POVERTY GAP TRANSFORMED—THE SPOT WHERE YOUNG HEALEY WAS MURDERED IS NOW A PLAYGROUND.
I came back to my office to find a letter there from a rich man who lives on the Avenue, offering to make another Poverty Park for the tenement-house children of another street, if he had to buy the lots. I told him the story of Poverty Gap and bade him go and see for himself if he could spend his money to better purpose. There are no play-grounds yet below Fourteenth Street and room and need for fifty. The Alley and the Avenue could not meet on a plane that argues better for the understanding between the two that has been too long and needlessly delayed.
CHAPTER XII.
THE INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS
That “dirt is a disease,” and their mission to cure it, was the new gospel which the managers of the Children’s Aid Society carried to the slums a generation ago. In practice they have not departed from their profession. Their pill is the Industrial School, their plaster a Western farm and a living chance in exchange for the tenement and the city slum. The wonder-cures they have wrought by such simple treatment have been many. In the executive chair of a sovereign State sits to-day a young man who remembers with gratitude and pride the day they took him in hand and, of the material the street would have moulded into a tough, made an honorable man and a governor. And from among the men whose careers of usefulness began in the Society’s schools, and who to-day, as teachers, ministers, lawyers, and editors, are conspicuous ornaments of the communities, far and near, in which they have made their homes, he would have no difficulty in choosing a cabinet that would do credit and honor to his government. Prouder monument could be erected to no man’s memory than this record at the grave of the late Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the Children’s Aid Society.
THE LATE CHARLES LORING BRACE, FOUNDER OF THE CHILDREN’S AID SOCIETY.