Walkabout: Charity Starts at Home, Part 1
The measure of any society is in how it takes care of those not able to take care of themselves. In the Victorian Age, charity was a serious subject for the upper classes. It was thought the proper thing to do to help only those they considered the deserving poor. This was at a time…
The measure of any society is in how it takes care of those not able to take care of themselves. In the Victorian Age, charity was a serious subject for the upper classes.
It was thought the proper thing to do to help only those they considered the deserving poor. This was at a time when there was no government safety net of any kinds whatsoever.
Religious institutions also had a mandate to serve those in their communities who were poor, widowed, orphaned or sick.
There were many charitable institutions in all of Brooklyn’s communities, but central Brooklyn, then, as now, had the greatest number of charities and facilities, more than any other part of Brooklyn. Today, only a small number of these buildings remain, reminders of the social conscience of their times.
There were both secular and religious based institutions. The areas we now call Crown Heights and Bedford Stuyvesant had an abundance of both. Because they were mostly developed in the latter part of the 19th century, institutions, hospitals and homes ended up being congregated in the community because there was plenty of space for large buildings.
Today I’ll highlight some of the secular institutions; Thursday will be about the religious based institutions.
There were thousands of orphaned children roaming the streets of late 19th century New York. In central Brooklyn, they were housed in the Church Charity Foundation on Albany and Herkimer, the Orphan Asylum of the City of Brooklyn at Atlantic and Kingston,(1872) the Truant Home at Empire and Nostrand, in 1857, the Children’s Home, at Sterling and Brooklyn, as well as a Hebrew Orphanage at Ralph and Pacific, (1879), and the Howard Colored Orphanage at Dean and Troy. (1866) None of these buildings remain.
There were many hospitals and institutions treating all manner of diseases and maladies, many more than we have today.
The secular ones in Crown Heights alone, included the Swedish Hospital, at Bedford and Dean (1902), Brooklyn Women’s Hospital, Eastern Parkway, Lefferts General Hospital, at Brooklyn and ENY Ave, Carson Peck Memorial at Crown and Albany Ave, (1919), Unity Hospital on St. John’s Place, Thoracic Hospital at St. John’s and Kingston, the Home for Nervous Invalids, on St Marks Ave, Kings County Asylum for Chronic Insane and Alms House, and the Home for Habitues, which was on Brooklyn Ave near Park Place (1902) for those addicted to cocaine, chloral and opium.
In Bedford Stuyvesant, the Central Throat Hospital was on Broadway and Howard, and the Hospital for Consumptives was on Kingston and Butler. Both communities also had almost as many hospitals run by various religious groups, which I will list on Thursday. Believe it or not, today, Crown Heights does not have a single open hospital.
On the other side of the law, Crown Heights South was home to Brooklyn’s Penitentiary, once located near where Ebbetts Field rose later, and located in a two block plot at Nostrand, Rogers, President and Crown. Inmates were used as labor in the late 1800’s and were rented out from this location to dig ditches, pave roads, and build foundations.
The prison closed in 1907 and the inmates were transferred to Blackwell’s Island. The grounds were bought by the Jesuits for a college and church, which opened in 1908, and today, is the oldest part of Medgar Evers College, part of SUNY .
To close out, from orphanage to old age, the Zion Home for Colored Aged stood on St. John’s and Kingston Ave, The Home for Aged Men was in Bed Stuy at Classon Ave, The Hospital for Old People was on Chauncey St, also in Bed Stuy, while several religious run old age homes were in the Bed Stuy/Crown Heights area.
The Zion Home is still in use as a senior’s residence, with a modern extension attached, and is now called the Brooklyn Home for the Aged. This is one of the very few buildings to still stand.
The former site of the Thoracic Hospital is now an affordable housing complex, mainly for seniors, located in a large new development that was just finished a few months ago.
One of the Swedish Hospital buildings was replaced by the Chatelaine Hotel, which is now housing; another two buildings stand a few blocks away, one only a wall remaining, next to a former hospital building, now an abandoned church school.
The Orphan Asylum of Brooklyn’s lot is now a playground, and the Howard Colored Orphanage was torn down for a Transit System trolley lot, now a bus repair and parking lot. None of the other buildings mentioned remain, and their lots are all filled with newer buildings. See more on Flickr.
Next time: even more charities and institutions fill up central Brooklyn, these run by religious groups. Many thanks to Wilhelmena Kelly for her research on this subject, published in Bedford Stuyvesant, and Crown Heights and Weeksville for the “Images of America” series of books.
The modern day version of this seems to be the over-saturation of social service beds in these two communities. (Sigh)
(last section got cut off) continued…..
That a tiny fringe group of bohemians, as they used to be called, poses a threat to the nation’s value structure is preposterous. Actually, a paranoid might argue that the cultural left is subsidized by Opus Dei in order to galvanize the religious right.
The stew is garnished with what have become the cliches of cultural pessimism, like hand wringing over ”the loss of respect for authorities and institutions.” Himmelfarb does not ask whether the authorities and institutions in question (they are not specified) deserve respect. She wants a deferential society, in which the common people are cosseted by religious, moral and customary norms, but she does not consider whether such a society could rise to the challenges of modernity. She deplores our low birth rate, which she attributes to selfishness and hedonism, neglecting to consider the possibility that parents are investing more care and affection in each child than is possible in large families.
With anecdotes and statistics drawn from each of the domains that I have described, a superficial impression can easily be created of a nation on its moral uppers. But it would be more accurate to speak not of a cultural revolution but of a transformation in morals and manners resulting from diverse material factors that include changes in the nature of work, growing prosperity, advances in reproductive technology, increasing ethnic diversity and a communications revolution that has created a far better-informed population. The largest moral change that these developments have brought about is increased tolerance for people different from the norm, whether in race, religion, sex, sexual orientation or even physical and mental health (no more ”moron” jokes). This will strike most people, including, I assume, Himmelfarb, as moral progress. The nation’s more relaxed attitude toward sex — what Himmelfarb refers to disapprovingly as the ”Europeanization” of American sexual attitudes — seems on the whole a healthy development as well, though it has had some bad side effects. But, in any event, it poses no greater threat to the nation’s basic soundness than the sexual laxity (as it seems to many Americans) of countries like Denmark and Japan poses serious threats to those nations’ basic health. The idea that America’s success depends on its being more prudish than Europe (Himmelfarb proudly contrasts the ”relatively reserved . . . bohemianism” of Greenwich Village with Bloomsbury, which was ”flagrantly promiscuous”) is an old story, but Himmelfarb presents no evidence that it is a true one.
MM, can’t wait for Thursday’s article.
A review from the NYT by Richard Posner on her book “The Moral Minority”
Gertrude Himmelfarb is a well-known intellectual historian, but she is also, and in this book primarily, an influential social conservative. She argues that the counterculture of the 1960’s, with its unbridled sexuality, its flight from tradition and personal responsibility, its flouting of authority and its cultural relativism, has become the dominant culture of today, while the culture of the 1950’s — the culmination of an era, stretching back to the founding of the nation, when strong family values, a belief in absolute standards of truth and morality and respect for religion and authority were the cornerstones of the national culture — has become a dissident culture. We live, she thinks, in a period of moral decay, but there is growing resistance to the cultural revolution — resistance manifested in increased religiosity and in the recent improvement in social indicators like the number of abortions, births out of wedlock and crimes.
Most of ”One Nation, Two Cultures” is devoted to describing our current fallen moral state and contrasting it with our former Edenic state, and Himmelfarb, drawing on her experience as a historian, enriches her narrative with pungent quotations from the 18th century to the present. The book is moderate in tone, buttressed by statistics and a good read.
But it is not convincing. Its major shortcoming is its uncritical conflation of social phenomena that have different causes, are differently amenable to correction and differ in gravity; they are thrown together, and the resulting stew is labeled a morally sick society. First are social pathologies for which government is primarily responsible and that can be alleviated by governmental reform. These include a welfare system that encourages dependency and irresponsible reproduction and an excessive lenity toward criminals, which encourages crime. Both these pathologies have been addressed effectively in recent years — for which, needless to say, Himmelfarb gives President Clinton no credit.
Next are those pathologies that are the inevitable byproducts of modernity; and here we must, I think, take the bad (as social conservatives conceive it to be) with the good. The advent of safe and effective contraception and of household labor-saving devices, advances in reproductive technology, the reduction in infant mortality to near zero and the transformation of the economy into a service economy in which little work requires masculine strength — the interplay of these developments was bound to free (or, if you prefer, eject) women from their traditional role, and by doing so bring about a profound change in sexual behavior and family structure. Unless we want to go the way of Iran, we shall not be able to return to the era of premarital chastity, low divorce, stay-at-home moms, pornography-free media and the closeting of homosexuals and adulterers.
It is not even clear how much of the sexual activity that social conservatives like Himmelfarb deplore is actually pathological rather than merely offensive to people who hold conservative views of sex. What social purpose is served by keeping homosexuals out of sight? And in what sense is the divorce rate too high? As women become more independent, they demand more of marriage; they are less dependent on their husbands and so will not put up with as much. This has reduced the stability of marriage, but does not necessarily imply that the average happiness of married people is less than it was in the 1950’s. Divorce can harm children, but fewer married couples have children, or have many children; and as divorce has become more common, its stigma has declined and with it the harm to children.
Many people are offended by the flaunting of homosexuality, the easy availability of pornography, the proliferation of four-letter words in movies and the distribution of condoms by high schools — in short, by the decline of reticence about sexual matters. But does the decline matter from the larger social standpoint? Indeed, is it all bad? The distribution of condoms in schools may be a sensible policy, though Himmelfarb disagrees. She wants to make premarital sex dangerous in order to discourage it, and denial of condoms will do that, increasing both the pregnancy risk and the disease risk of sex. She also deplores the fact that ”public schools have displaced parents in instructing the young in sex education,” which has also made sex safer, since parents are notoriously bashful about instructing their children in ”the facts of life.” She is on to something: the more dangerous sex is, the less of it there will be. But, as she neglects to add, a higher fraction of the reduced number of sexual encounters will result in an unwanted pregnancy or the spreading of a sexually transmitted disease, so that the total number of such misfortunes may be higher. She does not explain why she thinks safe sex is more harmful than smoking, a vice that she does not want to repress. She may reply that nonmarital sex is always wrong even if it causes no temporal harm, but she does not attempt to justify such a position.
She reads the signs of moral decay in ”the degradation of popular culture,” as evidenced by ”vulgarity on TV,” by ”confessional memoirs” and by those television talk shows in which the ”participants proudly flaunt the most sordid details of their lives.” But these are matters of taste, rather than ”diseases, moral and cultural.” Popular culture has always offended the fastidious. That of the 1950’s was not as raunchy as today’s, but today’s popular culture does not ridicule obese people, ethnic minorities, stammerers and effeminate men, as the popular culture of the 1950’s did, so it may be doubted whether there has actually been a net decline in the moral tone of popular culture.
The final ingredient in Himmelfarb’s stew is the lunatic postmodernist left, represented here by a play in which Jesus Christ is a homosexual and has sexual relations with the apostles and by ”whiteness studies (which celebrate ‘white trash’ and expose the inherent racism in being white).” That a
wait, why aren’t there any religious institutions??
😉
Medgar Evers College is part of CUNY, not SUNY.
BklynGrn, there is so much research to do on so many topics, I’ll be here forever without repeating. That’s a good thing. I’m afraid I know little about the convent, except were it is, and I was concentrating on Bed Stuy/Crown Hts. Also religious institutions are Thursday!
Mont’Rose,
You know I love your research and generosity furnishing us weekly with such wonderful, readable histories!
And I guess this piece focuses on central Brooklyn.
But I would have loved a nod to the Convent of Mercy which was both an orphanage and a school. The original convent has been the subject of discussion on Brownstoner. The order also built another orphanage in “upper” Bay Ridge much later. Both locations still have charities, social services and house those less fortunate.
BrooklynGreene
Mont’Rose,
You know I love your research and generosity furnishing us weekly with such wonderful, readable histories!
And I guess this piece focuses on central Brooklyn.
But I would have loved a nod to the Convent of Mercy which was both an orphanage and a school. The original convent has been the subject of discussion on Brownstoner. The order also built another orphanage in “upper” Bay Ridge much later. Both locations still have charities, social services and house those less fortunate.
BrooklynGreene
Benson, if someone says its sprinkling out, you accuse them of saying it’s a hurricane, and then proceed as if your accusation is truth. There is no “gotcha” here. Your quote from my previous post does not question her research or her data, it merely says that her conclusions may be colored by her ideology. I neither accepted nor rejected those comclusions. Her marital status in regards to her independent ability to think is irrelevent. Perhaps YOU are implying that if her husband was not around to influence her, her thought processes would be different? That is not what you thought at all, but that conclusion is about as out there as your accusations. I’m done.