The Almshouse

New York shrank from 25,000 to 5,000 people before the invasion. But six months later refugees pushed the number up to 11,000. By 1780, it had ballooned to 33,000. Before the end, it passed 50,000. With the massive loss of housing in the fires, and the even more plague-like reduction of timber in the region, homelessness, squatting, quartering, and overcrowding became endemic. It was exacerbated by a record-cold winter that froze New York’s harbor solid. The cost of food jumped 800 percent. Talk of famine recurred. And epidemics of yellow fever, cholera, and smallpox (the greatest killer of the war) took untold numbers. Each morning, cart-men wheeled the frozen, starved, and pestilent dead.

The Almshouse is a fitting place to assess social welfare in New York under British occupation. These institutions had begun to proliferate in England with the decline of feudalism and the rise of liberalism. But they only sheltered the “deserving poor,” most often widows, orphans, and the “infirm.” Debtor prisons were more common, like the giant pair flanking each side of this little building on the Common, functioning mainly as repositories for cheap labor. New York’s public almshouse was no different. Officially a “house of correction for vagrants and paupers,” it sought to reform the poor foremost and, even in hard times, serviced just a fraction of them: no more than 300. That number remained the same during the war, even though the scale of hardship increased exponentially and the military put “the vestry” (forty leaders in New York’s Anglican church) in charge of municipal welfare. 

Hundreds more received aid in the form of subsidized housing and rations, with thousands benefitting from public work contracts. But it was never enough. The area destroyed by the Great Fire (everything west of Broad Way and south of Broad St.) became a giant refugee camp known as “Canvas Town,” for the sailing cloth pulled over burnt chimneys, joists, and beams to make pitiful shelter from the elements. Holy Ground, the old red-light district north of St. Paul’s Chapel and west of the Common, became an open market to 3,000 “ladies of pleasure,” a six-fold increase on the colonial period. The military shipped a good number of England’s own poor for the soldiers, the young women “spirited off” the streets of Liverpool and other cities.

Refugees and minorities shouldered the brunt, along with soldiers and camp followers. But most suffered. The government attempted but proved unable to provide adequate food, water, shelter, and medical care. When they failed to meet those needs, residents pursued them outside the law, raiding farms for food, seizing private homes for shelter, and illegally chopping trees for heat and fuel. By the end of the war, observers marveled at the destruction: streets now without trees and dug up for trenches, ghostly woodlots and ruined gardens, burnt-out houses and homes fit to collapse. Outside the city, where they had been dense hardwood forests and teeming fisheries, New York also looked physically exhausted.