Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [473]
With thousands of wage-earners thrown out of work by the abrupt cessation of the city’s business, private citizens and churches established a Committee of the Benevolent. A July 16 meeting at the Merchants’ Exchange collected about seventeen hundred dollars for poor relief; thousands more dollars flowed from prominent merchants. The committee divided into fifteen subcommittees, one for each ward. These groups paid local residents for “cleansing and purifying their own dwellings,” established soup kitchens, and distributed food and clothing. This was hands-on charity. Gentlemen searched out “the abode of poverty, filth, and disease” and administered “personally to the wants of the wretched inmates” while “not omitting to warn the wicked of their evil ways, and point them to the Great Physician of the Soul.”
As reported in this daily tally of its victims, the cholera epidemic raged through the streets of the Five Points and other crowded downtown districts with particular severity. (© Museum of the City of New York)
For some, the poor swam into focus for the first time. At the height of the epidemic Mrs. P. Roosevelt noted that while ordinarily “no one notices the poor” who are “frequently are to be found lying in the streets,” now they were being “picked up and taken to the hospitals.” “Only on occasions such as this,” she reflected, “is the true extent of the misery of the City known.”
Despite earnest solicitations by the Board of Health, the trustees of the privately run New York Hospital (who included Philip Hone and James DePeyster) flatly refused to accept cholera patients. The brunt of the onslaught therefore fell on Bellevue, the public institution. By July 7 it had already admitted 555, of whom 334 would die by August 8. Soon the place was swamped with the quick and dead alike. Patients lay on the floors crying for water. There were often forty bodies at once in the deadhouse, as the morgue was known. Before it was over, Bellevue would admit two thousand people, over a sixth of all victims, and tally six hundred deaths.
To supplement its work, the Board of Health established five cholera hospitals around the city—in the Hall of Records, a school, an old bank, an abandoned workshed, and a workshop at Corlear’s Hook (the arrival of the latter precipitating a mass exodus of workers from adjoining shipyards). Most poor people forcibly blocked efforts to remove their sick to these hospitals, regarding them as charnel houses run by incompetents. Doctors and city officials who insisted were attacked and brutally beaten.
Following precedents from earlier battles against yellow fever, the authorities set out to disperse the deadly concentrations in the slums. A Committee to Provide Suitable Accommodations for the Destitute Poor evacuated tenants, over the protests of anguished landlords. It moved them to buildings and shanties around town (including one at 10th Street and Avenue C for “colored people in health”), which they leased from other landlords, often at extortionate rents. It then arranged with the commissioners of the almshouse to supply food, medicines, and clothing. The Court of General Sessions discharged all prisoners convicted of misdemeanors and removed felons from the penitentiary and Bridewell to temporary shelter at Blackwell’s Island.
Many churches closed down, especially the wealthier ones whose flocks had fled (St. George’s shut for almost a month), but many clergy and religious stayed and did heroic work. The Catholic Church won highest praise, with the Sisters of Charity and Father Várela singled out. (It was said that Varela “lived in the hospitals.”) The Episcopal Mission Society expanded its outdoor relief efforts. Evangelist