Right here in River City
Well here is something I would love to know more about – the early history of the Home of the Good Shepherd in Wallingford, in Seattle. I’ve been familiar with the building that housed it for years, indeed decades. It belongs to the city now, and houses various organizations; the grounds around it are a city park. I think I always vaguely knew it had been some kind of “homeforunmarriedmothers”…but I’ve been learning to treat that archaic term with more suspicion, plus “Good Shepherd” is one of the four orders that ran those houses of horror the Magdalene laundries, so…
So I finally got around to looking it up, and sure enough.
The Home of the Good Shepherd, located at 4649 Sunnyside Avenue in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood, opened in 1907 to provide shelter, education, and guidance to young girls. The Home generated revenue by operating a commercial laundry, as did many other Good Shepherd institutions. Girls were referred by the courts or brought in by their families from throughout Washington and sometimes Alaska.
Check. Check. Check.
The Sisters of the Good Shepherd believed that by providing the benefits of a stable and loving home, the girls could become responsible, moral, and caring women.
Bad syntax there, but you can tell what it’s trying to say. You can also read on and see that the sisters’ idea of a stable and loving home is rather…Catholic.
The south wing of the building housed the “penitent” girls, those whom society considered “wayward” and rooms for those nuns who worked with them…
The nuns frequently led the girls in religious song as they walked to and from meals and Mass. Spiritual quotations were posted on classroom walls and devotional statues of saints were found throughout the Home’s stairways, hallways, and grounds. The Sisters of the Good Shepherd demonstrated to the girls a pious and moral lifestyle.
Not altogether homey…plus it was a prison.
For the first half of the institution’s history, residents rarely were allowed to leave the grounds or hear news of the outside world. Thus, the residents’ most coveted privilege was “parlor” — receiving approved visitors every other Sunday…The girls could not be trusted and neither could the outside world. To prevent residents from seeing the outside world and leaving the Home, locked doors and opaque glass were used in the earlier years. A little later, barred windows, barbed wire fences, then window alarms were installed. Though these measures appeared harsh for some; for others, it offered protection and safety and enabled to them concentrate on rehabilitating and healing.
You bet.
If the account is accurate (and that’s a big if), it was overall less harsh than the Irish versions, but it was still a theocratic prison. The big difference seems to be that the sentence wasn’t for life. Other than that, it’s a nasty business.
So that estate is now meridian park? It’s amazing the city moved the whole building though. It looks huge.
Hm, Meridian Park? I guess that’s the name…I forget. But no, the building wasn’t moved. It IS huge. There’s a great view from the top floor landings – and by the same token, the building is visible for miles; from the Aurora bridge for instance.
A nearby Catholic school uses the park as its very own athletic field, which is irritating, because it’s a park, not an athletic field, and they rip the lawn to shreds. Plus of course they should be paying for their own damn field. They probably think the whole thing still really belongs to them.
I maintained that park one summer and fall, and I used to do my best to get in their way. If I’d known then what I know now…
Ha. I live nearby the Aurora pedestrian bridge but always turn my gaze south. I guess I never really paid attention to the structure before. I bet it would make for the basis of a good ghost story of the Guillermo Del Toro type. Which reminds me, a Christian film company was shooting a ghost story in Wallingford back in April. I contacted the producer for an interview and was supposed to cover it for a local blog, but had a conflict of schedules. If I’m thinking of the right place, this is where they hold Tilth every year.
Yes, that’s the Tilth place. I got to know the gardeners who ran it when I was maintaining the park – one was Carl Eliot who used to do a gardening thing on KUOW (and maybe still does). Swell guys – garden geeks. I love geeks.
I’m curious who these “others” were, who so easily dismissed opaque glass and barbed wire fences in the name of “protection and safety.” Local homeowners? The nuns in charge?
Something tells me it wasn’t any of the people who were “healing.”
Really.
I would love to know some hard facts about how old the girls/women were when they were let out. I would love to know if any were held after the age of 21 – in other words once they were no longer minors.
Ophelia, did you also see this?
http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=5744
No; thanks Steve. Interesting. It sounds very coercive in the way one might expect for 1949, but way short of the Irish version. Not a life sentence, in short.
Barbed wire fences let the inmates concentrate on healing. Imagine that. I suppose attack dogs could allow them to focus on salvation. There are no bounds.
I remember asking my mother many times what that place was, probably on our annual trip to the zoo, and remember her telling us that it was a home for girls. And I remember figuring out that covert information, that it was for girls who were pregnant, or runaways, or bad in some way.
The link Steve posted tells a pretty chilling story, even though not as crushing as the Irish laundries. The idea that the sheriff would up and take a girl, at her family’s request, to a Catholic jail for girls, and there she’d be until someone decided to let her out, with no warning. God. It gives me the creeps. The threats, the running hot and cold, nice sometimes, cruel other times, the work (whose sheets were they washing anyway?), the kneeling to tell “Mother” some problem or other, right in front of the whole school. Not what I’d call a “stable and loving home.”
Thought it said “Rivet City”. Was :D
Realised it wasn’t about Harkness at all. Was :\
Today the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd numbers approximately 5,600 sisters. The general superior and her councilors reside in Rome, which is the seat of the central government. The pope must be keeping a good eye on them, seeing that they ate on his own doorstep.
I note that they appeared to give the ‘correctional’ girls in their care some education, despite the fact that the order is not a teaching one. The ethos of the Sisters of Mercy – a teaching order, was to educate those in their care, however in over one hundred years at Goldenbridge industrial school, only one person (Christine Buckley) received education up to Leaving Cert standard. (I don’t know American equivalent).
Claire, I know…it’s funny how one just absorbed that somehow, isn’t it. Funny but not in a good way. When I was a kid, girls who Did That might as well have been a different species.
Jackie Moen who gave her testimony (Steve’s link) was obviously treated as a ‘special’ from the moment she went to the correctional home at seventeen years old. I would surmise that her middle-class background would have endeared her to the nuns.
The whole set-up there was so different in lots of respect to that of Irish Magdalen laundries and industrial schools in Ireland. It reminds me somewhat of British remand homes. There was more interaction between the nuns and girls. What with the swimming pool and all the sports and educational activities? It was a kind of a cross between a remand and boarding school. I would have much preferred by far to have been there than in Goldenbridge industrial school. It was like a palace in comparison to GB which was a hell-hole.
I note one specific similarity between Mother Serena and GB’s Sr Severia (sic). They were both control freaks who wanted to run their respective joints with iron fists.
“Home, home, home, when you get home, you won’t be home for 5 minutes. You’ll be out on 2nd Avenue with the sailors.” …. She would shame girls.
Yeah, I can so readily identify with this by association, as this kind of spiel was regularly meted out to children at GB — who were far younger than the ones at the Seattle home to boot. Children who grew up in the system; who never knew anything; or very little about the outside world were tormented with this type of mantra. They were judging children — like mother like child. Admittedly, I was never on the receiving end of this abusive behaviour.
A girl that wet her bed had to wear her sheets with a big sign on it that said “fish.” Not psychologically oriented at all. I don’t know what her educational background was but, of course, we know more now.
I would love to know what the testimonial was of this inmate. Something tells me that it would be a far cry from that of Jackie Moen. The ‘specials’ ‘pets’ ‘la la’s’ were the bane of our lives at GB. I’d guess JM was not popular. She had be told that she was treating a child harshly. Pets tend to follow their mentors in dishing out cruel behaviour. It’s heartening to know that she done well and became a social worker.