A huge new home for 19th century orphans in the countryside of today’s Riverside Drive
It was 23 years after the end of the Revolutionary War. Before the launch of the Children’s Aid Society, before New York’s Gilded Age benevolent groups focused on the plight of vulnerable kids, before city welfare organizations, there was the New York Orphan Asylum Society.
Founded in 1806 by elite female citizens like Elizabeth Hamilton (below image), the recent widow of Alexander, and Isabella Graham (also a widow and founder of a number of charitable organizations), the Society sought to protect orphans from ending up in the public almshouse.
At the time, an orphan was a child who lost both parents—or who had one living parent unable to care for them. (Often, these kids were called “half-orphans.”) Adding to the city’s orphan population were immigrant children whose parents died on their journey to America.
Exactly how many orphans existed in New York at the dawn of the 19th century isn’t clear; the city population hovered under 100,000. But after the Civil War, with population at roughly one million, their numbers were estimated to be in the tens of thousands.
Whatever the number was, Hamilton, Graham (below image), and the rest of the women in the Society were deeply moved by their plight. That year, the organization rented a small house on West Fourth Street (after which became known as Asylum Street) in Greenwich Village. There, 16 orphans lived with and were looked after by an older couple, according to Village Preservation.
By 1807, the Society needed more space. “The second home of the Asylum was a 50 feet square brick building capable of housing 200 orphans” on land just north of the first building, states Village Preservation. Unlike the first orphan home, which was funded with private donations, the second one relied on a combination of private money, city and state funds, and bank loans.
“Although Greenwich Village was a good choice for the [Asylum’s] launch, environmental and health pressures soon forced yet another move,” stated Village Preservation. By 1839, the society relocated to a large facility in the Bloomingdale section of Manhattan at today’s 73rd Street, per Pam Tice in a piece in Bloomingdalehistory.com.
Why so far out of the city, which was about five miles south? Bloomingdale was a relatively remote area of small farms and a smattering of wealthy estate houses. Land was more abundant and less expensive than it was downtown.
The New York Orphan Asylum wasn’t the only facility that decided to make Bloomingdale home. Other orphanages included the Leake and Watts Orphan House (now the site of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine) and the Children’s Fold (100th Street and the Boulevard, aka Broadway), per Tice. These institutional settings were preceded by the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, where Columbia University stands today.
Spanning 73rd to 74th Streets, the new Asylum continued to serve the city’s orphans. A school was established, as was an infant nursery. According to the Society’s annual report from 1876, a total of 188 boys and girls were residents, down from 217 the year before. A $37K budget paid for clothing, bedding, fuel, laundry, furniture, books, medical needs, as well as the salaries of employees, including teachers and “matrons” who kept an eye on the children.
“From most of those who have left us to occupy various situations in life, letters are constantly received by those ladies who became their correspondents, telling of happy homes, good kind friends, and some speaking of growth in Christian grace and knowledge,” noted the Society’s secretary, M.L.R. Satterlee.
By the end of the 19th century, the Asylum’s future in Bloomingdale wasn’t looking bright. What was now known as the “West End” of Manhattan was undergoing rapid development into a high-class residential area of Beaux-Arts row houses and stand-alone mansions.
In 1900, the Asylum moved once again, this time to Westchester. In the coming decades, the New York Orphan Asylum Society became Graham Windham, a New York–based organization that helps children and families in crisis and still exists today.
And what about the facility and the land it sat on, which now had a Riverside Drive address? The Society sold them to Charles M. Schwab, a steel magnate. Schwab promptly tore down the orphanage and built himself an 86-room French chateau-style mansion.
Completed in 1906, Schwab’s mansion was one of the largest private homes ever built in New York City—a totem of Gilded Age excess lasting until the 1940s.
Find out more about the Schwab Mansion and the other palatial homes and townhouses of Gilded Age Riverside Drive by joining Ephemeral New York on a walking tour December 16! Click this link for more info.
[Top image: New-York Historical Society; second image: Wikipedia; third image: NYPL Digital Collection; fourth image: Wikipedia; fifth image: NYPL Digital Collection; sixth image: MCNY 93.1.1.241; seventh image: MCNY 93.1.1.244; eighth image: NYPL Digital Collection]
