Book manuscript- (c) 2009 by William Sims Bainbridge

A technological wonder of the age, Thirty-Four possessed three hydraulic elevators. A steam engine pumped water to a tank on the roof. When someone tugged on a cable running down through the elevator, a valve sent water down through a pipe to turn a cylinder and hoist the cab by a rope. Pulling the cable the other way drained the water into a second tank in the basement and lowered the cab. In addition to the passenger elevator, there were two freight elevators, one of which opened into the kitchen at the back of the apartment.

Emma Thursby, the coloratura soprano, was among the more famous of the other residents, and her Friday classes, called “Thursby Fridays,” drew Enrico Caruso and a chorus of other great singers. Other inhabitants included a banker, an editor, two architects, two importers, four lawyers, four publishers, and a brigade of cooks and servants.⁶⁰²

Gramercy Park was an island of quiet in the midst of the noisy city. Just a block east, the elevated steam trains of the Third Avenue “El” clattered their way between Grand Central Station and South Ferry. A contraction of “grand mercy,” the interjection “Gramercy!” spices the dialogue in Sir Walter Scott’s novel, Ivanhoe, and the archaic word expressed gratitude or astonishment.⁶⁰³ The park itself was private, belonging to the homes, and each owner possessed a key to the gates in the great iron fence that surrounded the greenery.
The Turn of the Century
For eight years, Lucy had served as superintendent of the Woman’s Branch, and in the summers it had become her custom to vacation near at hand, where a wire could quickly recall her to deal with emergencies. Even in Chautauqua she was only a day’s train ride from her duties. But in 1899, with the approval of the ladies of her executive committee, she resolved to travel abroad, for the first time in twenty years. A visit to England would serve both as a holiday and as a fact-finding mission, “gaining glimpses of life and methods of work among the London poor.”⁶⁰⁴

On a typical Sunday in London, the cabby drove her to Whitechapel. “The children’s service was early in the mission off Field Lane, and yet the men and women from the lodging-houses, near by, were already sitting on door steps and the pavement of the alley ways, dirty, ragged and hungry, waiting for their own meeting at noon, where they would all get something to eat.”⁶⁰⁵ A little boy on his way to the Children’s Hour greeted Lucy: “Please lady you are ’Merican, my uncle is in your country, do you think you could help my mother find him? He don’t write no more.” In a rush to visit many places, Lucy left the children singing, “Jesus Loves Me.”

A dash down Mile End Road brought her to the Great Assembly Hall, where she heard plain people in plain clothing signing heartily. Lucy’s cabby returned her to the Field Lane mission, and the boy whose uncle was lost in ’Merica showed her up the back stairs to the platform where a seat had been reserved for her. “On this height I could overlook the strange audience. Old men and young men, men who looked as though a good decent thought had not had lodgment in the heart since boyhood, others there were who might have been poets or preachers, the wrecks of English gentlemen. Six hundred men, and nearly half as many women, some of them with little babies in their arms, homeless, hopeless, hungry, and largely because of drink. At the close of the service, with its sermon and singing, each one received a huge cup of hot cocoa and chunk of bread.”

Lucy returned to her hotel for lunch, stopping briefly at a meeting for servant girls at the WYCA, then went off to visit a Sunday school. She preferred to travel London by hansom cab, because the driver could be counted on to know the route, but for economy’s sake she sometimes braved the bus. “It is a question of being smothered inside, for the English omnibus windows are made so that they can never be opened, hence I was forced to climb. Grasping the rail on each side of the narrow winding stairs, I would step on my dress in front, often lose hold of my umbrella as the great vehicle would start on over the pavements regardless of my being twixt sky and earth. But somehow the top was reached, and I would land with a roll into a seat, and then the good view and the fresh air would reward my efforts, though the fear of coming down clouded all the pleasure.”

Other days, she attended services at Christ Church and visited lodging houses, missions, schools, model dwellings, flower shows for the poor, meetings of nurses and Bible women, and Dr. Bernardo’s village home for girls. Because one of her favorite projects was the Training School run by the Mission Society, Lucy investigated missionary training schools in London. A leader of the London YWCA admired America’s schools for Christian workers, saying, “Our cultured young ladies rarely seek such training as we can give. We envy you the self-reliant, educated young women who are being trained in America for responsible positions in Christian service.”⁶⁰⁶

Back in New York, one of the brand-new students, Anna C. Fuetterer, would never forget her first sight of Lucy. “It was at 128 East Tenth Street where the Student Class then had its headquarters. I happened to be at the door. There she stood, tall, erect, her reddish blond wavy hair showing quite a bit. Her bright eyes beamed on us with motherly benevolence and her “How do you do, girls?” was so cordial that we just loved her at once. It did not take her long to know us, size us up a bit, and we thought she was just wonderful. That wonderful smile was always on her face when we saw her, that beaming countenance would for but short moments grow serious, and was serious only when she heard from our lips the stories of suffering we told her. She never gave up, and she was a great and wonderful inspiration to all who knew her. The most beautiful thing about her was her sweet spirit, if she made a mistake, which even the greatest on earth are apt to do, she was willing to say ‘I am sorry,’ even to the most humble and insignificant person.”⁶⁰⁷

Lucy personally kept the accounts for the Woman’s Branch, writing the payments and contributions in her large, clear hand. In 1899, a total of fifty-one women were employed, almost all full-time and all but fourteen for the entire year. The office secretary, Miss H. L. Carver, was paid $730, or about sixty-one dollars per month. Mrs. von Morstein, the most senior of the workers who had joined the Mission Society way back in 1870, earned $600. Only five other women earned more than $400, and Ida Brandt earned just $382.25. Eighteen of the full-year workers earned less than $300. But Lucy’s salary for the year was fully $2,000. The only greater expense of the Woman’s Branch was carfare, the cost of getting half a hundred women to the people they served, which totalled $2,025.00. The monthly magazine cost only $290.50 to print and distribute, while office expenses were no more than $180.31. Thus, through her salary, the Mission Society recognized Lucy’s great value.⁶⁰⁸

In fact, Lucy did not take two thousand dollars away from the Mission Society in 1899, because she donated her entire salary back, in forty-six separate donations throughout the year to seven different accounts. She gave $600 to the Christmas Fund, $700 to the Thanksgiving Fund, $465 to the Aged Pilgrims Fund, $125 to the Fresh Air Fund, $1152.11 to the Relief Fund, $615 to the Easter Fund , and $175.83 to the Baby Fold Fund, a total of $3,832.94, nearly twice her salary.⁶⁰⁹ These donations did not appear in the annual reports or monthly magazine.

On June 4, 1900, Frederick B. Swart came to Gramercy to count the residents for the decennial United States census. On his huge enumeration form, he wrote that Helen was a twenty-seven-year-old unmarried schoolteacher, and that her mother, Lucy, was head of the household. He found Will in his office on the ground floor, and recorded that he was a thirty year old unmarried physician from Rhode Island with parents born in New York and Ohio. Across the river in Brooklyn, eight days later, census taker R. J. Wardell found William Folwell Bainbridge at the Firman rooming house at 163 Joralemon Street, within a few doors of where Eliza Mosher had lived. Wardell wrote down that William was unmarried. Strangely, Wardell counted William twice, on line twenty-one as well as line seventeen of his form, perhaps because William was a man who wished to be remembered.⁶¹⁰
Helen's Work
Lucy’s adopted daughter showed promise of following in her footsteps. Vivacious and compassionate, Helen worked well with children and explored a career in teaching or social work. Back in the summer of 1896, she had organized The Junior Outlook at Chautauqua, a club for fifty girls, teaching them the rudiments of house work in a “kitchen garden” each afternoon for an hour in Kellogg Hall. At other times, the girls read books, did physical exercises, swam, and rowed boats. The older girls took an overnight cruise in the good ship Dolphin.⁶¹¹

Helen’s assisted her mother at the training school for Christian workers by teaching cooking courses.⁶¹² Lucy observed that “souls reside in bodies, and that the stomach is the engine power of that body.”⁶¹³ Many of the immigrant women simply did not know how to run a household effectively and provide for the health of their family. A few hints from a missionary could do wonders for the life of the home. “Ignorance of how to use the scanty wages, when earned, sends the hungry man to the saloon, leads the growing lad to steal, makes the working girl an easier prey to sin, and curses the family life with cross words and bad tempers.”

By training the missionaries, Helen was effectively improving the lives of the families they would visit, and Lucy thought the effort was very worthwhile. “During the winter in many homes the daughter who had known nothing of cooking before, had learned even from our little effort how to make several soups and stews, to bake fish and make fish cakes, to use eggs, and make bread, and biscuit, and rice pudding, and cookies, and molasses cake. Some ways of preparing vegetables were entirely new to most of the girls. The brother of one girl had somewhere eaten creamed potatoes, and had talked at home of how good they were, but how they were prepared was a mystery. The sister learned to make creamed potatoes and the brother has since held his sister in higher estimation.”⁶¹⁴

“Some of our poorest women had never heard of soup stock to keep and use from day to day. When asked what they did with the bits of bone etc., left over, they said they threw them away. These women now have learned the possibilities of the soup kettle. One of the very best of our mothers has, since the lessons, made tomato soup once every week to the delight of her family.”⁶¹⁵

Will's Battles
As Helen’s work was an extension of Lucy’s, so was Will’s. Soon after establishing his offices in one of New York most fashionable neighborhoods, Will began donating time each month as attending surgeon of the New York City Children’s Hospital and Schools on Randall’s Island, a small triangle of land wedged in the East River between Bronx and Manhattan. His cousin, Louis Livingston Seaman, had served in a similar capacity for the immigrant hospital on Ward’s Island and the charity and prison hospitals on Blackwell’s Island.⁶¹⁶

Many of the inmates roused Will’s sense of compassion, and as the chairman of the Inspection Committee he had the awesome responsibility of judging officially whether or not they were feeble-minded. During one of the examinations, a little boy who was blind and nearly deaf turned to Will and said in the most pathetic manner, “Please, Mister, don’t let them call me an idiot!”⁶¹⁷ When once asked whether he thought any human being was completely useless, he replied, “I do not believe so. I believe in an All-Wise Providence and I do not believe he would litter up the earth with useless individuals.”⁶¹⁸

Will found the Randall’s Island institution to be “in a deplorable condition. Here were gathered about two thousand mental misfits. The only means of getting there from the mainland of Manhattan was a rowboat. Occasionally a freighter stopped there. A committee was formed of which I was chairman, and there was an investigation. The committee individually, in twos and threes, and collectively, made innumerable, unannounced trips to the Island, any time during the day or night. It was found that many of the attendants were drunkards, there were degenerate practices, cruelty, incompetence, neglect, and the food for the inmates was rotten. Illegitimate children and defectives were placed there to get them out of the way.”⁶¹⁹

Will got little support from charities commissioner John W. Keller, who merely told him to keep investigating, but his successor, Homer Folks was more encouraging. Will’s committee hired detectives and notaries to gather information. One month, Will himself infiltrated the island fifteen times by dark of night, and as the campaign mounted, he enlisted the commissioner on one of these secret raids. “Finally,” Will recalled, “one by one complaints were made substantiated by the sworn affidavits of witnesses with the result that about seventy different employees on the Island, including several of the highest paid officials, were discharged or forced to resign for cruelty, negligence, drunkenness or for failure in other ways to comply with the rules of the Department theretofore enacted.”⁶²⁰

His list of twenty-eight charges against the superintendent, Mrs. Mary C. Dunphy, included some relating to medicine: violation of quarantine, submitting false reports on medical matters, irregularity in distribution of medical supplies, false reports upon contagious diseases, and false charges against the house staff, nurses, medical board, and inspection committee. She displayed a reprehensible “lack of an intelligent understanding of, or else a studied indifference to, all scientific problems bearing on the improvement of conditions among the inmates.” To confound the investigation, she suppressed and manufactured evidence, and she maintained an elaborate “spy system to meet inspection and supervision.”⁶²¹

He was not able to depose this despot of Randall’s Island, however, and he became convinced that her close family connections to the Tammany political machine and to the Roman Catholic cathedral protected her.⁶²² Mrs. Dunphy’s deputy was fired, and she herself at first agreed to retire on a pension, then balked. Homer Folks later admitted, “We were then on the eve of a municipal election. To have removed Mrs. Dunphy at that time would have injected into the campaign a sectarian issue which easily might have endangered the entire administration.”⁶²³ When City Hall changed hands again, she was gradually able to hire back the people that Will’s broom had swept out. Fully a dozen years later the scandal erupted anew, when Will recruited reform mayor, John Purroy Mitchell, to his crusade. This time he succeeded in ousting Dunphy, but the political fallout cost the mayor his job.⁶²⁴

In his fourth summer doctoring at Chautauqua, Will faced another implacable enemy: typhoid. The disease that had nearly killed him just a decade before, and which had killed Lucy’s beloved brother George, was rampant. As case after case came into his office in the Athaneum, Will systematically looked for clues to the cause. Contaminated drinking water was the likely culprit, and soon he had determined that eleven of the ill people had all drunk from the same well. With Dr. Charles A. Ellis, he launched a campaign to clean up the water supply⁶²⁵

The governing board of Chautauqua appointed a Board of Health, with Ellis as Health Officer, enlisted the services of a professional bacteriologist, and took samples of water from the lake and all the wells. When some of the private wells proved contaminated, they demanded they be shut down. One such well belonged to Susie Birch Jennings, who ran a rooming house called the Aldine Cottage, right across from the Athaneum circle and possessing an imposing tower.

Susie’s husband sent a sample of the water to a chemist and wrote the Board he had removed the pump handle pending a report on the water. What happened next is well documented but obscure, because the ensuing battle between Susie and Chautauqua was one of six water contamination lawsuits fought out in the courts through claims, counter claims, injunctions, vacating of injunctions, and vacation of vacation of injunctions. Mr. Jennings claimed “Charles A. Ellis, accompanied by several assistants entered the plaintiff's house and attempted to remove the pump from said well, and did succeed in partially disabling said pump.” Susie described the incident more dramatically, saying that Ellis “violently assaulted this plaintiff, made her sick, lame and sore and threw her across the room on two occasions, by reason of which the plaintiff suffered in body and mind, was humiliated before by-standers, a number of whom were witnesses to the affair, and became thereby greatly damaged in the sum of $5000.00.”

The battle was pursued in the press. Chautauqua said Susie’s water was unhealthy, and she printed a brochure quoting the chemist as saying it was pure. Two local newspapers printed Chautauqua’s side of the story, and Susie said her opponents “with intent to injure and defame this plaintiff in her good name, fame and credit, both to herself and in her business amongst her neighbors, her customers and other good and worthy citizens, caused to be published of and concerning the plaintiff and her business, the false, scandalous, malicious and defamatory statements” with the result of damaging her business to the tune of a further $10,000.00. Later, Susie’s chemist admitted he had never tested for bacteria, not being a bacteriologist, and typhoid was defeated at Chautauqua.⁶²⁶

Since 1898, Will had lectured at Chautauqua on bacteriology, and he commissioned the H. H. Otis company of nearby Buffalo to produce a booklet titled “Our Unseen Foes,” explaining the nature of germs and fulminating against such germ-ridden habits as spitting on horse-drawn streetcars and sharing the same communion cup in church. His arrangement for the third edition was probably typical; Otis would print 2000 copies, selling 1000 to Will at $37.50 and giving him 2 cents a copy on each of the remaining 1000 that Otis sold.⁶²⁷ Will recalled the stories Lucy had told him about nursing during the Civil War, and he knew that she had been entirely ignorant of the necessity for antiseptic treatment of wounds. “The noble boys who went to the front in 1863 encountered the deadliest of enemies -- blood poisoning -- which carried off far more than bullets and shells. No longer will it be necessary to see on the battle field, standing yards high, great masses of amputated limbs.”⁶²⁸
Illness and Exhaustion
The explicit aims of the Woman's Branch were “home making, character building, and soul saving,” but many of its challenges were medical. Lucy wrote, “In a rear tenement of lower New York lay a dying woman whose husband, brutal through drink, would not allow even hospital care. Under the bed snarled the hungry dogs. The place was noisy and foul and dark, but the missionary kept at her post. ‘I’ll go soon,’ said the sufferer, ‘there is nothing more you can do — only stay — tell me the words again.’ So over and over, until the angel of death had sealed the ears and closed the lips, the dying woman tried to repeat with the missionary — ‘Come unto me all ye that are heavy laden and I will give you rest.’

One day in 1900, Lucy had met a little girl named Concetta, busy washing at a wash-tub outside the miserable tenement in which her family lived. “Her feet were bare and her tongue was sticking out while this little eight-year-old housewife was rubbing the clothes with all her might and main. ‘What makes you so excited?’ I asked. ‘O, my baby is sick,’ was the quick reply, and down went her head over her work, like a woman. ‘Why do you not go to school?’ ‘I can’t, my baby is sick; I must wash.’ And again she resumed her rubbing.

“I entered her home and found her little brother, five years old, suffering intensely with a big abscess in the cheek, and the mother trying to sew on shop work.” Lucy asked if a doctor had seen the poor child, but his mother merely said she had put chicken fat on the abscess. Lucy immediately prepared to take the boy to a hospital. But the mother resisted, fearing her husband’s wrath. “I would let him go, but if his father comes back and finds him gone, he will beat me; he does that nearly every day.” So Lucy was forced to return later that day when the father was home. “I have never seen a child so happy to go to the hospital as was that little boy; he was so anxious to start, and though young, showed more sense than his parents.”⁶²⁹

Lucy described a few of her desperately ill, impoversihed clients in little booklets printed for every Easter’s fund raising campaign. One poignant photograph showed a worn and haggard old woman, gazing stonily into the camera, hands clasped firmly in her lap holding tight her shawl, while behind her an epileptic boy leaned on his elbow, his face lined with exhaustion from helping to support the family by polishing men's shoes on the street. Another Easter booklet shows a lean woman bending over a sleeping infant, the only one of her five children who had not yet contracted spinal meningitis.⁶³⁰

A sullen child sits on a wooden box, guarding a crude, padlocked door that could not easily be opened in case of fire. “An old rear tumble-down house, near the river, is the home of Katie. The mother must go out to work the long day, leaving the six little children to the care of the oldest one, a frail girl of thirteen. When the caretaker is at school or on an errand, the miserable place is locked... and Katie is waiting on the outside. The wind from the river is bitter, and she shivers as she remembers how cold the water is. One evening last autumn, the father, whose time has been spent in the saloons, became angry at the appetites of the hungry brood, and though too lazy to work, made up his mind to have one less mouth for his wife’s small earnings to feed. ‘Where’s the kid, Katie?’ he said, and the two started for a walk. Down through the alley and onto the dock they went; bare-footed, ragged Katie, pleased with this unusual attention from her father. When no one seemed to be around, he threw her far out into the river and ran. A policeman, however, saw the child and saved her as she rose the third time. When Katie returned from the hospital, where she had to stay for several weeks, mercifully the father had died.⁶³¹

In 1903, after a dozen years of coping with problems like these, Lucy was seized by fatigue and “a trying form of grippe,” symptoms like those of influenza but lasting for many weeks. She said her days were “more full of care and labor than ever before,” but at sixty-one she also was no longer young. The Executive Committee voted her a leave of absence, and on June 6, 1903, she sailed on the steamship Hohenzollern, planning to return in September, leaving Flora Smith in temporary charge of the Woman’s Branch.⁶³²

She landed in Genoa, rested at Bellagio on Lake Como, spent a week in Venice, went to Milan, then on July 20 arrived in the Engadine. Two weeks in the rarefied mountain air of Pontresina was a severe test for her heart, so her associate in the Mission Society, A. F. Schauffler took her down to Lucerne.⁶³³ Returning to work as early as September was now out of the question, so Lucy was joined by Helen, who accompanied her to Florence and Rome.