "cable-road " means progress; but meanwhile a great avenue remains "paved with good intentions."
Among the people, also, what signs of fever and unrest! Haste and hurry may be habit or temperament, or the press of good busi- ness. Multitudes are thus in motion, with a daily strain that requires shorter hours of work, or (as has become the case) more frequent breaks and holidays. Yet do people seem to be more migratory. Houses are now closed for months, where formerly a few weeks' absence suf-
1 Hugh J. Grant was born in New-York in 1852. He was graduated from Columbia College Law School ; was elected alderman in 1882, and was again reelected. In 1884, he was nominated by Tammany Hall for mayor, but was defeated; and in 1885 he was elected sheriff. Renominated for
mayor in 1888, he was elected. polling 114,111 votes, against Joel B. Erhardt 73,037, and Abram S. Hewitt 71,979. He was reelected to the office in 1890, defeating Francis M. Scott by 23,357 votes, and was succeeded in 1893 by Thomas F. Gilroy. EDITOR
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NEW-YORK DURING THE LAST FOURTEEN YEARS
ficed; due in part, undoubtedly, to the behests of fashion, in accor- dance with which, when the season opens, in May or June, multitudes flit and bustle here and there, all together, like a bevy of sparrows in the street. But it is also due, undoubtedly, to the opening of pleasurable
WALL STREET IN 1892.
routes, to increased conveniences of travel, and to the fact that so many are able to maintain for themselves a home in the country. For a sea- son or permanently rapid transit permits multitudes to maintain such homes; and to the student of city problems the hope is that increased facilities over those so far attained may enable other multitudes, of
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HISTORY OF NEW-YORK
the poorer class, to cool the fever of city living with the fresh air of the country. What we have said, however, does not cover the sub- ject. There are a fever and unrest which characterize the period. Were we to choose an image of a condition, it might be, at one end of the city, a fashionable woman whose unending rounds of teas, din- ners, visitings, receptions, card-parties, dances, and operas indicate and make a feverish life; or, at the other end, none better than the wandering " fakir," the personification of business unrest, prosperous to-day, to-morrow down; whose life, like the tape of the "ticker," is a continuous record of ups and down and fluctuations, of fever and chills, till the waste- basket receives the used-up scroll. We have had during the period one notable failure and panic- the failure, in 1884, of Grant and Ward;
THE POST-OFFICE AND PARK.
whereby our patriot
soldier, who in the morning thought
himself worth a mil- lion, at night found himself with less than nothing. How wonderful his spirit
of endurance, so great that, notwithstanding this influx of calamity, added to the anguish of disease, he could yet begin and finish his ad- mirable "Memoir"! We have had during the period bank-wrecking and failures, lunacy, "corners" and dishonesty, the outcome of a feverish, daring, or grasping spirit, with results bad enough or de- served enough to those concerned; but as incidents involving indi- viduals, not the generality, not the majority, and not even peculiar
to the period in review. We have had in this year a cholera scare,- a healthy scare, in so far as it led to a stricter quarantine, and to in- creased efforts at sanitation and cleanliness. Some localities, at least, have felt the chill of an unusual exposure from being unusually clean: a cleanliness remedied on some streets (it is said) as soon as the vision of carts and sweepers had passed ! There are always those ignorant or vicious or reckless enough to defy precaution for themselves or others; they must be ruled by an active police and an efficient, non-political health department. In 1832, during the first cholera season, in a house from which fifteen had already been carried, an eye-witness saw the two remaining inmates eating clams from
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NEW-YORK DURING THE LAST FOURTEEN YEARS
a pail, and eating them raw, and using language not to be re- peated ! Such classes we have always, awaiting disease; they are themselves a permanent disease. But, separate from all these things, the decade has been full of unrest, restlessness, even fever. No one cause can be claimed for it. It relates to no one special sub- ject or class of subjects. It is mental unrest, not affecting the city alone, but the country. Just as at certain sea- sons meteors in unusual abundance enter our atmosphere, and burn and blaze across the horizon, so have new ideas entered,-new ideas to be tried or old ones to be readjusted, by ex- periment, by discussion, by friction, by strife. The air holds them in com- bustion. Whether ignorantly, crudely, or intelligently, people are thinking. From the kitchen to the top story of life there is friction of ideas. Among the laboring classes high wages, plenty of work, and unusual savings-bank ac- counts as indices of prosperity, do not affect it. They have their ideas to be tried, something yet to be changed in ways of their own. During this dec- ade, as at other epochs, the "labor question " has given frequent trouble. In 1889 there was a great strike of AUDUBON horse-car drivers, upon a question of hours or wages; whilst in several later strikes the issue has been the employ- ment or non-employment of non-union men (even down to one man) by some concern here or there, or the discharge of a union man. We have even seen regiments during this year called out AUDUBON MONUMENT.1 upon hard and unexpected duty at Buffalo by a strike of switchmen, few in number, but who held the key of a public roadway, and could thus interrupt the business of thousands. Certainly, a crude and ig- norant way of solving the labor problem. A costly, but good result, if repeated trial has brought us nearer to something else. Even with
1 A memorial to Audubon, the naturalist, will be unveiled early in 1893. It covers his grave, and stands at the head of Audubon Avenue, in Trinity cemetery. It is in the form of a Celto- VOL. III .- 39.
Runic cross embellished with birds and animals and appropriately inscribed. The cross is made of North River limestone, is twenty-five feet high, and cost about $10,000. EDITOR.
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HISTORY OF NEW-YORK
real grievances to be redressed, it is organizing private war for pri- vate ends, and making the many suffer for the sake of a few ; it is an attempt of parties or trades, forming themselves into unions, to obtain their ends, say in wages, by force and coercion,- a method which, if generally adopted, would tear business to pieces. With the car-driv- ers, who threatened and drove others away, it was an attempt at a monopoly of driving upon that line, at their own prices, and with the company's horses and equipment as their capital. It is monopoly and tyranny of the worst kind which claims exclusive rights in a trade, and which, to prevent a fellow-craftsman, or even an appren- Tho F. Gilroy tice, from pursuing it, stops private building in the midst, and all firms that deal with the concern that em- ploys him. It is, in the extreme, de- moralizing to the workman, who finds his work to depend, not on its merits, but on the mere coercive power of his organization. It is a method of force which, doubtless, had to be tried; but, may we not hope, only as a rough stepping-stone to some better outcome and development ?
In putting the outlook of the period together, the question is, What are the forces at work, and to what do they tend ? They are good and evil. On the evil side we have, to begin with, the fact of num- bers-the thousands imported every year to swell the already start- ling sum total of ignorance, vice, degradation, and finally crime. Their environment is poverty, the overcrowded tenement-house with its inevitable degradation, the liquor-saloon, the street. Separately, which is the worst? But, with all these huddled together, what a force for evil ! The number alone of homeless and vagrant youths in the city during each year is estimated to be about thirty thousand; and they are born and bred in just such neighborhoods and places. As they grow they constitute the "dangerous classes," always ripe and ready for crime. A distinguished writer, Hon. Andrew D. White, during the summer delivered an address at Chautauqua on the "mur- der problem"; as if murder had grown (and it has) to. the size of a problem, something to be studied and solved! Vain as are these youths, quarrelsome, ambitious in the only way known to them, viz., to have repute among their fellows as "toughs," as "nervy," as "kill- ers"; still more than this, to have their pictures and biographies in the newspapers day after day,-to achieve such glory is to some of them well worth the chance of a hanging; for chance it has become, the chance which a soldier takes in battle. These youths are the " heelers" and "repeaters" of ward politicians, of men with a "pull." And now come in the law with its delays, the criminal lawyer with his devices, and ultimately the chance of a pardon, a commutation,
NEW-YORK DURING THE LAST FOURTEEN YEARS
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NEW-YORK CITY AND HARBOR IN 1892.
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HISTORY OF NEW-YORK
or an escape. Surely, in some of its features, a condition of hopeless evil, an unchangeable sore! Add to all this a corrupt politics, the kind of men chosen to govern, the firm grip of the liquor interest, and the dependence of all upon these classes, together with the many of better antecedents who do not care; and the complexion of things, for the good side, is painful and discouraging. The numbers and the governing influences are against it.
On the other hand is something to be said. There are houses in the city so apparently ingrained with fever that to remove it is im- possible,-houses that cannot be reformed. They must be left as they are, a resort for the vilest, or be pulled down. Neither can the health authorities, nor hospitals, nor physicians, though armed with the best appliances of science, cure all the maladies even of a district. They can mitigate, can remove some, can isolate and quarantine others, and in cases cure; but the inevitable result must come to many. The same must be said of moral agencies-our public schools, our grand charities, our churches, our educating and reforming organiza- tions: they cannot remove all the ignorance and other evils of the city. Nor can they, like the bees when an intruder too large to be removed threatens harm to the hive, seal it up by itself in a dense coffin of propolis. But they are persistent agencies, and we may rea- son from what they have already done to a broader future beyond. There are fires where, from the first, the only hope of the fireman is to save adjoining buildings that have not yet caught. These agencies, as we have seen, venture into the worst to save what they can. They have planted themselves, as engines of good, in some of the worst districts of the city ; and already with success that opens a future. Twelve thousand vagrant children come yearly under the influence of the Children's Aid Society alone. Even the older element, as they have proved, is not beyond the reach of influence. There are "trea- sures hid in the sand," like Jerry McAuley and others of his class, where one would hardly expect to find them-men and women whose only schooling has been that of ignorance and vice. If, on the one hand, that which in its opening is a flower may in its culmination prove a thistle; on the other hand, the lotus, the most beautiful flower of India, grows in the mud!
Certainly, when we look only at the seething mass concentrated in our city from all nations, to educate, elevate, and assimilate it may seem too great a task. Of two things, however, we never should de- spair. They are education and the Christian religion as lifting forces. Their failure in this country would mean our doom. But it has been proved that the amount of electricity which would charge a thunder- cloud is not enough to decompose-that is, to tear apart the two gases that compose-a drop of water. Such restriction has God laid
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NEW-YORK DURING THE LAST FOURTEEN YEARS
upon the cloud. Big and dangerous as it may sometimes seem or be, it cannot destroy the blessing which, as a "wandering cistern," it was intended to convey. Such force of resistance has God given to the raindrop, in its accumulated streams the life of nature and all being. Like the two gases which compose the raindrop, education and reli- gion must combine; and, combined, they are in the world a permanent, ever active, and efficient power, if slow yet sure. We should remem- ber that in the twelfth century the people of England were sunk in brutal ignorance; that what little knowledge existed was possessed by a studious few; that they were Norman and Saxon, victor and van-
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Boywni
GRANT'S TOMB ON RIVERSIDE DRIVE.1
quished, separated by caste and hatred; that their only religion was a debasing superstition; and that it has taken seven centuries to de- velop from this beginning the England of to-day. It needs time. But our circumstances are different. It will not need so much time to work up the dissimilar and perplexing material. As this appear's to-
1 As Sir Walter Scott's Edinburgh monument is the finest yet raised anywhere on earth to the memory of a man of letters, so it is believed that the tomb of Grant, now building on Manhattan Island, will be the grandest yet erected in the wide world to a soldier, surpassing even that noble one which stands near the banks of the
Seine, raised to the memory of the hero of Aus- terlitz and Marengo. The situation of the poet's or the emperor's monument cannot for a mo- ment be compared to the magnificent site of the American soldier's tomb, on the banks of the Hudson, among the grandest rivers in the world -perhaps the very grandest. EDITOR.
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HISTORY OF NEW-YORK
day, crowding so much of our city, much of it may seem but rubbish and refuse fit for the ash-barrel or the dust-heap. Born in great num- bers, these people pick up a day's living without a thought beyond, struggle, suffer, and die. Over 60,000 of them cannot write their own names. What is their use or purpose in life? Are they merely a part of nature's fecundity ? Undoubtedly, many of them may die, must die, as they are; and so in each generation. Yet the problem is not, after all, a hopeless one for the city. Crowded already, in parts overcrowded, with more than can find work, emigration must take a turn. Education and religion are pushing upon their envir- onment; and, in time, out of the present ignorance and degradation will come something better. The races will mingle and Americanize. The influences at work all look to something better. The hybridizing bee dips its legs in the pollen of a flower; goes to another, and, behold, a better variety! The cosmos is but a weed to begin with, but un- der cultivation it is already becoming a marketable flower of the fall; whilst the chrysanthemum, the favorite of the day, and which is a union of the Japanese, Chinese, and American varieties, has this year produced a Columbus variety in color, and another which is the very perfection of form. Such, we may hope, will be the march of im- provement in our city on the moral and human side, to equal that upon the material side. An English statesman, at the close of a long life in the public service, was asked if what he saw and had seen made him gloomy. He had seen the ups and down of parties; had seen his country prosperous, and again apparently the reverse. He had seen that a country might be going too fast, and needed, as some- times in the spring the season needs, a check. There was much at the time of his retirement that looked discouraging, but his reply was that he did not feel gloomy; that he had often found what he thought a disastrous retrogression to be merely "the ebb of the advan- cing wave." "No," he said, "I do not feel discouraged; Hannibal peto pacem -'I, Hannibal, seek peace'; that is all!" Personally he was tired. The historian of the future, beginning at 1893 where this volume closes, may have much to tell of progress and fruitage where we see only germs; to tell of better times, when the heads of its present writers will lie among the "mournful marbles."
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CHAPTER XVI
CONSTITUTIONAL AND LEGAL HISTORY OF NEW-YORK IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
NY outline of the constitutional history of New-York in the nineteenth century involves primarily the considera- tion of several great public movements, culminating in the constitutional conventions of 1821 and 1846. Each of the constitutions presented by these several conventions led to very radical changes in the substantive law or procedure of the State. The constitution of 1821 was followed by a notable revision of the fundamental law of New-York, which exercised much influence also on the laws of other States; while the constitution of 1846 was followed by the overthrow of the ancient judicial establishment of New-York, and by drastic reforms of the inherited and antiquated procedure in use for several centuries in the courts of justice of New- York. Both constitutions were in the direction of more liberal insti- tutions, and were intended to confer upon the people of the State greater political powers and privileges than had ever before been granted to them.
In the preceding volume some of the defects apparent in the con- stitution of 1777 were noticed; two of these led to the constitutional convention elected in the year 1801. The constitution of 1777 had omitted all directions for its amendment; but, on the theory that all political authority emanated from the people, the legislature in 1801, by a referendum act, recommended a convention to consider two changes. One of these was made necessary by the embarrassing ratio in which the senate and assembly were augmenting with the popula- tion, and the other by a notorious conflict which had arisen between the governor and the other members of the council of appointment concerning the governor's exclusive right of nominating to certain public offices under the provisions of the constitution of 1777.
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