Howard Colored Orphan Asylum

[1] It was located on Troy Avenue and Dean Street in Weeksville, a historically black settlement in what is now Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York City.

[2] The asylum gradually deteriorated due to lack of funding, and closed in 1918 after an incident involving burst water pipes, which resulted in two students contracting frostbite and having their feet amputated.

In the 1890s, the institution moved away from the indentured system to train students in industrial education to prepare them for the practical world of labor, business, and agriculture but which would limit formal studies.

[3][13] Billed as the "Tuskegee of the North," the orphanage moved 250 children from the Brooklyn location to a 572-acre (231 ha) farm in Kings Park, Long Island to teach practical skills in 1911.

[3][14][15] The property had originally consisted of two large farms and later converted into a similar educational experiment for Jewish people to move away from tailoring and sweatshop occupations in the Lower East Side to agriculture, but the project later failed.

[3] By the mid-1910s, the institution was again in dire need of more funding to house greater numbers of orphans due to the influx of people moving north for work during World War I.

[3] Lack of funds and war shortages contributed to the institution's low coal supply and inability to repair burst pipes due to freezing temperatures.

Following one incident where pipes froze and burst in January 1918, two students contracted frostbite and had to receive foot amputations after they warmed up their feet at the kitchen stoves.