Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [33]
The Mary Ellen case was the first case of child abuse to reach a New York City courtroom, and during the month of April 1874, New York newspapers featured lurid details of Mary Ellen’s abuse at the hands of her “mama,” Mary Connolly. Having been orphaned as an infant, Mary Ellen was “indentured” to the Connollys by the Commission of Charities and Correction, a crude form of early foster care. But Mary Connolly always suspected that the child was one of her husband’s illegitimate children, and she beat Mary Ellen daily with a two-and-a-half-foot leather “cow-hide” normally used in the city for driving horses.
By 1896 the offices of the SPCC housed hundreds of records of child abuse in the tenements. In 1896 reformer Helen Campbell wrote in her exposé Darkness and Daylight of the “screams resound- [ing] through a tenement-house” as children were beaten. She documented just a few of the cases for her readers. Seven-year-old Antonia was found with her hair “matted with blood, and her face, arms, and body were covered with wounds around which the blood had dried and remained.” Ten-year-old Patrick Lacey nearly lost an eye to beatings from his drunken father, and six-year-old Jennie Lewis was found by a police officer on her knees scrubbing her tenement apartment’s floor: “Her face and body were much discolored and covered with bruises, and her emaciated arms were patched with red spots from pinches.”
Criminality extended beyond the family and into all dimensions of life. The journalist Colonel Thomas Knox documented in detail street life among the poor of New York: from petty thievery among even the youngest children to gangs of con men, bank robbers, and murderers.
Like many observers of late-nineteenth-century New York, Knox blamed a combination of poverty, ignorant and brutish immigrants, and the evils of liquor. He also placed great blame on the nature of tenements themselves. “Whoever follows a case of distress to its abiding-place,” Knox wrote, “finds it in part of one room of a tenement-house, and that one room duplicated in wretchedness by range after range of rooms from the oozy cellar to the leaky garret, and that house duplicated by streetsful of other houses, till benevolence stands aghast at misery miles in area and six stories deep.” Knox referred to the individual born into poverty in New York’s crowded and unhealthy housing as “the low tenement victim.”
In Manhattan some wards on the Lower East Side were packed with 250,000 to 300,000 people per square mile. This was shockingly dense, unmatched even in London. By 1900, 1.6 million people would occupy 42,700 tenements in Manhattan alone, averaging 33.5 persons per tenement. By 1916, the Lower East Side would boast about 8,400 tenements occupied by over half a million people, for an average of 60 people per tenement.
The tenement was the breeding ground of crime. Knox wrote, “Ignorant, weary and complaining wives, cross and hungry husbands, wild and ungoverned children, are continually at war with each other. The young criminal is the product almost exclusively of these training-schools of vice and crime in the worst tenement-house districts.” Against much of the common wisdom of the day, Knox asserted that necessity, more than any other cause, drove people to crime. “If one suffers from cold and hunger, and can neither buy nor beg food, fuel, and clothing, he must perforce steal it, for necessity is a master of human action.”
Want, hunger, and the threat of violence were all constants for those who lived in a tenement. In such circumstances stealing food or coal became not only understandable but even a laudable means of scraping by. “Petty thievery by boys and girls who are not taught to discriminate between right and wrong, who are, in fact, led to believe it a virtue to steal in order to provide themselves and parents