IN DARKEST NEW YORK.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVI, Issue XXV, 20 June 1896, Page 735

IN DARKEST NEW YORK.

In his report of the work of the past year to the New York City Mission and Tract Society, John Jaeger, superintendent of the mission at No. 136, Cbrystie street, speaks thus of the conditions which obtain on the lower east side of the city • My field of labour is in the darkest section of New York city, where the population is more dense than in any of equal size, not only in this city, but the world. It embraces that part known to the police as the eleventh precinct. This precinct is only nine blocks square, but it contains more inhabitants than the city of Albany. It starts at the beginning of the Bowery and extends east along Division street to Clinton-street, then north to East Houstonstreet, then back to the Bowery and to Chatham square. ‘ Within these narrow limits we have people from every quarter of the globe— Americans, Irish, Germans, Italians, French, Hungarians, Englishmen, Chinamen, and a dozen other nationalities. But Polish and Russian Jews form the majority of the population. In some of these sections in the tenement houses you will find four or five families on a single floor, and often two or three families in a tenement apartment. ‘ Beside these classes, that form the re gular inhabitants of the section, there is a large percentage of “ floaters ” or “ transients,” who form the population in the lodging houses. It is within the narrow limits of this section that we find the cheap lodgings where men and women who manage to secure five, ten, or fifteen cents find shelter over night. ‘ This is eminently the section of crime. Daring the last year an enormous percentage of the population of this precinct was detained in the Eldridge street Station, charged with some violation of the law, five thousand of these being women. There is hardly a “ crook ” or “ confidence man ” in the whole country who has not at some time or another been an inhabitant of this section. The riff-raff cf the world, coming to New York, seeks the Bowery and drifts in there. One-half of the prisoners that appear in the Essex Market Police Court come from it, although four other police precincts send their prisoners to this court. Twenty murderers were ar-

raigned tor trial from this precinct last year, and perhaps there were as many more whom the police failed to apprehend. * And yet among the people we find quite a percentage of the popnlation who are by poverty and unfortunate circumstances compelled to live in this section—honest, struggling, poor, who try to do their best and seem content in the struggle for mere existence. Among these are a large number of children, who early in life are brought in contact with the conditions I have heretofore described. During the past year we have bad an aggregate attend ance at the mission of 26,235. Of these, 15,600 asked for prayers and over 1,000 came forward. A large number of them simply pass through our hands and are never heard of again by us, while from others we hear occasionally, who are standing loyally by their confessions.’