Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [918]
At Christmas time in 1891, the Army opened a Cheap Food and Shelter Depot in the basement of a deserted old Baptist church on Bedford and Downing streets. At this New York Lighthouse men could get a box bed and a shower for seven cents (half that charged by commercial lodging houses, for much cleaner, safer, and drunk-free surroundings). A restaurant served staples for pennies. The totally penniless could work for the shelter for two hours in the morning, splitting wood, which was then sold to poor families. Soon larger quarters were opened on Front Street, with attendance at evangelical meetings a prerequisite for coffee and buns. Before long their urban enterprises included day nurseries and Salvage Brigades that collected old clothes, hired the poor to repair them, and sold them to the needy.
This combination of material and spiritual aid was spectacularly successful. The crusade expanded rapidly—by 1890 the Salvation Army was established in forty-three states—with national headquarters at the Brooklyn Lyceum. But such success did not please genteel church leaders. They were offended by the Army’s hoopla and made uncomfortable by its bumptious vitality, which they felt degraded the Christian heritage. While there was some admiration for its expanding social program, overall they found plebeian Protestantism—and its biblical literalism—hard to swallow.
“FRIENDLY VISITORS”
The welfare reforms of the 1870s, by halting municipal outdoor relief and handing public monies over to private agencies for disbursal, guaranteed that metropolitan charity would be governed by well-worn axioms: poverty most often stemmed from individual moral and character defects (probably hereditary), and the task of scientific charity was to dispense assistance, cautiously and grudgingly, to the deserving while incarcerating or rehabilitating the remainder.
In 1881 State Board of Charities commissioner Josephine Shaw Lowell surveyed the city’s existing private charities in the light of this flinty perspective and found too many of them “wasteful” and “encouraging pauperism and imposture.” New York’s alms enterprise remained insufficiently coordinated, despite the decades-long efforts of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP). “So important a business as the administration of charity has become in New York City,” Lowell concluded, “requires to be carried on on business principles.”
In 1882, accordingly, Lowell launched the New York Charity Organization Society (COS), modeled on the London Society for Organizing Charitable Relief and Repressing Mendicity (1869), established by professionals intent on curtailing indiscriminate almsgiving by aristocratic West Enders. As the group’s “guiding spirit” she presided over a thoroughgoing amalgamation of Protestant almsgiving organizations and families. Emerging as something of a Charity Trust—the philanthropic equivalent of Standard Oil—New York COS pooled the resources of over five hundred churches and societies and nearly a thousand private families, embracing old monied (Robert W. De Forest was president) and new (J. P. Morgan was a generous patron). In 1893 this consolidating impulse received architectural expression when COS erected a United Charities Building (on Fourth Avenue and 22nd Street) and persuaded other charitable organizations such as the Mission and Tract Society, the Children’s Aid Society, and the AICP to move in with them (merging with the latter in all but name).
To block multiple handouts, COS established a centralized Registry Bureau