Children at Risk: Protecting New York City’s Youths, 1653-2003

Children at Risk: Protecting New York City’s Youths, 1653-2003

Children at Risk examined New York City’s history as home to generations of impoverished young people, and as an incubator of ideas and institutions seeking to improve their lives. The project’s challenge was to narrate the evolution of public responses to juvenile poverty – from Dutch orphan masters and evangelical asylum builders to Progressive social workers and government agencies-- without losing sight of the humanity, labor, and street life of young New Yorkers across time.

The exhibition's object list interspersed apprentices’ contracts from colonial New York with antique dolls from the Lower East Side, promotional literature for the Children’s Aid Society’s “orphan trains” with a century-old shoeshine box from Manhattan streets, and photographs by Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Bruce Davidson, and Helen Stummer. Quotations from Lydia Maria Child, Anthony Comstock, Jonathan Kozol, and Harpo Marx inscribed on the gallery walls evoked changing viewpoints as well as the continuing needs of poor children. In 2003, three out of every ten New York City children under age 18 were living below the federal poverty line. Designed by Rob Del Bagno.