Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [401]
But Joseph Curtis, the Refuge’s first manager—chosen for his experience in superintending workers at James Allaire’s ironworks—soon discovered that the young reprobates had minds of their own. They used “improper language,” talked during silent periods, played during work sessions, and ran away. When reprimands proved useless, Curtis resolved to be “as harsh as any other father.” The infractions and punishments recorded in his daily journal for 1825-26 included:
E. D. paddled, with his feet tied to one side of a barrel, his hands to the other.
J. M. . . . neglects her work for play in the yard, leg iron and confined to House.
Joseph R.: Disregarded order to stop speaking, given a bit of the cat [i.e., the whip].
John B.: A few strokes of the cat to help him remember that he must not speak when confined to a prison cell.
Ann M.: Refractory, does not bend to punishment, put in solitary.
William C.: Questioned guard’s authority, whipped.
Amid some uneasiness at his methods on the part of the overseers, Curtis was replaced by a new manager, Nathaniel C. Hart. Hart proved an even more thoroughgoing disciplinarian, and he ringed the Refuge with a two-foot-thick wall to prevent escapes. Nevertheless, the institution was pronounced a great success. In its first ten years 1,120 boys and girls were admitted, and those “reformed” to the satisfaction of the authorities were released to parents, friends, or masters for apprenticeship; the more refractory were bound over to captains of whaling ships or sent into service as domestics.
THE BELLEVUE INSTITUTION
Almost due east of the House of Refuge, on a twenty-six-acre site overlooking the East River, stood a complex of buildings, likewise enclosed by a wall, known as the Bellevue Institution. Dedicated in 1816, by the mid-twenties Bellevue comprised—in addition to the pesthouse opened during the yellow fever epidemic of 1794—the city’s new almshouse, Bellevue Hospital, and a penitentiary, plus a school, a morgue, a bakehouse, a washhouse, a soap factory, a greenhouse, an icehouse, and a shop for carpenters and blacksmiths. It was here that New York reformers faced, even more directly than at the House of Refuge, the task of holding the line they had drawn between the deserving and undeserving poor.
The three-story, blue stone almshouse paralleled the water; 325 feet long, with wings at either end, it was the largest structure in the city. Nevertheless, within a decade of its opening, it was overflowing with people too old, too young, or too sick to heed the summons to greater self-reliance. During the year ending September 30, 1825, when the annual cost of running the almshouse had climbed to $81,500—better than 10 percent of the total city budget of $780,400—the number of its inmates fluctuated from a high of 1,867 to a low of 1437 (with deaths totaling 495). Ninety-five percent of the inmates were white and were more or less equally divided between men and women (with genders, like races, segregated in their own quarters). The number of those whom guidebook writer James Hardie referred to as “wretched emigrants from Europe” had multiplied, but they were still outnumbered, three to two, by “needy adventurers from most parts of our own country.”
Jews were conspicuously absent from the almshouse rolls as, ever since New Amsterdam had made Jewish settlement contingent on their poor not becoming a burden to the Dutch West India Company, the tiny community had been taking care of its own. Suddenly faced with large numbers of poor immigrants in the 1820s, but determined that no Jew would beg on the streets, Shearith Israel (spurred by its president Harmon Hendricks) dispensed aid to the needy. In 1822 Ashkenazic members formed the Hebrew Benevolent Society, which affiliated with B’nai Jeshurun