Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [402]
Catholics too formed their own institutions. In 1817 the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum was founded by the Sisters of Charity, an out-of-town order organized by ex-New Yorker Elizabeth Ann Seton (who in 1797 had cofounded the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows). In 1805, two years after her husband died, Seton had converted to Catholicism and been baptized at St. Peter’s. Ostracized by her Episcopalian family and friends, she had moved with her five children to Baltimore in 1808, taken vows before the bishop, and formed the American Sisters of Charity in 1809 in Emmitsburg, Maryland; it was the first Catholic religious order in the United States. Seton never returned to New York, but four years before she died in 1821, she dispatched three sisters to open the city’s first Catholic orphanage, a small wooden structure on Prince Street near the new cathedral. The ranks of its charges grew steadily, swollen by the hard lives and piety of immigrants like Bridget McGlone, who in 1820 left her infant daughter on the steps of Bishop Connolly’s house, with a note saying she hadn’t taken it to the almshouse as she didn’t want it exposed to Protestant teachings. In 1826 the diocese erected a three-story brick building for the sisters’ now 150 orphans; a second followed in 1830 for half orphans (children with one surviving parent).
Like the almshouse, the new Bellevue Hospital was soon overcrowded, thanks both to the epidemics that swept the city in the early 1820s and to an influx of patients turned away from the New York Hospital downtown. That old charitable establishment, though it still served the respectable poor, had begun to exclude dangerous or morally reprehensible cases. It now sent the contagiously ill up to Bellevue’s pesthouse, the chronically ill to Bellevue’s hospitals and infirmaries, and the wicked ill—sailors with syphilis—to Bellevue’s almshouse, where they could be “made to work.” This policy at once lowered the downtown institution’s patient load and diminished its mortality rate by whisking away terminally ill patients before they could blemish the hospital’s good name.
The pressure on Bellevue Hospital and the almshouse was somewhat alleviated by the appearance of specialized institutions for indigent New Yorkers of good character, among them the New York Eye Infirmary (1820), the New York Infirmary for the Treatment of Diseases of the Lungs (1823), a Deaf and Dumb Asylum (1817), and the New York Asylum for Lying-in Women (1823). Similarly, in 1821 “maniacs” and “lunatics” were shifted from city hospitals to the new Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, located on a rustic seventy-seven-acre plot several miles north of town (now occupied by Columbia University). Besides removing a source of constant disruption in the hospitals, its construction was a victory for Eddy, who had been urging for years that New York adopt Europe’s humane new system of “moral management” for mental illness, which all but eliminated chains and straitjackets.
That both the almshouse and Bellevue Hospital ran out of room so quickly suggests the extent to which genteel reformers had underestimated the population of deserving poor in the city. It was in the penitentiary, moreover, where the consequences of their drawing such a thin line between pauperism and criminality became increasingly apparent. The penitentiary, a three-story stone structure situated just to the rear of the new almshouse, housed criminals and poor alike. It took those convicted at the Court of Sessions of relatively minor offenses—petty larceny (theft of goods valued under twenty-five dollars), fraud, misdemeanors, disorderly conduct, assault—and set them to hard labor for terms up to three years. It also received those convicted of vagrancy—the offense of being unemployed, poor, and on the streets during one of the occasional sweeps by city marshals. These roundups came at the behest of merchants and shopkeepers determined to improve New York’s business climate by scouring away peddlers, scavengers, beggars, and potential criminals. In 1826 the 210 vagrants