Financial History Issue 113 (Spring 2015) | Page 32
bureau to supervise its program. The city
used suburban land rented to it by private
owners and had much more limited results.
Men were paid wages by the city — not in
dividends from their hard work — and only
2–3 workdays were available per week for
each person who signed up. Each worker
could still make $3–$4.50 each week, but
wages were paid in the form of fuel or provisions made available in a “poor store,”
not cash. Thus, demand for these positions
dried up fairly quickly.
“Tilling,” wrote Grant, “became merely
a part–time job, not a labor of love.” And,
the overall commitment and scope was
limited — most times, the foodstuffs grown
by the employees were handed directly to
the non–working indigent, so there was
no profit to be made, and also, the public
treasury did not have enough money in
it for more investment in seeds and land,
limiting the program’s ability to grow.
Brooklyn’s mayor, Charles Adolph
Schieren, was a good friend and admirer
of Hazen Pingree. He visited him in
Detroit in January of 1895, in order to
learn more about reform measures, and
also about the Pingree Plan. In May,
Schieren declared that more land than he
ever expected had already been donated,
and that he expected to raise $5,000 from
philanthropists for seeds, equipment and
supervision. His office projected the net
profit on the farming of 200 acres would
exceed $6,000 by the end of the season. “If
the average farmer could make half that
from 200 acres, he would consider himself
rich,” noted the Rome Daily Sentinel.
But only a dozen or so families took
advantage of the inaugural vacant lot program in Brooklyn, which was then an independent city. The New York Herald blared
“Pingree Plan a Failure” around six weeks
after the program started. It blamed the
poor, noting that even with the advantage
of free seed and soil, “the toilers of the tenements prefer to remain watching the sun
bake the rear walls and sleeping on the roofs
when the nights are unbearable indoors.”
Conversely, other papers reported that
the problem with Brooklyn’s poor potato
farmers was that they found the work so
rewarding that they now wanted to move
out of the city. Of course, neither of these
assumptions was true.
Applicants from “Smoky Hollow”
and “Darby’s Patch” were few and far
Illustration of one of Pingree’s potato patches that appeared in the Buffalo New York Courier, 1897.
between, because getting transportation to the plots was difficult. In 1896
and 1897, though, increased numbers of
families took advantage of vouchers for
the Kings County Elevated Road, which
took them safely to plots farther than
walking distance from their homes. And
while some people found city watchmen intimidating, others were glad to
have protection against others stealing
the fruits of their labor in the middle of
the night. The farmers — many of whom
were German immigrants — successfully
raised potatoes, onions, radishes, beans
and sweet corn. Again, like Rochester,
the drawback was that little or no money
changed hands: “If the Bureau of Charities…would pay these men 10 cents an
hour for their work, and then dispose of
the product, both sides could make some
money,” wrote the New York Tribune on
July 21, 1896. “As far as a mere