NEW YORK CITY YOUTH BOARD.[RALPH W. WHELAN].
Reaching the Fighting Gang.
New York: New York City Youth Board, 1960.
$750.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-153335
+$500
First Edition of the New York City Youth Board's Reaching the Fighting Gang; Inscribed by Commissioner of Youth Services Ralph W. Whelan
First edition of the New York City Youth Board's account of its work with the street gangs of the 1950s, published in 1960 when the city's gang wars were national news. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed on the front free endpaper by Ralph W. Whelan, "Best wishes Alice and Nicky, Ralph." Whelan was Commissioner of Youth Services for the City of New York and executive vice-chairman of the Youth Board, and he wrote the introduction to the book. Very good in a very good dust jacket. Foreword by Sheldon Glueck. Introduction by Ralph W. Whelan. Rare and desirable signed.
Reaching the Fighting Gang (1960) is the New York City Youth Board's own report on the street club program it ran through the 1950s, in which trained workers were assigned not to offices or settlement houses but to the corners, candy stores and tenements where the city's fighting gangs gathered, with the aim of winning the trust of individual gangs and steering them away from warfare with their rivals. Drawing on case records and the workers' own accounts, it describes how a worker made contact with a gang, how he handled the rumbles, weapons and feuds that defined its life, and how the program tried to connect its members with jobs, schooling and the agencies of the city. It appeared at the height of public alarm over juvenile delinquency, three years after West Side Story carried the gang wars of the West Side onto the Broadway stage, and the board's roster printed in the front of the book, headed by Mayor Robert F. Wagner and including Robert Moses and Police Commissioner Stephen P. Kennedy, shows how high in city government the problem was being handled. The foreword is by Sheldon Glueck, the Roscoe Pound Professor of Law at Harvard, who with his wife Eleanor Glueck carried out the long term studies of delinquent boys published as Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency.
Reaching the Fighting Gang.
$750.00
In Stock