A Note from the Author
Before City Hall’s marble steps rose, before clerks stamped papers and judges called dockets, this ground was soft earth. A garden, tilled by the unwanted. In 1736, women bent their backs here, not to claim honor or coin, but to keep the almshouse alive. The city named this soil disposable, yet the ground kept its own ledger. Beneath the roots lie buttons, shells, bones, infant ribs, women’s teeth, livestock fragments, all commingled. The soil remembers what the city would rather not. (Anderson 2001; Hildebrant 1994).
Almshouses were known as religiously founded shelters for the poor, elderly, and sick in medieval Europe. These dwellings were commonly referred to as bead houses, named for the Anglo-Saxon word for prayer, or as hospitals, from the Latin hospes, meaning both host and guest. They reflected a Christian duty to shelter strangers, especially traveling pilgrims. In colonial North America, almshouses followed the traditions of England and France, emerging as institutions for the poor, disabled, widowed, orphaned, and sick in urban settings. Confinement was not understood as healing or rehabilitative. Instead, those deemed unfit for labor were surveilled and put to work.
Residents were required to contribute to the institution through tasks such as spinning, sewing, laundering, cooking, and picking apart salt-encrusted ship rope to recover hemp for caulking (Spencer-Wood 1999, 55). Children, who made up nearly a third of the residents, were taught Christian doctrine and skills aligned with their gender. Boys learned reading, writing, and arithmetic, while girls were trained in knitting and domestic work (Mohl 1971, 145–176). This was framed as moral development, yet it primarily served to reinforce labor expectations and social discipline.
Although the almshouse claimed to offer care, its structure reinforced class and racial hierarchies. Wealthy families avoided these spaces entirely, viewing them as places of contagion rather than cure (Foucault 1994). Within the institution, distinctions persisted. City records show that the superintendent and his family were housed separately and dined on finer foods donated by New York’s elite, while most residents ate a modest diet dominated by fish from the harbor (New York City 1917, Vol. 1, 357; Vol. 2, 125).
New York City’s City Hall now stands atop the ground where the almshouse once stood (LPC 1993, 3–5; Inskeep 2000, 6). Where root vegetables once grew, grief was buried and paved over. The almshouse was demolished in 1797, but its logic remains intact. Production is valued above care, labor over rest, and worth is measured by output (Chapman, Carey, and Ben-Moshe 2020). Today, in the gardens I study, I see the same structures persist. Gardens evoke a sense of community, yet they often reproduce exclusion. Who gets a plot? Who decides? Informal hierarchies govern access just as surely as city officials once did.
My hope is to produce a historical fiction rooted in archival fact, a critical fabulation that imagines what might have been felt, buried, and planted by the women who lived behind New York City’s first almshouse. It weaves three threads. Margaret’s diary reveals her inner reckoning. A third-person narrative expands her world, capturing what exceeds her ink. Finally, the voice I call MOTHER offers a counter-archive. Drawing from burial maps, almshouse ledgers, and archaeological reports, MOTHER reads between the lines of what the city recorded and what it erased.
This formal oscillation is an homage to the tension between personal memory and institutional history, between what is felt and what is filed away. MOTHER is a caretaker of the forgotten. Where the archive stops, she continues. This is a story for those labeled burdens. The ones deemed undeserving. The women who worked the soil that fed a city that never cared to remember them. The soil remembers. And so must we.
The Diary of Margaret: The fifth of June 1736
My husband Samuel departed this life and left me destitute of all means of support after a brief illness of the measles struck his poor soul. We dwell at the lower end of New Amsterdam, a few cross streets removed from Broadway, in a single chamber above a brothel, once part of the old Dutch colony. I am told that farmland did once line the East River in former days, but this land has long been given over to warehouses and wharves (Cantwell and Wall 2001, 259). Upon our immigration to this seaport, we found it far removed from the quiet, sweet-smelling air that filled our homeland. We left behind my kin in Ireland when the potatoes had failed us. Samuel and I fell asleep to the rapturous fiddle melodies drifting up from the bar below and the far-off cries of courtesans from hallways and secondary bedrooms. “Margaret, please try and get some sleep.” Samuel has a way of never reassuring me after a long day’s work at the shipyard. I have longed for the days when my hands tended a modest garden, whilst my mother sang soft airs and I pulled turnips and radishes for the winter’s store; and for the merry laughter of my sister, who once startled me with a spider set upon my hair, to her great amusement. Samuel had sworn to my father that he would be my protection in this New World, yet I now perceive how light a thing such promises may prove.
I learned of our daughter Gráinne’s arrival into this world upon his last breath. We had, in happier days, chosen the name Gráinne, for its speaketh of the earth and the sun, of warmth and bounty of the harvest. I do now cling to that meaning, praying it may lend strength to the child and the uncertain life before us. My thoughts are turned wholly to the preservation of her and myself. I doubt not that the city’s officials shall reckon me among the “deserving poor,” a widow, not a rogue or beggar (Ross 1988, 14). Yet, such judgements avail me little, for my skill lies only in sewing, laundering, painting, and gardening.
The landlord hath given me notice that I shall soon be kicked to the streets. I’ve heard whispers that the churches, which once took widows under their charge, have altered their customs and now give aid in a more general manner as the city grows thick with strangers (New York City, 1905, Vol. 4, 308–09). Samuel told me of vagabonds taken for their thefts from the docks and confined to the almshouse, a place barred to those deemed unworthy and admitted only to the disabled, the troubled, and the widowed. It seems to me that entrance there may be my only recourse. I know the house is my fate, and the only thing left for me to do is pray.
The Diary of Margaret: The Sixth of June 1736
This afternoon, when Samuel’s body was borne away, I crossed Chambers Street to the almshouse newly raised this spring. They say it is for the widow, the lame, and the poor. I know it only as a place of last resort. The house is vast, dark within, and made my heart quake as I passed the door. A woman in apron and cap asked but one thing: Can you work? I bowed my head. “Then come.” She led me down a narrow corridor where children clung to their mothers’ skirts, and men raved in their bonds. The air was foul with sweat, fish, and the sourness of close bodies. The boards creaked as though they pitied us (New York City, 1905, Vol. 4, 308–09; Ross 1988, 14). At length we came to the garden. It was no garden such as I knew, but a churn of mud and flies, with pale shoots struggling to rise. The woman pressed a rusted hoe into my hand and said: You must make your own bread here. Spin your own cloth. Pick rope till your fingers bleed. Tend the children, and if one is lost, you shall be punished (New York City, 1917, Vol. 2, 126; Spencer-Wood 1999, 55).
MOTHER
Under six inches of garden soil lies soft layers of loam, silt, and yellow clay that once nurtured the vegetables grown in the Almshouse Garden. In the late 1990s, remains of more than two hundred individuals were uncovered, bone threaded through marrow-rich soil (Anderson 2001, 17). Shame lingers in the substrate itself. In the private garden behind an institution of control, laboring women grew food to sustain the city’s unwanted. In death, they were buried behind the fences of the almshouse cemetery only to have their graves quietly built over by City Hall in the early 19th century. Poverty, state control, and invisibility broken down into the sediment. Shame is lodged in the bones turned charcoal dust beneath recycled fill. The shame is carried by the spores, bacteria, and mycelium that swallowed their shame and became a silent archive. Under plot fourteen, adjacent to the squash patch, archaeologists found the femur of a woman approximately 25 years old. Shallow burial. No coffin. Found with buttons, an oyster shell, and a child’s clay doll head (New York: Parsons Engineering Science, Inc., 2001), 17.
MOTHER
Look closely at the almshouse plan. The garden sits not by accident but by design, pressed between kitchen and burial ground. Food, labor, and death mapped onto the same few acres, an architecture of moral order. Cabbage and discipline cultivated side by side; women moved seamlessly from plot to grave. The floorplan, as Lubin and Vaccaro write,“choreographs the interactions of experts and subjects by way of the forms interposed between them, among them, around them, beneath them,” blurring the lines between ruler and ruled (Lubin and Vaccaro 2023, 518). Architecture does more than contain, it produces. As Anna Kornbluh reminds us, following Derrida, “architecture produces social space… it realizes the priority and force of form (Kornbluh 2015, 204). Radically primary and radically critical, architecture wields power on the ground and masters the practice of space as the fundamental category of politics.” The almshouse makes this plain: here, design was doctrine, and the built form itself enforced hierarchy.
First Touch of Earth
The nurse’s words hung in the stale air, thick as the dust dancing in the corridor’s last light. The outdoor common area did not mirror the rich, dark soil of her mother’s garden, humming with life, but instead was a churned-up mess that smelled faintly of… something else. Decay. Not of plants, but of something deeper.
The nurse pushed a rusted hoe into Margaret’s hands. Its weight was familiar, yet alien. “Get to it. The sun won’t wait for your pleasantries.” Then she turned, red cloak flashing across her shoulders before the heavy doors thudded shut behind her.
Margaret stood alone in the chaos. Other women, hunched and silent, moved grimly through the rows, their faces hardened by practice. No humming here. Only the drone of flies and the scrape of metal against resistant earth. She plunged the hoe into the mud. It resisted with a stiff, dead weight. These turnips, she thought, will be bitter.
A wave of nausea passed through her. She thought it was from the smell, but it was really the doom she felt about her new reality. Her stomach, still soft with Gráinne, cramped. She needed to eat. Needed to work, to survive. Was this the “nourishment” they spoke of? Soil nourished by… whom?
The next morning, the dormitory air was thick with the scent of unwashed bodies and restless breathing. Margaret hadn’t slept. A flutter stirred in her belly. Gráinne again, reminding her of the fragile life she now carried.
Mr. Davies assigned Margaret a new section, closer to the tall fence that separated them from the land beyond. The cemetery. Isolated in death as they were in life.
Beside her, an older woman toiled. Agnes, she’d heard. A “vagabond,” caught begging after her husband died. She suspected she might’ve been “undeserving,” by the way the nurses Margaret, as a “widow,” was technically “deserving,” but their fates felt the same. If you looked closely, the categories blurred. The women labored alike, wore uniforms, and ate fish from the harbor. Sometimes, if the superintendent wasn’t watching, they played marble games with clay balls from the kitchen midden.
Agnes grunted, yanking a root from the ground. “This land,” she rasped, voice like dry leaves, “it fights back. Always has.” She didn’t look up, but the words lingered between them, a quiet understanding of the land’s resistance, and perhaps their own.
Margaret dug; her movements slow but steady. The cold soil felt strangely intimate. Her fingers brushed something smooth, too white for stone. Bone. Not pebbles. Not roots. A chill ran through her. Is this what they meant by “nourishment”? Her mind flew to Gráinne, so innocent, already tethered to this soil, a soil that held the forgotten. She dug faster, frantic now. She needed to finish, to silence the implications buried beneath her.
MOTHER
If landscapes are imbued with social meaning, what values are reflected in the gardens of the poor? This garden reflects the social values of the colonial elites who ran New Amsterdam. In 1734, the city council asked for a site plan of the almshouse, which was to be located just outside the city limits but adjacent to the city’s boundaries. They specifically requested “a Needful Yard room and Garden” for the housemates to utilize for sustenance (New York City, 1905, Vol 4, p. 241). The architects of the almshouse were not looking for inmates to be isolated from society; archeological findings suggest that the house faced the city and was located on Broadway and just a ten-minute walk from Wall Street.
The various gardens at the almshouse were both symbolic and functional spaces. Scholars note that the directors had a three-part goal with these areas. First, to teach basic gardening techniques with the hope of creating employable skills amongst the poor; second, to use visual images in the garden of tightly curated plots to ensure order; and finally, to use these orderly surroundings to ensure a sense of shared values (Baugher 2001, 195). But if these shared values were colonial in nature, how does that benefit our dear Margaret, a woman of low rank and class with nothing but her unborn child in her belly? These are the questions of care that Mother seeks to unpack. Today, tourists sip lattes above the burial grounds. The squash patch is now an entrance to the City Hall subway station.
The Almshouse System of “Care” (or Lack Thereof)
The sun climbed, beating down on the exposed garden. Sweat stung Margaret’s eyes, mixing with the dust. Her back screamed, a constant, dull throb she was learning to ignore. The air, once damp, was now thick with the smell of sunbaked earth and the faint, ever-present odor of human bodies, packed close.
A shadow fell across her. Mr. Davies, the overseer, stood over her, a stout man with a ledger tucked under his arm. He wasn’t the nurse; he was the authority. To him, widows and unmarried mothers were the scourge of the earth: defective women who drained resources and dirtied the streets of New Amsterdam. Her pregnancy was a liability, a cost to the almshouse: an extra mouth to feed, a wet nurse to employ, and worst of all, a pair of idle hands.
His eyes, cold and assessing, swept over her work, then to the swell of her stomach: “You’re not pulling your weight, widow,” he stated, his voice flat, devoid of sympathy. “We have mouths to feed. You, and the one inside you, are a burden if you do not contribute.”
Margaret straightened slowly, wincing. “Sir, I am working as fast as I am able. The child…” He scoffed, cutting her off. “The child will learn to work, just like you. This is no place for laziness. We provide shelter, food, and clothing. In return, you will be productive. Rehabilitation, not indulgence.” He gestured with a dismissive hand towards the rows of meager crops. (Chapman, Carey, and Ben-Moshe 2020; Spencer-Wood 1999, 26). “Every seed, every weed pulled, offsets your cost to the city. This isn’t charity, woman. It’s a system.” When the women asked for tools or raised beds for the garden, he scoffed at the notion the city would pay for such things. He was pleased the almshouse needed no kitchen staff, the garden offset the costs and allowed for a lean budget. The women’s labor fed the institution and spared his hands from “outlandish mishaps” with city funds.
He then looked past her, towards a small group of children chasing a butterfly near the garden’s edge, dangerously close to the fence. “Keep them in line! If one strays, if one causes trouble, it’s on your head. We don’t need any more undesirables polluting the streets.”
Margaret’s jaw tightened. Rehabilitation. Self-sufficient. The words tasted like ash. This wasn’t care; it was a transaction. She was a cog in a grinding machine; her body, her labor, and her unborn child were all quantifiable assets. The promise Samuel made, her mother’s garden, the sister who made her laugh—all of it seemed a distant, unattainable dream. The earth under her fingernails was not sweet-smelling any longer; it was the scent of forced survival.
The Diary of Margaret: The Tenth of June 1736
That night, after ration soup and inspection, I went back to the garden. The moon silvered the fence and the burial ground beyond. I knelt where the white shards had turned my stomach and scraped a shallow hollow with the heel of my hand. We live on what the city would rather forget: paupers’ bones, lost babies, and women worked down to shadows. They bury them near the kitchens and grow squash where no gravestone dares stand. From the pocket of my apron I drew the last of the Irish seed sewn into my petticoat the day we sailed: three wrinkled turnips, two radishes. For those called burden, I whispered, pressing them into the contested soil. Agnes’s shadow fell beside mine; without a word, she crumbled her crust of bread for mulch. Behind us, a child coughed; another slept against the door. If this house measures us in labour, we shall measure ourselves in what grows. When Gráinne comes, I will show her how sweetness may be found under rot. Let that be our reckoning.
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