That portion of the city east of Second Avenue, between Seventieth and Ninetieth Streets, is populated by large numbers of working people about whose poverty not much has been said heretofore, because they have struggled bravely against misfortune, and have made their wants known only when starvation and eviction stared them in the face.  It is the district where most of the cigars produced in New York are made–the tenement-house cigar shop district, where thousands of men, women, and children are huddled together, making cheap cigars by day and by night, and inhaling a heavy, rank atmosphere.

Miss E. Wells, Principal of the Jones Memorial School, at 417 East Seventy-third Street, has written to the Business Men’s Committee of the Industrial Christian Alliance, saying that the opening of a people’s restaurant and cheap grocery store would be very beneficial in that district, where hundreds of families are without any work, and have very little relief.  From Seventieth to Seventy-eight Street, east of Second Avenue, there are large numbers of working people, chiefly Bohemian cigarmakers, who are suffering from the effects of strikes.  Many families are in debt for the necessaries of life.  Their rents are long overdue, and the tradesmen feel discouraged by the inability of the people to meet their obligations.  Miss Wells has in her school nearly 500 children from the poorest families.  Over 300 of them are fed daily at the school, and the meals they get there are the only good ones that they eat during the day.  She wishes the committee to send some one to investigate her statements.

1894 MAR 3 – New York Times – Distress on the East Side.