By: Lissa G.
Life in the city, especially New York City, back in the late 1800's and early 1900's was extremely over-crowded. Immigrants were coming into the city everyday from overseas. To manage the over crowding, the city came up with buildings called tenements.
"Structurally, New York City tenements were generally of two types: smaller houses of three or four floors that may have originally been one family and were converted into three or four family dwellings-larger buildings constructed as tenements that were typically five or six floors with four families to a floor"(Maggies Blanck, N.D.).
Sometimes there were ten to twelve people living in a 10x10 room. The adults took to drinking after their long shifts at the factories. The kids, dubbed "street rats", took to the streets to beg and steal for food. "In such rookeries where dozens of families live in the same nest and each one is in the other one's way, there is a continual round of evil communication, foul talk, thieving, brawls, fights and often murders... the children frequent the alley's and the gutters rather than the schools"(New York City Tenement Dwellers, early 1900's).
These children took to the streets to barter and try to work for pennies. They sometimes formed gangs that would fight and steal. "Sometimes they seemed to me, like what the police call them, "street rats", who gnawed the foundations of society, and scampered away when light was brought near them... to sleep in boxes, or under stairways, or in hay-barges on the coldest winter nights, for a mere child was hard enough; but often to have no food, to be kicked and cuffed by the older ruffians and shoved about by the police..."(Loring-Brace, 1880).
Thankfully, there were people who cared and one of those was Charles Loring Brace. He started the Childrens Aid Society in New York City in 1853. This well-known reformer sent kids out to farms to learn how to be productive and to grow up in a living, nurturing environment, instead of shoving them into an assylum or an orphanage.
My great grandfather, Adolf Mahler, was one of those children in 1901. He had come over from Austria and became homeless. He was 14 years old at the time and got help from the Children's Aid Society and was sent to a farm in upstate New York. As a Jewish teenager, that grew up very wealthy, this was probably a huge culture shock. He eventually converted to Christianity and became a Pastor. He also met my great grandmother, Mabel on that farm!! I'm so thankful to Charles Loring Brace for being a loving man who made a difference in the lives of those so called "Street Rats."
http://www.maggieblanck.com/NewYork/Life.html
http://www.oldandsold.com/articles05/New-York-City-14.shtml
http://www.1776mag.com/20-hitoric-photos-of-New-York-City/
Charles Loring Brace,(1880).The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years' Work Among Them. New York: Wynkoop&Hallenbaeck.
(Please insert pictures here) or up at the top.
