Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [621]
“TO EXPEL IDLENESS AND BEGGARY FROM THE CITY”
The “scientific reformers” at the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor were not doing much better than the moralizers they tended to belittle. By the early fifties the AICP, with roughly four thousand contributing members—including some of the greatest bankers, merchant princes, and industrialists of the day—was the most influential organization of its kind in New York. Its program of centralized philanthropy to manage city indigents was in full swing; nearly four hundred employed visitors had logged hundreds of thousands of visits; and executive secretary Robert Milham Hartley professed himself mightily pleased with the elaborate structure. “Its machinery,” Hartley boasted, “though extensive, is easily managed, and works with admirable precision, economy and effect.” Surely it couldn’t fail “to expel idleness and beggary from the city.” Here, he crowed, was America’s answer to the recently published Communist Manifesto.
Hartley had succeeded in expelling many of the most wretched from the city, in a sense. They’d been swept from Manhattan’s streets and dispatched to Blackwell’s Island, by 1850 a 1.75-mile-long laboratory for scientific management of the classified poor. Yet no matter how many grand (and costly) new establishments got constructed on Blackwell’s, they were immediately (and expensively) swamped with inmates, 60 percent of them Irish. Many were elderly discharged domestics who, having spent their lives in service, had no children to look after them nor community support networks to rely upon in their old age. Between 1853 and 1856, caring for the seven thousand people crammed into the new almshouse drove the costs of operation up by 240 percent, from $385,000 to $925,000.
The sick and immigrant poor, meanwhile, were shoehorned into Bellevue Hospital. Of the 3,728 admissions in 1850, 2,596 had been born in Ireland and only 647 were native born. A substantial minority were relegated to the floors until a new wing, added in 1855, brought the number of beds to twelve hundred; by the mid-1850s Bellevue was treating four to five thousand patients annually. The place had a fearsome reputation, however, partly because the private hospitals and other poor-relief institutions continued to dump their terminal cases there and then slander the facility for its mortality rate. Ardent efforts brought in-house deaths down somewhat, but in the late 1850s Bellevue remained rat-infested, lice-ridden, and, like many of the other overcrowded institutions, wracked by epidemics of puerperal fever (which carried off parturient women) and ophthalmia (which led to blindness in large numbers of children).
Public and private reformers made heroic efforts to respond to the crisis. A tiny smallpox hospital was opened on Blackwell’s southern tip in 1848, then replaced by a much larger version in 1856. The Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum, a mammoth and intricately designed hospital at the northern apex, was the largest such institution in the country when it opened in 1839 but was quickly overburdened with inmates; it was replaced by two new buildings in the late 1840s. Three-fourths of these inmates were immigrants, two-thirds of whom were Irish. Insanity proved especially prevalent among young immigrant women, one sympathetic physician wrote, who were simply overwhelmed by “the combined moral and physical influences of their leaving the homes of their childhood, their coming almost destitute to a strange land, and often after great suffering.”
The idle