At the turn of the 20th century, a teenage girl without a home, family, friends, or money didn’t have many options. There was no public safety net, and for far too many girls, no hope. For Mrs. Phebe Maine, a wealthy Park Slope wife and mother, this was unacceptable, and unlike many who simply shook their heads in sorrow, or looked away in pity, she did something about it. In 1889, she and some of her like-minded wealthy friends founded the Brooklyn Training School and Home for Girls. The institution was both school and shelter, designed to get a young woman off the street, and into a sheltering environment that would offer her education and training in the domestic arts. For more information on the beginning years of the school, please see Part One of our story. By 1901, the school had moved around several times, always needing more room, and that year it came to its final resting place: a wood framed house in the newly fashionable St. Marks District, at 1483 Pacific Street, between Brooklyn and Kingston Avenues.

Mrs. Maine set up the school to be a voluntary shelter for girls between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one. She specifically stated that the Training School was not a reformatory or a prison, and was not a punishment. The girls were not required to dress in uniforms, and were not referred to as “inmates”. While many of the girls enrolled were without families or homes, some were also from homes where the parents were just too poor to keep the girls in the house, or the household had problems of alcohol, violence or abuse.

At the school, the students received an education, and training which would enable them to get good jobs as maids and housekeepers. Although that seems rather limiting now, there really weren’t a whole lot of opportunities for uneducated women in the workforce at the turn of the 20th century. A woman could work in a factory or become a domestic. A career in nursing, teaching, or secretarial work took an education and training that was unavailable to most poor girls, especially those not in a stable home life. A skilled and well-trained domestic could command a decent salary, one above your basic domestic drudge. Most of the servants in New York were immigrants, some of whom spoke little English, but worked cheaply. One had to have an “edge” to even make it in the service industry, and the Training School was designed to give a girl that edge.

At least that was the package presented to both the girls and their wealthy sponsors. Mrs. Main retired from the board in 1901. Some records have her passing away in 1902, while others list her death in 1907, the same year her husband, Malcolm T. Maine, died. But even before her death, the school had begun taking in girls who were sent there by the court system. The magistrates and justices of Brooklyn’s court system began looking at the Training School as a girls’ reformatory, and began committing girls there, as far back as 1890. The first girl mentioned in the Brooklyn Eagle was a twelve year old named Josie Springer.

On the face of it, young Josie Springer came from a stable home. She had both parents, although the papers never say what her father did for a living. Her mother, Mrs. Anna Springer, was well known to the court system as someone who would sue someone at the drop of a hat, as well as a woman with a foul mouth. Mrs. Springer had been fined $50, not a small sum back then, for using “language unbecoming a lady” to a police officer on Navy Street, in the Vinegar Hill neighborhood where they lived.

The Eagle accounts of the story are not consistent, with Josie’s age and other facts of the case changing each time the story appeared, but the gist of it is this: young Josie, either twelve or fifteen at the time, was arrested for sending an obscene and inappropriate letter through the mail. The letter was either to her next door neighbor, or to a rival boarding house owner, someone her mother was feuding with. A private investigator named James Wilson would later testify in court that he recognized the handwriting in the letter as being Josie’s, and he would have reason to know, as he and his wife, Anna, were tenants at the Springer’s boarding house.

On the advice of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the judge in the case sentenced Josie to the Training School for Girls, until she reached legal age, saying Mrs. Springer was an unfit mother. This verdict was appealed, and at the same time, suits and countersuits rose up around it. Mrs. Springer had Ann and James Wilson arrested, charging them with stealing objects from her home. They had moved out in October of 1899, but she didn’t have them arrested until the following January. Mrs. Springer said they stole a dozen towels, six napkins, and a pair of scissors, a fork and a spoon.

The Wilsons countered that these charges were bogus, and that they sprang from Mr. Wilson being a witness in Josie’s case. Mrs. Springer had already won a case from the Wilsons for the payment of back rent, but the Wilsons filed a countersuit for non-payment for investigative services rendered. The judge in the theft case chose not to proceed.

Meanwhile, poor Josie’s case bounced back and forth for some months. The lawyer for her appeal stated that the original judge did not have the right to sentence the girl with an indefinite sentence. He did have the discretion to send her to the school, but the sentence had to have a finite time limit, not “until she reaches her majority”, as his original sentence read. The case had come up in January of 1890. It took until June of that year for the Appellate to decide that the evidence against her was insufficient, and she was released from the home. They did not find that the judge was wrong in any way. Josie spent seven months at the Training Home.

By 1915, the Training Home was far too small for the rambling series of wood framed houses it occupied on Pacific Street. The city was on the verge of condemning the property, and a series of fund raisers was held to build a new facility. In 1919, a new, Mission style complex was built, taking up three or four lots on this quiet street. The photographs we have of the school are this entirely new complex. More tales of life at the Training School, and the end of an era, as our story concludes, next time.

(Above photograph: from the collection of Museum of the City of New York, 1923)

Backyard playground in development. Photograph: Museum of the City of New York. 1923.

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