It’s a fantasy to imagine that our complex world has somehow lost its ability to provide compassionate care for the most vulnerable children in our society. It’s a fantasy to believe that if we could only go back to the “good old days” the thorny issues would disappear.

This book tells the story of how people of goodwill worked to find consensus among the conflicting philosophical, political, and moral beliefs about society’s role in caring for the poor. It is a story of the constant debates about our obligations to the smallest and most vulnerable among us, because the truth...

Between 1810 and 1860, New York City’s population grew from 119,734 to 1,174,799, in large part because of a huge influx of immigrants from Ireland, Wales, and Germany. Being a port of entry, New York was the place where most immigrants settled, and the majority of these immigrants were desperate for work. Some men left the immediate urban area and got jobs working on the Erie Canal, living on edge of subsistence—some for fifty cents a day and jiggers of whiskey. Like most immigrant groups coming to the United States, the Erie Canal workers labored at jobs nobody else...

In the twentieth century, the focus shifts from a historical overview of the way things were in the hazy past, with only archival records and yellowed daguerreotypes to guide us, to events and memories that are still fresh because people like me who experienced them are still alive.

Young victims of the Great Depression often wound up at the orphanage gates. Extreme economic hardship created the emotional desperation that drove some wage earners to abandon their familial responsibilities. Parents did not have enough money to keep their children, and as family life disintegrated, adolescents flocked to New York City. Some...

In 1846, a small band of nuns from the Order of the Sisters of Mercy made the long and arduous journey from Dublin to New York City. They came after New York’s powerful Archbishop John Hughes himself traveled to the Mother House in Dublin specifically to recruit members of their order. Hughes was convinced that young women who came as immigrants to New York were in need of a House of Mercy like that in Dublin, where they could find shelter in a dangerous urban environment. He wanted the house to be for the “women of Ireland arriving in this...

The Angel Guardian Home was one of the many institutions for children founded by the Sisters of Mercy. When it opened in 1899, the first residents were ninety girls, ages two to five, who had been separated from their families for all the reasons children ended up in such places—a parent got sick and could not handle taking care of children; or they lost their home; or they were just too poor to manage.

Boys were accepted in 1903, and in 1906 the sisters commissioned the nursery where I was placed. That same year Angel Guardian began placing children...

I came to live at St. Mary of the Angel in 1952. It had the feel of a rustic homestead, although in fact it was an institution that housed 172 boys in three dormitories. The property, a 120-acre farm in Syosset, Long Island, had belonged to the Van Nostrand family. The church purchased it in 1893 for $7,500, in order to use it as a summer retreat for the Brooklyn’s Convent of Mercy sisters, and for children suffering from respiratory problems. The following year the property was given the name St. Mary of the Angel.

The sisters and the older...

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, St. John’s was the name given to the institution for boys that opened near Albany and Troy Avenues in Brooklyn. At its peak, the Sisters of St. Joseph cared for about a thousand boys, but in 1937, at the request of Bishop Thomas Molloy of Brooklyn, the Marianist Brothers took over responsibility for the program. Coinciding with the decrease in the number of boys coming to the institution, the City of New York, exercising eminent domain, vacated the home to build a large city housing project for low-income families.

St. John’s Home...

On December 8, 1858, the evening of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, in a gas-lit classroom at St. James School in Brooklyn, Bishop John Loughlin exhorted members of the Brooklyn St. Vincent de Paul Society to find ways to alleviate the suffering of indigent newsboys. The men in that room were far from rich, but they were well respected in the community and committed to helping the underclass. And Bishop Loughlin had already proved himself an ardent and powerful proponent of building services to promote the wellbeing of the most vulnerable in his diocese.

Seven years later, at another...

When I am fifteen years old the gates to paradise open: I get to go to my first dance. It is a monthly event open to all the boys in the home, held in the St. Vincent’s second-floor auditorium. Parish girls and girls from the local community are invited, and we are allowed to invite girlfriends some guys may have met at school or in the neighborhood, although most of us had not had such luck. I dream that this dance will change that for me. Oh, the excitement! Living, breathing girls. I cannot stop thinking, dreaming, fantasizing. Dancing cheek-to-cheek...

On a sunny, unseasonably mild January afternoon in 2009, I take a sentimental journey on the D train, ending up in Flatbush. As I exit the subway at Newkirk Avenue, I wonder if the old neighborhood has changed. I pass familiar streets. Turning left, I keep walking until I am one block past Glenwood Road and then turn onto Waldorf Court. And yes, the homes on the block look as grand as ever—American and Dutch colonial, Tudor and Victorian, each with its own manicured lawns. Many of them still have beautiful wraparound porches on double lots.

Suddenly, I am...

I am twenty-six years old and on top of the world. I have a good job with the Brooklyn DA’s office. For the first time in my life I am able to save money. I coach football, basketball, and baseball part-time at St. Vincent’s Home. I live in a great apartment in a great neighborhood with a twenty-four-hour doorman. And I have a personal commendation from the president of the United States!

Then, one Friday evening in spring, 1972, it all comes crashing down. I come home from the DA’s office to find a letter from personnel in my mailbox....

In 1978 I graduate from Fordham University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in social science and am accepted at the Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service. I am thirty-one years old, and a party is held in my honor. It is the first time that anyone has made a party just for me. My cousin Andy makes the arrangements, and among the guests are the members of my self-made family: Aunt Katherine, Sister Johanna, Harry and Aida Perez, and Henry and Lelar Floyd. I feel empowered, but I have learned my lesson about leaving jobs too quickly, and I...

No child should grow up in an institution. My upbringing was harsh, with little in the way of pleasurable ease, not much nurturing, and many unanswered questions and unacknowledged needs. By and large, I was raised by people who made do with little. The Sisters of Mercy and Marianist Brothers worked long hours in a system that stretched them beyond the limits. Only the strength of their calling kept most of them from breaking. It is with some relief that I can say that today society understands there is no perfect, one-size-fits-all “answer” to the question of care for vulnerable...