Book manuscript- (c) 2009 by William Sims Bainbridge

Lydia's reports to Lucy painted an unflattering picture of Catholicism. In one of her reports, she wrote: “Am I in a Christian or a heathen country? This question I asked myself as I stood in the Italian Roman Catholic Church, which is in a basement on Baxter Street. The day was Good Friday; all the images in the church were covered with black cloth; the altar was also draped in black, and at the foot of the same an image of the Savior lying as dead, with different colored lights burning before it. On the step that leads to the altar was spread an old shawl, and on it lay a cross, about two feet in length, with an image of Jesus nailed to it. It was a very pathetic sight to see boys and girls, men and women, all kneeling around that cross and eagerly waiting for their turn to kiss the hands, the feet and the pierced side of the image... Will you still say that we need not be anxious about the Italians because they are Roman Catholics? They do believe in God, but they are idolatrous, and are as ignorant of the doctrine of worshipping God in spirit and in truth as any heathen.”⁵⁰⁶

In Lucy’s first years at the Mission Society, its men were seized by the craze of converting the Jews. For a time they enlisted a charismatic fellow from Warsaw, named Warszawiak, to preach in the Jewish immigrants’ own language and run a Home for Persecuted Christian Jews and Enquirers. Born in 1865, the son of a wealthy merchant and grandson of a rabbi, Hermann Warszawiak read the Talmud as a boy, but his father urged him to study Leviticus deeply, and this led to an intense debate between them over sacrifice and forgiveness of sin. Sent to his rabbi uncle for more advanced instruction, Warszawiak descended into a guilt-ridden struggle to find atonement, racked by the conviction he was a lost sinner. He married into a rich family but was extremely erratic in behavior, leaving his wife and children, becoming fascinated by a Hebrew edition of the New Testament, wandering into the clutches of a Scottish missionary movement, contemplating suicide while crossing the Atlantic, and winding up on the Mission Society's doorstep.⁵⁰⁷

Every Saturday, Warszawiak addressed large groups of Jewish men in the Society’s DeWitt Memorial Church, displaying considerable powers of oratory.⁵⁰⁸ On Wednesdays, Warszawiak held a discussion meeting for Jews, after prayers shared with Reverend Leonhard’s German congregation. Members of the audience would write challenging questions on numbered cards, and Warszawiak would answer them. Why do Christians not keep the commandments of Moses? How could Jesus be the Messiah when the prophesies said that war would cease upon the Messiah’s appearance? How could God have a son? Why does Jesus crucified on the cross call out to God, instead of calling for his Father; indeed, if Jesus is God, why does he call out at all? This might lead to a discussion of the Trinity, about which Warszawiak had written a pamphlet. The Christian desire to covert Jews was so strong that Warszawiak could give his listeners a free Hebrew edition of the New Testament, from the supply of twenty-thousand copies the Christians had provided him, and he distributed a badge showing a star of David embracing a cross.⁵⁰⁹ Donations allowed Warszawiak to establish his headquarters in a four-story building at 65 Avenue D, filling its four apartments and nine beds with followers. Still as erratic as ever, he left the society, battled with his family, returned, then finally vanished for good.⁵¹⁰ Years later, Kenneth D. Miller, president of the Mission Society from 1939 to 1952, called Warszawiak’s mission to the Jews “neither wise nor effective.”⁵¹¹

Lucy’s chief activity for Jews was a sewing school for Jewish girls. The regular sewing school was held on Saturday, but to avoid the Jewish sabbath Lucy established another on Wednesdays, enrolling a total of ninety-eight children “thus opening up to us for missionary visitation, 74 Hebrew families.”⁵¹² The only religious aspect was recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. The training began with stitching simple straight lines, progressing through overhanding, darning, patching, button-holes, hemstitching, and making clothing for dolls. Graduates could immediately get jobs with dressmakers. Lucy commented, “The Jewish girls acquired the stitches more rapidly than our Gentile children. The characteristics of the race, ambition to excel, and perseverance in what they undertake, came out prominently and their patience in mastering difficult work was surprising.”⁵¹³ When the Woman’s Branch received a little money for Jewish work, Lucy used it not to badger the Jews with appeals for Christ but to pay the salary of one of her nurses, “a converted Jewess” who “understands their language and habits of these strangers in a strange land.”⁵¹⁴

Lucy's Missionaries and Nurses
Lucy gave her missionaries “a comfortable and healthful home within easy access of the tenement people,” but she did not encourage them to share the slum life experienced by the women they sought to save. In this the Woman’s Branch of the City Mission Society contrasted with the Salvation Army. “Our aims are the same and much of our service is alike; but there is a difference in plan... The women of the so-called ‘Slum Brigade’ endeavor to live just as do the poor people they are trying to help. They wear the badge of service; they eat and sleep and dress in the most economical way, without regard to comfort; they visit among the tenements of the very poor, and scrub and wash and cook and nurse the sick, and talk of the Master’s love which prompts this kind action.”

Woman’s Branch missionaries dressed more like other middle class women, and their aim was to elevate if possible the deserving poor out of their poverty. “Like their army sisters they wash the babies, prepare food for the sick, make up the bed, sweep and dust, read the Bible and pray; but it is our plan to try to teach the mother how to cook, and clean and sew, rather than do it for her. A missionary caring for a sick and miserable family will often help another poor woman, who is in distress for food and rent, by hiring her to wash and patch for the sick mother.”⁵¹⁵

Almost subconsciously, Lucy’s middle-class missionaries focused on women who had the potential to join the middle class. “They may be poor, but there are real ladies and real gentlemen tucked away in cheap tenements. They respect and enjoy refinement and intelligence, and crave friendly recognition from those who have greater advantages. Many are bitter and tempted because of the chasm which poverty and hard toil has made between them and those with whom they feel fitted to associate. Such people need the ministry of our workers, who represent to them the better social life they crave. As the dress of the city missionary is not peculiar, from time to time the lady of wealth, who longs to give personal service, is enabled to go with the missionary in and out of the crowded tenement houses and see and do for the poor most wisely.”⁵¹⁶

Some impression of the nurses’ work can be gained from the contents of a typical nurse’s bag, inventoried by Lucy: “Tincture of iron, vaseline, glycerine, ointments, absorbent cotton, old linen, safety pins, Castile soap, cuticura soap, borax, olive oil, cheese cloth for poultices, flannel bandages, cotton bandages, liquorice powder, boracic acid, witch hazel, mustard leaves, clinical thermometer, small toys to amuse small children and rest tired mothers, and sometimes sheets, nightgown, and suit of baby garments.” Other articles a nurse might use every week included: “Flax-seed, alcohol, morphine pills, bovinine, mustard plaster, Imperial Granum, quinine pills, ointments, emulsion of codliver oil, turpentine, syrup hypo-phosphates, lime water, capsicum plasters, blisters, worm lozenges, gelatine, oiled silk, brushes, tincture iodine, clinical thermometer Yale, syringe glass, vaccine points, line, boracic acid, Leibig’s Extract Beef.”⁵¹⁷ The list of cures did not match the list of diseases: “abscess, accident, cancer, diphtheria, pneumonia, bronchitis, consumption, heart disease, confinement, scarlet fever, typhoid fever, rheumatism, measles, paralysis, sore eyes, peritonitis, asthma, ophthalmia, alcoholism, gastritis, la grippe, marasmus, erysipelas, cerebral meningitis, pleurisy, whooping cough, mumps, cholera infantum, Bright’s disease, and croup.”⁵¹⁸

People in Need
In a drunken rage, a man nearly killed his wife. Sent for six months to Blackwell’s Island Work House, he vowed to kill her the instant he got out. The solution was to send her far away, and place her children in an institution.⁵¹⁹ Lucy's missionaries dealt with many unique practical problems. One man had been trained to make long boots, but they had gone out of style, and he was seeking a position as a night watchman.⁵²⁰ Another fellow had lost his left eye to an accident, and no employer would accept this ugly deformity, unless money could be raised to buy him a glass eye.⁵²¹

Impoverished elderly persons, beyond the capacity to work and lacking families to support them, were called “aged pilgrims,” because their last days was a saintly preparation to meet their maker. Lucy called Mrs. Marion McDermott “an attic saint.” She was the daughter of Dr. Lansingburg, who practiced medicine in New York around 1820, but her father was killed by an accident, and her mother expired from the shock. At eighteen, Marion married a Methodist lay preacher and settled in Westchester County, where they produced four children. Shortly, her husband died, followed by two daughters who were carried off within a week of each other, and then one of her two sons died. The remaining son heeded the call of the Civil War but never returned.

When found by one of Lucy’s missionaries, Mrs. McDermott “was literally worn out,” having sewed for the House of Industry for sixteen years and then struggled to survive for nine years in a dark little attic space atop a tenement building. Ladies of the University Place Church collected money for her rent, and the old women proudly said, “Not a cent do I owe; I am no beggar and only want to work again.” But her poor health would not permit labor.

Lucy commented, “We could not suggest the alms-house to this real gentlewoman, this saint who believed that the righteous shall not be forsaken. As she grew better, ineffectual attempts were made to have her comfortably settled, when severe sickness again took hold of her. For four months the Presbyterian Hospital gave to our attic saint the best of medical skill and nursing. In her pain and weakness, with almost sightless eyes, she imagined that the very gateway of Heaven had at last been reached. Surely such cleanliness and comfort and kindness were not earthly, and the nurses in their snowy caps seemed to have angels’ wings.”⁵²² A photograph shows Mrs. McDermott bundled in a blanket, sitting on a chair near a plain tenement window, her hands in her lap and her eyelids closed. “There she sits waiting, only waiting, patiently, trustingly waiting.”

One of Lucy’s missionaries found a deathly ill woman abandoned by her husband. “It was a pitiful scene! A mother in a delirium of fever, raving against her own dear little ones, the oldest not yet six years of age, who were cowering in a corner, too frightened by mother’s strange threats to stir or scream. The lifeless form of the four-days’-old infant was beside the insane mother, who had rolled upon it in her agony. During the days which followed, and until after the death and funeral of this mother, and the return of the dissipated father, what to do with the babies was the question.”⁵²³

To answer this question, Lucy rented rooms on Elm Street, created a warm and comfortable place for infants in family emergencies, and called it the Baby Fold. In the autumn of 1893 it filled an entire floor at 179 Forsyth Street, and “several beautiful cribs have been given as memorial offerings” for infants who had owned these beds but perished.⁵²⁴ A photograph provides a glimpse of the Baby Fold: a large, clean room with a heating stove on the right and a row of fine cribs on the left. Light comes from a chandelier and two large curtained windows in which are hung growing plants. Cheerful pictures on the wall and two rocking horses mark this as a happy refuge for small children. The matron and a visiting nurse hold babies, one the motherless boy of a street car conductor, the other the child of an insane woman. Two older children sit on small chairs at a small table, the matron’s boy and a girl whose mother works at a restaurant until nearly midnight.

In one crib rests a tiny Italian boy whose insane mother was placed in the institution on Blackwell’s Island; hope she might improve was sustained for several months, but a few days before the picture was taken, she died. The mother of an infant named Julia was deserted by her husband, has two other children, and has taken a position as a wet nurse, providing the milk of her own breast to a wealthier child. Seven-month old Louise must also share her wet-nurse mother’s milk, one of six children of a woman deserted to starve before the missionaries found her. George, three months old, has no mother, while Ethel’s mother is looking for work. Joe and Frankie, brothers aged one month and thirteen months, wait for their mother to return from the hospital, where she must undergo a serious operation. Edith’s widowed mother works, as does Robbie’s mother who must labor while her husband drinks.⁵²⁵

The Mission Society was not legally authorized to go beyond part-time day care for children, and Lucy was frustrated in her attempt to change the charter. Some people felt that other institutions could handle orphans and foundlings, including the dreaded institutions on “The Island.” Begging her friends to give the Baby Fold a chance, Lucy stressed the needs of emergency cases.

“For example, a woman with a babe and two run abouts, whose husband is sent to Sing Sing, must face the problem of support. A firm where she worked before marriage will again employ her, the two little ones can be placed at the ‘Home for the Friendless,’ but the baby is too young for any institution. Where can she put it, even temporarily, so as not to lose this position? At the Roman Catholic Foundling Asylum, which certainly is a beneficent society? No, for that means abandonment, and soon she will want her home built up again. ‘Ask the Superintendent of Public Charity to send it to the Island,’ says some one. But look at the appalling figures. Out of 167 babies on the Island last year 159 died.”⁵²⁶ Opening and closing at intervals, moving from place to place, the Baby Fold was always an anomalous extension of the Society's three regular day nurseries, and Lucy eventually had to abandon the project.
A Rare Convert
On Thanksgiving, 1892, Lucy was busy with the holiday work of the mission, when she noticed that a fellow named Dave Ranney, who had been hired to deliver dinners to poor families, was working without an overcoat. Lucy had collected the money for these meals herself, telling donors that a dollar would provide Thanksgiving dinner for a family of four: “Fowl or meat, a few vegetables, loaf of bread, little coffee and sugar, and for dessert a baker’s mince pie.”⁵²⁷ Ranney was a drunkard, deadbeat and offtimes thief who had been recruited just two months before by Lucy’s colleague Alexander Irvine, lodging-house missionary to the Bowery.

Something of Irvine’s character could be seen in two photographs that hung in his office at the Broome Street Tabernacle, one showing a healthy two-year old boy, sitting in a large arm chair, wearing his first pair of trousers. Irvine called it “as pretty a picture of childhood as heart could desire.” The second picture showed “a wretched tramp covered with dirt and filthy rags. The bloated face and unkempt hair betoken a life of sin and debauchery. It is revolting to look into that pinched face, every lineament of which is traced with misery.”⁵²⁸ The two portraits depicted the same person, thirty-seven painful years apart. Irvine took the second picture himself, converted the man to Christianity, and watched him die a week later. The first picture was a gift from the man’s family when they came to claim his body. Irvine would take any risk to save a man, however often the salvation failed or ended in death, and Ranney had nearly robbed him when first the two men met.

Lucy knew Ranney by sight, and asked him where his overcoat was. He replied that he had no overcoat.⁵²⁹ Lucy exclaimed, “That’s too bad! Come with me and we will see if there’s one in the Dorcas Room.” Each shelf of this storage space was full of donated clothing of one category or another.⁵³⁰ They found several overcoats, any of which would have suited Ranney. But Lucy was not satisfied. “David, come into the office,” she said. Quickly she wrote a note to Rogers, Peet and Company, and she told him to deliver it and wait for an answer.

The store clerk read the letter from Lucy, eyed Ranney suspiciously, then began trying overcoats on him. When one fit, the clerk said, “You might as well wear it home.”

Ranney protested, “Not on your natural!” It had not yet dawned on him that the coat was really to be his, for it must have cost nearly fifty dollars, at a time when he was earning twelve dollars a month. “Put it in paper or a box.”

Only later did he discover that Lucy’s note had read, “Give this man about the best overcoat you have in the store.” Ranney returned to Lucy, and she told him, “David, that coat is for you, but listen, David; that coat is mine. Now I wouldn’t go into a saloon, and I want you to promise me that you will never enter a saloon while you wear it.”

Promises are cheap, and Ranney had broken more in his life that he could count. But he could keep the promise never to enter a saloon while wearing the coat, and the tug of that coat would prevent him from entering a saloon too easily. A cold winter was ahead, and if he passed a saloon and decided to enter, by his promise to Lucy he would have to take the coat home, then return into the cold without it. He respected Lucy greatly, and once said, “God bless her, for she is one good woman!”

Five years after receiving the overcoat from Lucy, Dave sent it to his wife’s father in Ireland. He had reconciled with the wife he abandoned years before, succeeded in holding an ever more challenging series of jobs for the Mission Society, and never touched liquor again. By the time he published his autobiography in 1910, he had become a major force helping other men of the Bowery who had fallen into the dissolution that earlier had gripped him.

A Temporary Daughter
One day a railway agent sent a woman and a little girl named Dora to Lucy’s office, saying that the woman had begged for a reduced ticket for the waif.⁵³¹ “The Woman and the girl were so nearly alike that it was almost amusing, the one was such a miniature copy of the other, — the same dark eyes, the same shaped nose and mouth, and even their voices had the same tone and accent.”

Lucy asked the woman if Dora belonged to her. “‘No,’ she replied, shifting her eyes from one to another, ‘no, she is no relation to me; I picked her up on a train as I was coming from the West, she was travelling alone, and I felt sorry for her, — I went to the railroad company to get a ticket for her, so I could take her back, to where she says she comes from; I feel very sorry for her.’ During this explanation the child’s eyes became wet and her face flushed, as she clenched her little hands together, but said nothing. ‘Do you think you could have forgotten? Are you sure that this is not your little child?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ replied the woman, bracing up to the lie she had told, ‘I never saw her before until on the train nearly to New York; if I had the money I would buy her a ticket myself, but I haven’t enough.’”

Lucy spoke to Dora kindly, and the sobbing child briefly rested her head against Lucy’s shoulder. After a fruitless attempt to coax the woman into admitting she was the mother, Lucy thanked the woman for bringing Dora and made arrangements with the Home for Homeless Girls. Two days later the woman returned, weeping. “Oh, I lied, I have lied; I have committed the unpardonable sin; I have disowned my own child; I’m going away where she can’t see me. I am a sinner; I have lied — lied; I know you will be good to her, and by and by I’ll send money and have her come to me.”

For a few weeks, the Home for Homeless Girls did all it could for Dora, but every night she would cry herself to sleep, saying, “Oh, my mother told a lie — that awful lie.” She grew sick and pale. Then a letter came from Dora’s mother in Cleveland, saying she had obtained a good job and was ready to take Dora back, if only the Mission Society would advance the price of a train ticket. Lucy contacted friends in Cleveland who reported that Dora’s mother was an earnest churchgoer and very active in a small local mission. Lucy found comfortable clothing for Dora in the Dorcas Room, and a friend who was travelling westward volunteered to deliver her to Cleveland. With great happiness, Dora told Lucy, “My mother does love me I know; she is sorry for that awful lie.”

Lucy took a small stamped envelope, addressed to herself, and sewed it into Dora’s pocket. “Dora, your mother does love you, and I hope you are going to have very good times with her, but if any kind of trouble comes, and you need a friend, send this little envelope back to me, and I will understand and try to help you.”

Two months later, the envelope arrived in Lucy’s mail, containing a note from a woman who lodged in the same house with Dora and her mother. “For God’s sake, lady, get this child away from here; she is getting killed.”

Lucy arranged for Dora to be brought back to New York, ostensibly to receive French Lessons. To Lucy, Dora looked “thin, haggard and sad.” She told a terrible story. “Her mother was a missionary worker believing the end of the world was close at hand. She wanted her child to follow in her footsteps, and be ready. She took her to meetings every night, and brought her home to her rooms, and then soaked the girl’s feet in cold water above the knees, so as to extract the evil from her nature. The mother fed her with ashes, for the purification of her soul, and when the child refused she would sharpen the great butcher knife she had, and draw the back of the knife across her neck, telling her that God had told her to punish her, and that she would put the sharp edge on if she said a word.”

Dora was sick with the early stages of whooping-cough, and the Home for Homeless Girls could not take her in. So Dora came to Lucy's apartment to live with Will and Helen, “and for over a year, was my own devoted, happy child.” Dora was frequently ill, and the whooping cough was followed by chronic appendicitis and measles. But eventually she grew healthy and began attending school.

An extensive search discovered a brother of Dora’s lost father, living far in the West, who was willing to welcome Dora into his own home. The daughter of a Mission Society supporter, about Dora’s size, had just died, so there was ample clothing for her trip. Living with her uncle, she learned to play the church organ and began a new life filled with promise. After all of Lucy’s care, Dora had become “a bright, cheery girl” and “an earnest Christian.”
Relocation
In March 1893, the Mission Society moved to new offices on the northeast corner of Fourth Avenue and Twenty-Second Street, which had been constructed over the previous year through a donation by John Stewart Kennedy. St. Paul’s Methodist Episcopal Church had occupied the site, and when Kennedy bought the building he donated the pipe organ to the Society’s Olivet Church. At completion, the United Charities Building was seven stories high, constructed mainly of brick, with dimensions of 60 feet by 150 feet. A booklet produced for the opening said, “It is absolutely fireproof. Nothing has been spared in initial cost to make it complete and substantial, and to minimize the future cost of manufacture and repairs.”⁵³²