The East Side Relief Work Committee – Lillian Wald

By Anne M. Filiaci, Ph.D.

In the summer of 1893, prominent New York City philanthropists, churches, synagogues and charitable organizations came together to form the East Side Relief Work Committee (ESRWC). The ESRWC sought to provide work to people who had lost their jobs during the sustained and deepening depression. Josephine Shaw Lowell coordinated and administered the relief effort, which was headquartered at the College Settlement, Lillian Wald’s new residence.

By October of 1893, ESRWC members had formulated a systematic plan, raised funds and coordinated with the City’s street cleaning commissioner to get men jobs cleaning the streets of New York. By the end of November the Committee arranged for participating charities, unions, churches and settlement houses to distribute “work tickets,” entitling each bearer to one hour’s work per day sweeping the streets. By late December the ESRWC had employed “about 150 men in cleaning streets.”

The ESRWC also provided jobs for those with experience in the textile industry. They “opened a tailor shop,” which proved so successful that they soon started “another tailor shop…where fifty more men will be employed.” During the same period, they put “women and girls who cannot go to the factory” to work sewing clothes to send to the poor in the Sea Islands in Georgia.

During her first year on the Lower East Side, Lillian Wald was one of the participants who distributed a substantial number of ESRWC “work tickets” to her clients. In a letter to Schiff and Loeb written on March 4, 1894, she noted that

Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell has increased our tailor shop privileges, so that now twelve men per week are from our patients’ families—these and eight on the street and the workers at the Delancey Street sewing rooms and an occasional ‘lift’ besides from other sources bring us the most desirable means of relieving the households we enter.

In January of 1894, “after the laborers had been employed at street sweeping and tailoring for two months and the number of applicants was still large,” the ESRWC decided to ramp up its efforts by giving 491 men “work renovating the tenement houses,” by whitewashing “tenement-house cellars, alleyways, airshafts, and living rooms.” In short order, the subcommittee obtained the approval of the City’s Board of Health and got authorization from a number of landlords to clean their buildings. They also sought and obtained the cooperation of labor unions and other workers’ organizations, making sure that this work project would not “be injuring” the livelihood of “regular workmen.”

While getting the needed approvals and authorizations, the ESRWC set out to raise money to pay the workers. Shaw Lowell issued a fundraising appeal early in February of 1894 on behalf of the ESRWC, asking the public to contribute more to this project through the Emergency Fund to Give Relief By Work. At the end of February, Shaw Lowell again asked the public for money, this time through a letter to the editor published in the New York Times.

According to Lowell’s appeals, by the end of February the Committee was “employing more than 1,200 heads of families,” thus maintaining “more than 5,000 men, women and children.” Their success, she asserted, meant that they needed even more in the way of contributions. Although tenement whitewashing project had employed “seventy-five men,” the ESRWC had to turn away “scores of men” solely “for lack of funds.” In fact, Lowell asserted, they had “on file applications from over 100 painters, waiting till we get money,” as well as “800 days work” already “arranged for the future.” Without more funding, she stated, they would not only be unable to hire more workers but would soon be forced to “cut down” their existing “force.”

Over the next few months, the Committee hired a total of “over 1,100 men” who “whitewashed and kalsomined 2,962 rooms, 769 halls and 474 cellars in 617 houses….” The workers also “whitewashed [214] lofts and stables, areas and small buildings,” and “cleaned and scrubbed 2,100 rooms and 2,253 halls in 602 different houses….”

During the course of this project, the ESRWC discovered that in addition to hiring the unemployed, they were performing a much needed public health service. Workers found “so much refuse” in some cellars that whitewashing had to be postponed in order to first clean out the “rubbish,” some of which “was thrown against the walls in piles” often reaching “three feet high.” They succeeded in removing the “refuse from 491 cellars,” collecting a total of 3,903 barrels of trash—including

150 barrels of ashes, 100 barrels of rags, 54 of bones, 47 of leather, shoes, etc., 44 barrels of wet straw, 41 of excelsior, 29 barrels of old iron, 18 of broken glass and 18 of old tin.

Workers also “removed a large number of dead cats, dogs and large rate [rats?] in a decomposed state,” as well as “large quantities of decayed garbage, including in one house several barrens of rotten sauerkraut, also putrid meat, old mattresses, filthy bedding and stale milk….” In one house, on “Fifth street,” they found “a can of milk that had been in the cellar for over a year….” That particular cellar was in such bad shape that the subcommittee refused to tackle the job. They complained to the Board of Health, which then ordered the landlord to “hire other men to do the work at his own expense….”

Even with all of the work they did, the subcommittee and its employees barely scratched the surface—they did not have the money to hire people to clean or whitewash “1,900 and more halls and cellars” where they had received the go-ahead from landlords.

In spite of its successes, the ESRWC disbanded in April of 1894. Members found that they could not begin to fully address the massive unemployment and misery caused by the economic downturn in any sustained way. However, during its short tenure, the ESRWC did furnish a considerable amount of relief to those who suffered, spending a total of $120,000 and hiring some 3,000 men and women.

Providing temporary employment was not the only legacy of the ESRWC. After the Committee disbanded, New York City’s reformers and philanthropists—once again headed by Josephine Shaw Lowell—made sure to report on and publicize the public health risks and the deplorable living conditions that they encountered while cleaning up the tenements. Their advocacy soon resulted in government action. That same spring, the New York State Legislature passed an act “authorizing the Governor to appoint a committee of seven to be known as ‘the Tenement-House Committee’” of 1894.

Bibliography

Davies, Celia, “Professionalizing Strategies as Time- and Culture-Bound: American and British Nursing, Circa 1893,” in Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe, Nursing History: New Perspectives, New Possibilities, NY: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1983.

“Earnest Efforts to Aid the Poor. East Side Relief Work Committee’s Appeal—What Col. Murphy is Doing.” New York Times, Feb. 5, 1894.

Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe, A Generation of Women: Education in the Lives of Progressive Reformers, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Lowell, Josephine Shaw, “Appeal From East Side Relief Work. Over 1,200 Families Already Given Aid by Useful Employment.” New York Times, Feb. 25, 1894.

Lowell, Josephine Shaw, “Poverty and it’s [sic] Relief: The Methods Possible in the City of New York,” paper presented by Josephine Shaw Lowell, in Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, held in New Haven Connecticut, May 24-30, 1895. Text appears in Stewart, William Rhinelander, The philanthropic work of Josephine Shaw Lowell; containing a biographical sketch of her life, together with a selection of her public papers and private letters, collected and arranged for publication. New York, Macmillan, 1911, pp. 175-188. (Available free as ebook online at https://archive.org/stream/philanthropicwo01stewgoog#page/n21/mode/2up

(openlibrary.org) Current 7/15/15

Notable American Women, 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary, Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer, eds., Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971, 3 vols.

Report of the Tenement House Committee as Authorized by Chapter 479 of the Laws of 1894. Transmitted to the Legislature January 17, 1895. Albany: James B. Lyon, State Printer, 1895 (Testimony of John B. Devins, chair of the Sanitation Subcommittee of the ESRWC and pastor of Hope Chapel on East Fourth Street appears on pp. 425-427 of the Report.)

Stewart, William Rhinelander, The philanthropic work of Josephine Shaw Lowell; containing a biographical sketch of her life, together with a selection of her public papers and private letters, collected and arranged for publication. New York, Macmillan, 1911, pp. 175-188. (Available free as ebook online at https://archive.org/stream/philanthropicwo01stewgoog#page/n21/mode/2up

(openlibrary.org) Current 7/15/15

“To Aid the Unemployed: New-York Crowded With Those Who Must Be Cared For. Mayor Asked to Accept Charities’ Commissioners’ Offer to Take Charge of Station-House Lodgers—Representatives of Charitable Organizations Believe This Would Rid the City of Those Not Entitled to Its Charity.” New York Times, December 23, 1893.

Wald, Lillian D. to Hon. Jacob H. Schiff and Mrs. Solomon Loeb, from LDW, 27 Jefferson Street, March 4, 1894, in Wald, Lillian D., Lillian Wald Papers, New York: New York Public Library, [1983].

Waugh, Joan, Unsentimental Reformer: The Life of Josephine Shaw Lowell, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997.