New York City. 1863. The Civil War raged on. An extraordinary thing occurred amid the dangerous streets and crumbling tenement houses of the Five Points, the notorious 19th-century Lower Manhattan ...

Spying flames vomiting from a Manhattan tenement one night last week, a scavenging junkman named Roderick Good turned in an alarm. In their beds in the five-story rookery lay more than 100 tenants.

“I don’t want to grow up to be any dumb guy,” said one Manhattan slum kid recently. Such children know adults who cannot even read the want ads, and sense the despair of unskilled teen-agers loitering ...