braille

Caption: Blind brother Nandlal came to the orphanage in 1900. He became blind as a result of sore eyes that sometimes follow starvation. J.A. Ressler taught him to read braille. Nandlal says, "The two finest things in Christianity are Christian Fellowship and prayer." 1949.

NYT of July 13, 1914 query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70F1FFA3F5E13738... describes a garden created for the blind on the roof of the new United States Bank Building on Delancey St.

Oddly, there is another NYT article from the week before which seems to be describing the same event, only at the Bank of the United States Building at 77 Delancey Street.
query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D05E3DF1038E633A...
The story of the Bank and its founder Joseph S. Marcus "a Jewish immigrant to the United States. Born in the town of Telz in Germany in 1862, he went to school in Essen and immigrated to the United States at the age of 17 and worked his way up from being a tailor, to a garment industry business, to a banker. He founded the Public Bank in 1906 and the Bank of United States in 1913" is an interesting one.
It was Marcus who created and donated this rooftop garden.
The Bank was the first to collapse at the onset of the Great Depression.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_United_States

The Bank's first building at 77 Delancey Street, from 1914, has obviously seen better days:

Thanks, swanq and artolog, for tracking down the likely site of the roof garden and offering the updates. We'll add information to this and related images when we next update.

my Compliments Masterwork !

Katherine "Katie" McGirr was eight when she survived exposure during an 1888 blizzard, blind and deaf. Two years later she was admitted to the New York Institute for the Deaf. She's mentioned by name in Helen Keller's "The Story of My Life." Elsewhere on Flickr:

Thanks pennylricharsca for this information about Katie McGirr, including this link to the Perkins School. We'll fill in some of the information the next time we update.

See books.google.com/books?id=5rRIAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA37&lp... from The blind-deaf: a monograph, being a reprint of "The deaf-blind," By William Wade for more about her, including a photo (from ~1900) and her own writing.

news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1955&dat=19230902&... indicates that she was employed at the Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind to transcribe letters received in braille.

Thanks swanq for doing this research. What a great story about her night at the theater. The transcription work is most likely what she is doing in the two photographs.