History and architecture
Opened on April 21,1887, the Children's Aid Society Tompkins Square Lodging House for Boys and Industrial School, aka the Eleventh Ward Lodging House, is one of a series of buildings in which the Children's Aid Society sheltered and educated destitute working children, particularly newsboys and bootblacks. The Children's Aid Society was founded in 1853 by Charles Loring Brace, a Protestant minister, to address the city's worsening problem of juvenile vagrancy. The funds for the building were donated by Mrs. Robert L. Stuart, who placed $50,000 in trust for the Children's Aid Society to replace an inadequate facility.
The preeminent and nationally influential architectural firm of Vaux & Radford designed the Tompkins Square Lodging House, the third of approximately a dozen picturesque structures that the firm created for the Society between 1879 and 1892. The building is a significant surviving example of the work of Calvert Vaux and the oldest extant Children's Aid Society building as well as the only extant combination lodging house and industrial school designed by Vaux & Radford.
The four and five-story building handsomely exemplifies the High Victorian Gothic style with its dormers, paneled chimney stacks and steep pyramidal towers that make it stand out from the surrounding tenements. In 1925, the Society sold the building to the Darchei Noam, a Jewish center whose programs included after-school religious study for Jewish immigrants. In the 1950s, the East Side Hebrew Institute operated a yeshiva in the building. The building was purchased in 1977 and converted to apartments in 1978.
It remains a worthy symbol of the work of the Children's Aid Society.
Sources and further reading
This history comes from the Landmarks app’s historical catalog. Names and building uses may reflect the period described.