\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u201cSecond<\/span> German Baptist Church<\/span> was located on the edge of Hell\u2019s Kitchen, just a few blocks northwest of the Tenderloin district, where prostitution and gambling thrived. Street gangs and graft pervaded the culture of this community.2 <\/span>Today Hell\u2019s Kitchen is the trendy Midtown Manhattan home of actors and movie stars. But in Rauschenbusch\u2019s day, it was the seedy underbelly of one of the world\u2019s largest cities. Nothing in our country today truly approximates what life was like in Hell\u2019s Kitchen in the late 1800s. If you\u2019ve ever seen the Martin Scorsese film Gangs of New York<\/i>, it was set in this same time period in the Five Points area of Manhattan, which was a similar, nearby neighborhood. It\u2019s a violent and twisted film. Yet, if you can wade through the blood and gore, you\u2019ll see that Scorsese did a masterful job of drawing out some of the heartbreaking social prob\u00adlems, inhumane working and living conditions, as well as the violence which was commonplace when Walter Rauschenbusch found himself leading that small German Baptist Church. Rauschenbusch believed the gospel must have something to say about these social problems.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nMost German immigrants in the city lived in squalor, with multiple families crammed into each tenement building. Hell\u2019s Kitchen was a crowded rectangle of apartment buildings and factories which stretched from Fifty-seventh to Thirty-fourth Street, and from Eighth Avenue west to the Hudson River. The Second German Baptist Churchwas located on West Forty-fifth Street near Tenth Avenue, smack in the middle of Hell\u2019s Kitchen. In those days life along Ninth and Tenth Avenues was hard. Typically ten to fifteen people crowded into small, squalid three-room apartments. In addition to the rampant overcrowding, the low wages, crime, disease, unemployment, and hunger made life miserable and often short. Particularly heart-wrenching for Rauschenbusch was the impact on the children. It was reported that 68 percent of the deaths in that time and place were among children aged five and under.4 <\/span>Rauschenbusch lived and worked among the people of Hell\u2019s Kitchen. He experienced their struggles up close, living each day with the angst of desperate poverty.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nWhat made this even more absurd was that all of this was happen\u00ading while, just a few blocks up the street, New York\u2019s high society was insulated from the suffering lower class. These were the days before labor unions, social security, unemployment benefits, and occupational safety regulations. Safe working conditions and fair wages were not the norm. There were few or no industrial codes and restrictions, nor were there child labor laws. Though some members of the affluent class made mea\u00adger attempts at charity and relief, the harsh reality was the rich indus\u00adtrial barons and the middle class managers were getting filthy rich on the backs of the immigrant working class of Manhattan. Many of the family fortunes amassed during this period (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, etc.), survive to this day, bearing witness to the jaded exploitation, abuse, and starvation of those who suffered in Hell\u2019s Kitchen less than a mile from their opulent homes. Their exploitation of poor working class peo\u00adple became so ugly and transparent that they were given the pejorative nickname, \u201cRobber Barons.\u201d\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Today is the recall election for Scott Walker in Wisconsin, and the money is flowing in for the already bloated campaign expenditures. When it is all said and done estimates are that 70-80 million dollars will have been spent on the election \u2013 much of it coming from out of state. CNN is reporting that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1118,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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