Walkabout: The Lost Boys of St. John's

The responsibility of taking care of those who couldn’t take care of themselves in Victorian Brooklyn was taken on by both private and religious charities. One of the most pressing needs was the care of children.

In 1826, a group met in Brooklyn that would eventually become the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum Society. Various orphanages were set up in Brooklyn in the following years, run by different groups of brothers and nuns.

In 1868, the Saint John’s Orphan Asylum for Boys was built on St. Marks Place, between Albany and Troy Avenues in what is now Crown Heights North.

The institution grew both physically and in population, becoming a huge complex, which at its peak, housed over a thousand boys.

Photographs and records from the institution show that by the 1880’s, St. John’s was one of those large, dark and forbidding Victorian institutions that have almost disappeared from modern America.

The large enclosed campus housed dormitories, a chapel, kitchen, laundry room and infirmary. It was run by the Sisters of St. Joseph, and overseen by the Diocese of Brooklyn.

It was not easy being a poor child in Brooklyn, especially in the latter half of the 19th century. There was little protection from the law, child labor was common, and even expected, and the huge surge of immigration, tenement living, civil unrest, and the industrial revolution all contributed to thousands of children without homes or parents.

There were many orphanages in Brooklyn, most segregated by sex, race and religion, and all were full to capacity.

A search of the Brooklyn Eagle for the latter part of the century illustrates the life of a child who might find himself at St. John’s home.

A boy did not have to be an actual orphan to end up at the home. Not that there weren’t plenty of actual orphans, given the horrible conditions of tenements and poor or nonexistent health care for parents and children alike.

There are countless stories in the Eagle of boys sent to St. John’s by the courts because one or both of their parents is jailed for public drunkenness or theft.

Far too many stories involved women who gave up their children because their drunken or abusive husbands had been jailed, or had died, and they were just unable to care for them.

The mothers were able to visit, but the children actually now belonged to St. John’s.

Life at St. John’s was probably no picnic, either. The boys were referred to as inmates, but a perusal of all kinds of charities from the period shows that this was a common word, and may not have had the same connotation it has today.

We do find records of decently dressed and fed boys, all of whom had Irish surnames, who were schooled at the Home, some for the first time in their lives.

They were expected to help pay their way, and many of the older boys were sent out to farms outside of the city to work in the summers.

The Home also had a very large and busy choir and band, which provided entertainment, seemingly at almost every Catholic function in Brooklyn, as well as many political events and charitable balls and fund raisers.

Some boys, however, inevitably ran away, and the Eagle has many stories throughout the years of kids escaping and being picked up and returned to the Home. Some escaped to look for their parents, some got into trouble, and at least one died by drowning in a pond.

This is the backdrop for one of the worst disasters in Brooklyn history, the St. John’s Orphan Asylum fire of December 18, 1884.

The fire started in the laundry, caused by burning rags left to dry, but soon travelled to the building’s mansard roof, which acted as a flue, spreading the fire throughout the complex.

The disaster was further complicated by a lack of fire escapes in the building. There were some, but not near the infirmary, where most of the damage took place.

There also weren’t enough fire hydrants in the streets, and the closest fire house was on Bedford and Myrtle Avenue, which would be far for a fire truck today, much worse for a fire truck pulled by horses on a cold December night in 1884.

Reports in both the Brooklyn Eagle and the NY Times, echoed the horror of that night. Most of the dead were found in the infirmary.

Body after small body was pulled from the wreckage, most burned beyond recognition. Two children were found huddled together in the laundry, where they had fallen through the infirmary floor from above.

The body of a priest was found protectively crouched over the body of a child. The body of a mother who had gone to visit her child was also found, as were other many, many children.

One of the nuns, a Sister Mary Josephine, aged 36, died when she had crawled out onto the mansard roof of the orphanage and slipped off the roof.

She had been trying to reach a fireman’s ladder. After all of the investigations and shifting through the rubble, the death toll reached 21 children and at least 5 adults.

The official inquiry after the event concluded that most of the children in the infirmary had been too sick to escape from the fast moving blaze which did a lot of damage to that wing of the building, but spared most of the rest of the institution.

The sad funeral procession that took place on December 27th 1884, was led by three hearses, as all of the remains of the 21 boys fit into only three coffins. The funeral took place at nearby Our Lady of Victory Church on MacDonough and Throop Ave, and the children were buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in Flatbush.

In the weeks following the disaster, St. John’s received thousands of dollars in donations from all across the greater NY area. In short order, the infirmary wing, and other damage was rebuilt, and the institution carried on.

The city fathers ordered a new fire house for the St. Marks District, more hydrants, and the Asylum was rebuilt with more and better fire escapes.

Almost four years later to the date, on January 31, 1888, another fire broke out at the Asylum, again at night. At that time there were 600 boys living there.

The nuns were able to get them all out in a rapid and orderly fashion, to safety. The fire turned out to be from an overheated stove in an office, the damage was noted, and the boys returned to their beds. Life at St. John’s returned to normal.

The boy’s choir and band continued to play at charity and civic events for many years to come, well into the 20th century. In June of 1948, the last mass was said in the chapel, before the re-named St. John’s Home relocated to Beach Street in Rockaway Beach.

Today, the institution is still there, now housing at-risk teenage boys who attend school there or in nearby public schools.

The huge Victorian complex was torn down to build the Albany Houses, one of New York’s many housing complexes, which opened in 1950. St. John’s Orphan Asylum for Boys is only a footnote in Brooklyn’s history.

Nothing remains of the complex or the story of one of the worst fires in our history.