Managed by the Magdalen Benevolent Society, the asylum previously occupied a building at 88th Street and 5th Avenue until 1893, when it relocated to its first purpose-built facility at 139th Street, a rather undeveloped site at the time. Designed by architect William Welles Bosworth (1869-1966), the attractive neo-medieval building stood on grounds that led all the way to the edge of Manhattan and the railroad tracks that ran along the Hudson River.

139th Street terminated at the asylum’s front door, not yet extending to the western edge of Manhattan. The new building included room for 100 inmates as well as a chapel. Adjacent to the chapel was a separate building that functioned as a laundry––the proceeds from which partially supported the operation of the Magdalen Asylum. Inmates were seldom allowed visitors and were primarily confined either to the laundry facility or to workrooms in the rear of the asylum building that faced the Hudson River. Some women and young girls came voluntarily to the Magdalen Asylum, while others were committed by parents or family members. Officials of the Magdalen Benevolent Society’s various committees actively sought out females by visiting the city’s penitentiaries, almshouses, and even its “disreputable abodes.” These missionary efforts to gather worthy subjects were aided by the actions of New York City’s police courts. Magistrates often sentenced females brought before the court on charges of prostitution to six-month stays at a women’s reformatory––these institutions included the Magdalen Asylum, as well as the House of the Good Shepherd and the House of Mercy.

Six months of laundry work and religious education were unfathomable to some of the women ordered by the court to the 139th Street Asylum. For example, in June 1894, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported the attempted escape of twenty-nine-year-old Lizzie Donnelly, who had been sent to the asylum from Jefferson Market, a Police Court known for handing down sentences to prostitutes.

Donnelly fashioned a rope by tying her bed sheets together and lowered herself down the side of the asylum from a third-story window. She was climbing over the high fence that surrounded the building when one of the matrons caught her. Donnelly, apparently well acquainted with the city’s many penal institutions for women, claimed she preferred Blackwell’s Island to the Magdalen Asylum. This was understandable. By contrast, a woman charged with prostitution, vagrancy, or disorderly conduct served an average of only ten days at the Blackwell’s Island Workhouse.

Despite the Magdalen Asylum’s uptown relocation, continued urban development, namely plans to extend Riverside Drive, had an adverse impact on the isolation of inmates. In order to maintain the city’s grid of streets, 139th had to be extended to meet the path of Riverside Drive and hemmed in the south side of the building. The wide sidewalks planned for the east side of Riverside Drive abutted the rear of the asylum and would eventually expose the female inmates to all manner of passersby on the street. A 1915 photo from the Museum of the City of New York illustrates this perfectly. For this reason, the Magdalen Benevolent Society made the decision to move yet again. In total, the Magdalen Asylum occupied its building at 139th Street for a little more than ten years, from 1893 to 1904. After temporary accommodations, an even larger facility at the northern tip of Manhattan in Inwood would be completed and in use by 1907. In 1904, another charitable organization, this time affiliated with the Episcopal Church, purchased the 139th Street building from the Magdalen Society for $150,000. The House of the Holy Comforter, a home for “incurable” women and girls made use of the former asylum from 1904 to 1914. The organization had been established in 1870 by Louise Gardner Hall to provide a free home for destitute females that hospitals were reluctant to keep in their care. After ten years, that home likewise moved to a newer and larger facility in order to accommodate more patients. To fund the establishment of its new Bronx location, The Episcopal charity sold the old asylum a Catholic order of nuns living in adjacent buildings on the same city block. The Sisters of the Cenacle devoted their lives to quiet contemplation and to providing laywomen and nuns in need of tranquility a place for rest and relaxation. They would use the former asylum and charitable home as a retreat house, renaming it “Nazareth.” Taking possession of the building in 1915 allowed the sisters to continue their work with expanded facilities, which they made use of until 1954. Today, the River View Towers, modern high-rise apartments built in 1964, are located at 139th Street and Riverside Drive. Construction of this twenty-four-story complex began only after the razing of the Cenacle property, which included the 1893 asylum. With the building’s demolition came the destruction of both a fine example of Gilded Age architecture and a physical record of women’s history in New York City. The former asylum, charitable home, and retreat house stood witness to a boom in urban development that, in its sixty years of existence, transformed from a strictly monitored reformatory into a quiet retreat enclosed by the city streets. Works Cited Sixty-First Annual Report of the New York Magdalen Benevolent Society (New York, 1894). New York Magdalen Benevolent Society, Missionary Labors through a Series of Years among Fallen Women (New York, 1870). Ruth Alexander, The “Girl Problem”: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 22 June 1894. Stacy Horn, Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in Nineteenth-Century New York (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2018). Sixty-Eighth Annual Report of the New York Magdalen Benevolent Society (New York, 1901). Seventy-Second Annual Report of the New York Magdalen Benevolent Society (New York, 1905). New-York Tribune, 19 October 1907. After moving, the Magdalen Benevolent Society changed the name of its organization to Inwood House. New York Times, 16 January 1904. The Church Standard, 6 May, 1905; See also The Medical Directory of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, vol. 12 (New York: Medical Society of New York, 1910). New-York Tribune, 30 June 1914. Cenacle of St. Regis, 1894-1952 (New York: The Albertype Company, 1954).