Orphan Asylum Society of the City of New York

Photograph by Byron Company (New York, N.Y.) of the Orphan Asylum, 73^rd Street. Riverside. 1899 or 1900. Museum of the City of New York (93.1.1.240)

I selected this photo, because it documents the 2^nd location of the Orphan Asylum Society of the City of New York, co-founded in 1806 by the widow of Alexander Hamilton, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton. Throughout their married life, Alexander and Eliza raised several orphaned children of friends along with their own eight children. After her husband’s death in a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804, Eliza devoted most of her life to caring for her seven surviving children and to charitable work in New York, and in her later years, in Washington, D.C. For the first several decades of its existence, the Orphan Asylum Society occupied a small building in today’s Greenwich Village. It moved to its beautiful new location in the upper west side in the 1840s. Eliza lived to see this vast improvement. She outlived her husband by 50 years and died at the age of 97 in 1854. Eliza’s Orphan Asylum survives until this day in New York City under the name of Graham Windham.