New York House of Refuge

The New York House of Refuge was the first juvenile reformatory established in the United States. It opened in 1824 on the Bowery in Manhattan, New York City. As the delinquent population grew, separate wings for boys and girls were added and the original rectangular building became U-shaped. In 1806 the United States Arsenal was erected near the junction of the Bloomingdale and Old Post Roads.  It would be several decades before the northern tide of the city would reach this far.   The two-story frame building was, according to the General Government "for the purpose of an arsenal and deposit of military stores."   When the War of 1812 erupted the Arsenal was converted to a barracks. After the military facility was moved to Castle William,

Destroyed by a fire in 1839, before being relocated to Twenty-Third Street. A new location was procured on East 23rd Street at the river until a substantial new facility was built on Randall's Island in 1854.

They moved to Randalls Island. Beginning in 1901, female inmates were removed to the newly opened New York State Reformatory for Women, now the Taconic Correctional Facility. In the 1930s, younger male inmates (ages 12 to 15) were transferred to the new state training school at Warwick, and the older boys to the newly constructed state prison in Coxsackie.

Investigations uncovered an enormous amount of abuse inside the walls of the reformatories: excessive corporal punishment, exploitation of the inmates as sources of cheap labor for outside contractors, virtually no classroom education or vocational instruction to prepare the children for a better life. The Houses of Refuge eventually disappeared, relics of a bygone time, their passing mourned by few.