Walkabout: Charity Starts at Home, Part 2

Charity was an important part of late Victorian life, here in Brooklyn. In my last column, I looked at some of the secular charities that called central Brooklyn, specifically Bedford Stuyvesant and Crown Heights, home.

The second half of the 19th century saw unprecedented amounts of immigration and migration to the New York City area. With vast amounts of new people, added to the large amounts of people already here, so too, came the need for social services. Hospitals, orphanages, old age homes and asylums were needed for the multitudes of people not able to help themselves.

Private charities funded by the wealthy helped scores of people, and even more were helped under the auspices of religious groups of many denominations and faiths.

The Catholic Church was extremely active in charity work in central Brooklyn. As the years turned to the 20th century, a large number of Irish and Italian immigrants settled in the area, joining an thriving German Catholic presence.

The Church’s charitable organizations were large works, some surviving , while some are long gone.

One of the biggest was the enormous St. John’s Home for Boys (1868) an impressive facility at Albany and St. Marks Avenue in Crown Heights North. At it’s zenith, this vast complex with chapel, 3 story dorm, kitchen, and laundry, housed 1000 boys.

Today, the Albany Houses occupy this space. The Church also built the Brooklyn Preparatory School in 1908, a Jesuit run high school on the site of the Crow Hill Penitentiary in the square of Crown, President, Rogers and Nostrand, just across Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights South.

As mentioned on Tuesday, this facility is now part of Medgar Evers College, a SUNY institution. Farther west, on the far border of Crown Heights, the former Bishop McDonnell Memorial High School for Girls, built slightly later in 1926, is a huge neo-classical building located only a few blocks away from the Brooklyn Museum.

Since 1974 it has been the St. Francis de Sales School of the Deaf, serving children 5-15.

Other Catholic institutions include the St. Joseph’s Home for the Deaf (1850), Buffalo and Bergen, the Monastery for Carmelite Nuns (cloistered) built in 1907 at Bedford and Lincoln, the St. Joseph Orphanage, at Willoughby and Lewis, as well as the St. Joseph’s Home for Females at Willoughby and Sumner, in Bedford Stuyvesant.

Catholic Hospitals flourished as well; St. John’s Hospital at Albany and Atlantic, St. Mary’s Female Hospital also on Buffalo and Bergen (1882), and the House of the Good Shepherd (1868).

Other Christian denominations were also active in charity work. The Episcopalians ran the House of St. Giles the Cripple( 1891), an orthopedic hospital treating polio, located at President St and Brooklyn Avenue in Crown Heights South.

The building survives today as the St. Mark’s Day School, a private elementary school associated with nearby St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. The Lutherans ran, oddly enough, the Baptist Home for Old Ladies, a large institution that was on Throop and Greene Avenues.

I remember it well upon arriving in Bed Stuy, and was quite disappointed when it was torn down in the ’80’s for a newer facility. The Methodist Episcopal Church built their Home for the Aged in 1889, on a half block lot at Park Place, Sterling, and New York Avenue.

The original structure, designed by Mercein Thomas, is now in the center of the complex, and stands as the only remaining mega charity building in the area. When it first opened, it housed 60 men, who had to be over 65, Methodists in good standing for at least 10 years, and the rules stipulated that any property the clients owned had to be signed over to the home.

Over the years more wings and a chapel were added.The Methodist Home is now the Hebron French Speaking Seventh Day Adventist School, which uses only a small portion of the enormous complex. The Home is one of the most memorable buildings in Crown Heights North, and is calendared for landmarking in Phase II of the CHN Historic District.

Jewish groups also had charitable institutions in central Brooklyn. There was a large and successful German Jewish population in the area, and many fine institutions were established, including the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital complex, on Classon Ave and Prospect Place (1902), the largest hospital complex in the area.

Brooklyn Jewish went bankrupt in the 1970’s and merged with the old St John’s Hospital of Bed Stuy, to form Interfaith Hospital, now located, with new buildings, at the old St. John’s location on Atlantic Avenue. The oldest and most beautiful of the Jewish Hospital buildings are now apartment buildings.

Perhaps because religious groups were able to repurpose these buildings when their original uses were over, we have many more surviving buildings in this group, as opposed to those of private charities.

St John’s Home for Boys, and St Joseph’s Home for the Deaf were both torn down for public housing. But the Carmelite Monastery and the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital were repurposed as housing.

The Bishop McDonnell School for Girls, St. Giles the Cripple Hospital and the Methodist Episcopal Home for the Aged now all are educational intistitutions, all serving new communities.

All of these organizations and their buildings helped shape the communities they were in, and were tangible examples of charity and social conscience. Today, they still serve their communities as they move forward into a better future. Please see my Flickr page for more historic and contemporary photos.

Again, thanks to Wilhelmina Rhodes Kelly for the research gathered in Bedford Stuyvesant and Crown Heights and Weeksville, both part of the Images of America series of books.