The Newsboy Lodging House

Tumblr user explorethecosmosandfallinlove asked:

hi i have no idea if this blog is still active it is very late and i am very tired but i was just wondering what you knew about the lodging houses? how they were laid out, what the conditions were like, if the rooms were separate or like all together or a combination? thanks!

Yes this blog certainly is still active! I know a fair amount about the lodging houses, so here we go!

The lodging houses were created to help the homeless youth of New York City after it was discovered that they didn’t trust most of the free programs in the city, thinking the Sunday Schools and the like were just there to trick them and send them to jail. Seeing this, people who wanted to help homeless children decided to create a system that would give the children a bit more freedom while still keeping them off the dangerous streets at night.

The first of the lodging houses was opened at 9 Duane St. in March 1854, offering a bed and a bath for six cents, and a meal for an additional four. It allowed only boys and also turned away anybody who was found to have living parents. However, children of all races and religions were allowed to stay in the house. Boys were not allowed to smoke or swear in the house, but as long as they followed the rules and kept the midnight curfew they were allowed to come and go as they pleased.

As the house became more established, they also opened a school and required all children staying there to attend either a morning or an evening class. The house was also open during the day as a trade school, teaching not only the residents but also the surrounding community trades such as sewing or cooking.

The building at 9 Duane St. had six levels. The first was rented out to shops, the second held the dining room, kitchen and laundry, as well as sleeping quarters for the servants and the superintendent, the third had the school, gymnasium, check-in desk and washrooms, the fourth and fifth floors were the dormitories, and the top floor held a gymnasium. Above that was an attic full of extra beds that could be filled if there was a particularly cold night.

Most boys stayed in the dormitories with rows of bunk beds, but some paid a few extra cents for the opportunity to sleep in a more private bed partitioned from the others by curtains, known as “dude rooms”. In 1904, the Duane St lodging house also opened the “Waldorf Room” which cost 15 cents for the privilege of a room with only five other boys in it. Every bed had a locker assigned to it where boys could safely keep their belongings for the night.

The lodging houses were quite popular. Between their start in 1854 and the publication of Darkness and Daylight in 1892, they claim to have housed 250,000 children. Some of these children remained in the city and were helped to find their own apartments individually or in groups, others were sent to families out West looking for farmhands, some of whom ended up being formally adopted by those families.

The information in this post mainly comes from the book Darkness and Daylight by Helen Campbell. If you want to learn more about the lodging houses, you can check out that book, my “lodging house” tag, or the website “No 9 Duane Street”.

Thank you for the question and if anybody else has anything they want to ask please feel free to do so!

Annual Feast of the Newsboys

Caption from musicalcuriosity:

Friday, December 1st, 1899- The Sun

The boys gathered in the school room at the Duane Street Lodging House, and were than brought in 200 at a time in to the dining room. I’ll include a transcription under the cut. The dinner was paid for by William Waldorf Astor. Dinners were also held at all the city’s prisons.

“The ‘strikers’ and the ‘scabs’ of recent memory sat down together in peace and harmony and all, with a common impulse, reached way over their plates loaded with turkey and vegetables and grabbed their pumpkin pies.

‘That’s a regular trick of the newsies,’ explained the superintendent. ‘They always eat pie first.’“

Comment from historyofchildhood:

The eating of pies first was a popular tradition among the newsboys. It was in fact so important that missing them could result in total chaos. In 1902 a similar banquet was hosted on Christmas by the Salvation Army. Towards the end it was discovered that “There was a shortage of mince pie for a time, and the youngsters thought that they were being overlooked.” They started throwing whatever food they could get their hands on saying “they did not want turkey, but wanted more pie.” They were only settled when a Miss Sickles appeared with her arms full of plates of pie.

The scene was described in an article in the New York Tribune Dec. 26, 1905 and discussed in Stephen Nissenbaum’s The Battle for Christmas.

Girls, As Boys, Eat Newsboy Turkey

“Superintendent Rudolph Heig of the Brace Memorial Newsboys’ Lodging House, at No. 14 New Chambers street, had charge of a dinner for two thousand newsboys yesterday. Several Cherry Hill girls, in boys’ attire, were found at the tables. They told Superintendent Heig they had been playing vagabond all day and, being hungry, went to the dinner as newsboys. They were allowed to continue at the feast. The food left when the newsboys were full was given to five hundred hungry men from Park Row lodging houses.”

New York Daily-Tribune, November 30, 1906

Newsboys Who Wouldn’t Sing

A clip from The New York Sun, November 27, 1899

Caption via Tumblr user musicalcuriosity:

Another article about the boys denied entry to the Duane Street Lodging House in the afternoon. Said Robert Gibson:

“Every Sunday they open the doors at 1 o’clock in the afternoon and let us in so that we can use the gymnasium and get out of the cold. Today we were froze out. They didn’t open the door at 1 o’clock, but kept us out all day. The dudes that pay 10 cents a night got in. We only pay five cents. There’s only a few dudes. We got hunk tonight. Every Sunday night they have a meeting and ladies come to hear us sing. Tonight we all stayed out and wouldn’t come in when they opened the doors and there was only about six of the dudes at meeting. There were sixty of us who stayed out.”

Counter to Robert’s statement, Mr. Heig said the boys were kept out because some of them had played in the freshly painted walls the day before, and that only about 20 boys “revolted”.