Raised by the Church: Growing up in New York City's Catholic Orphanages

2. New York City in the Nineteenth Century

2 New York City in the Nineteenth Century Between 1810 and 1860, New York City’s population grew from 119,734 to 1,174,799, in large part because of a huge influx of immigrants from Ireland, Wales, and Germany. Being a port of entry, New York was the place where most immigrants settled, and the majority of these immigrants were desperate for work. Some men left the immediate urban area and got jobs working on the Erie Canal, living on edge of subsistence—some for fifty cents a day and jiggers of whiskey. Like most immigrant groups coming to the United States, the Erie Canal workers labored at jobs nobody else wanted. It was backbreaking and dangerous and they died by the thousands, of malaria, yellow fever, and cholera. Immigrants who remained in New York City did not have it any easier. Epidemics of yellow fever and cholera swept through the city. There was famine. The Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812 caused a practical standstill of both international and domestic shipping and manufacturing. The outbreak of the Civil War exacerbated political strife, economic upheaval, and social maladjustment. There was widespread unemployment, and children as young as five were forced to find ways to keep themselves and sometimes even their families from dying of starvation. In the absence of child welfare laws, a boy could be legally employed at age twelve. A large floating population of vagrant children coalesced, living on the streets and surviving by their wits. Seldom numbering fewer than ten thousand in any year, they were an illiterate army of orphans 14 | orphans in america and runaways, known as “street Arabs.”Almost entirely foreign-born, they were the city’s newsboys, bootblacks, flower girls, street sweepers , peddlers, and musicians. Some became gamblers. Others survived by becoming pickpockets, beggars, pimps, and prostitutes. Newsies Newsboys—or newsies, as they were called—were a prominent part of the urban landscape of the time. Very young boys, and occasionally girls, hawked their papers for a penny, and represented some of the worst of child labor abuse in the country. In his classic account of New York in the 1870s, the journalist James McCabe wrote, “The newsboys constitute an important division of this army of homeless children. You see them everywhere, in all parts of the city. . . . They rend the air and deafen you with their shrill cries. They are ragged and dirty. Some have no coats, no shoes and no hat.” Newsboys suffered homelessness, harassment, muggings, long hours, and uncertain weather conditions. Newspaper publishers charged fifty cents for a stack of one hundred newspapers and there was no reimbursement for unsold papers. And although reformers tried to help, it was not until the newsboys took action themselves that things began to change. After several publishers raised the cost of a bundle to sixty cents, New York City newsboys went on strike in July 1899. Tying up the city for two weeks, they won a limited victory when the publishers agreed to reimburse them for papers they could not sell. But before their dramatic victory, skirmishes had already occurred in other cities. On October 14, 1884, the New York Times reported one such incident in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, when several newsboys refused to deliver the Evening Chronicle. Four newsboys broke ranks, returned to the news office, and picked up their supply of papers,“but as soon as they left the office they were attacked by the strikers and one was severely beaten. The young fellow turned on his assailants and New York City in the Nineteenth Century | 15 stabbed one in the arm. The proprietors of the Chronicle threatened to have the whole party arrested, after which the four boys were allowed to deliver their papers without further trouble. The boys had been getting the paper at sixty cents per one hundred but they wanted it at fifty cents.” Today, homeless adults raise our anxiety level, our guilt, our rage—and sometimes a combination of all three. In the 1850s, homeless children who lived on the street were seen as a threat. There was always talk of placing them in an orphanage, but it remained only talk because there was no place to house them and nobody was willing to pay the enormous sums needed to have orphanages built. Not that these street urchins were likely to have gone willingly, or, for that matter, that they...