New York is known as America’s most diverse and densely populated city. It is the original melting pot, a place in which people from all over the world have convened to pursue a better life. For generations, the Lower East Side of Manhattan functioned as the epicenter of this uniquely American experience. During the late 19th century, the United States experienced a period of frenetic economic and industrial development.
This change gave rise to massive fortunes and a new standard of living for many. These economic trends accelerated immigration to the United States, with many latter-day pilgrims arriving in hopes of capturing some of the wealth that only America could create. One such individual was Danish journalist Jacob Riis. Arriving in 1870, he established himself in the Lower East Side where he found life a grim and disheartening experience, one defined by crime, corruption, squalor, and pervasive poverty. Riis would eventually become an American success story, but he never forgot the many faceless individuals who suffered silently in the slums of the Lower East Side.
The rise of the tenement
For decades this small enclave of Manhattan was both the most ethnically diverse and densely populated place on Earth. In an effort to address the housing crisis that emerged in New York City in the years after the Civil War, a new type of apartment building called the tenement had arisen in New York.
By modern standards, these four-eight story buildings were low; at the time they dominated the landscape of Lower Manhattan. Most tenements contained three apartments per floor, ranging from 300-400 square feet per unit. Initially designed to house small families, these spaces were subdivided as more immigrants flocked to the city in search of inexpensive housing and job opportunities. During the Gilded Age, it was common to find up to 10 people living in a single 300 square-foot unit. While many suffered in the tenements, tens thousands of those even less fortunate, many of them children, lived in abject poverty on the streets below.
Overcrowding, poor ventilation, contaminated water, and a lack of sanitation made the neighborhoods a public health disaster. The New York Times wrote that “the downtown East Side district is at present an offense to the eye and a prospective stench to the nostrils exists to an extent that warrants alarm. Several streets in the neighborhood are really in terrible condition. Every pile of snow is garnished with rubbish and decaying matter, and even the sidewalks are not clear of it.” In this environment, infectious disease outbreaks were omnipresent.
Myth vs. reality of 'American experience'
Unsurprisingly, life expectancy and the standard of living rested well below the national average, with infant mortality approaching 65% in 1884. Police corruption and crime only worsened living conditions.
Although he would become famous as a crusading journalist who exposed some of America’s darkest flaws, Jacob Riis did not arrive in the United States planning on becoming a social reformer. In his autobiography, “The Making of An American,” he described being possessed by a romanticized perception of the United States as he first saw her biggest city. “I felt my spirits rise, that somewhere in this teeming hive there would be a place for me,” he wrote. “What kind of a place I had myself no clear notion of. I would let that work out as it could. I had a pair of strong hands; also a strong belief that in a free country, free from the dominion of custom, of caste, as well as of men, things would somehow come right in the end.” Although this drive never left Riis, his preconceived understanding of the American experience ultimately did not conform to the reality he immediately encountered.
One of 15 children, Riis arrived as a 21-year-old Danish carpenter with no money or contacts in the United States. Riis quickly found himself enduring the impoverished lifestyle that he would eventually expose to millions of other Americans. He worked as an iron worker and coal miner in Pennsylvania, then a farmer in upstate New York. None of these pursuits provided stable housing or income for Riis and he found himself living homeless and hungry for many of his early years in America. He knew what it was to beg on the street, roam amongst tenements, and have one’s possessions stolen. He eventually returned to New York City where he became all too familiar with the tenement houses, police lodges, and crime-ridden streets of the Lower East Side.
These experiences hardened Riis, but inspired his empathetic nature and progressive vision. After years of odd jobs and financial insecurity, Riis began working as a newspaper reporter. In 1877, he became the police reporter for the New York Tribune. From this stable perch, he probed the social conditions that gave rise to poverty and crime –- factors that included slum housing, police corruption, and political malfeasance. Yet, he also used his relationship with the police as a tool for enforcing tenement safety codes and preventing crime. Nightly expeditions into the Lower East Side with then NYPD Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt formed a relationship the two would cherish for decades.
Roosevelt, who would become governor and, later president, admired Riis, writing in 1901, “Riis possessed the great advantage of having himself passed through not a few of the experiences of which he had to tell. The horror of the police lodging-houses struck deep in his soul. He had known what it was to sleep in doorsteps and go days in succession without food. All these things he remembered.”
Riis’ friend and fellow journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote in 1903 that though “Riis was poor in pocket, he was rich in sentiment and strength and courage,” adding that “the evils he suffered and the evils he saw moved his pity and turned him not to tears, but to…[a determination to fight] through despair to set the wrong right.”
Riis exposed the slum experience
Only by bringing Americans into the slums of Lower Manhattan, Riis believed, could he provoke the emotional response necessary to propel the matter to the forefront of any political agenda. But how?
Riis was not the first journalist to confront the horrid living conditions of the Lower East Side. Other reputable reporters and reformers made similar attempts, but conveying the decrepit environment of the Lower East Side through words on a page proved insurmountable even for the most gifted writers of the era.
John Hoskins Griscom, who headed the New York City Health Department in the 1840s, was one of the city’s most notable early reform advocates. Educated by the Quakers, he was the first to use the phrase “how the other half lives.” Griscom had initially been hired by the city as an inspector to investigate disease and mortality in New York, and he made the unprecedented suggestion of “regulating building construction and sanitation.”
For his troubles, Griscom was fired, and his report disregarded. But his pursuit of reform would not be stifled by his abrupt dismissal. In 1845, Griscom published "The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York." Alexander von Hoffman, a researcher at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies argues that “this pivotal work articulated the argument for sanitation and housing reform that would be repeated in the United States throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century.”
There was, however, an inherent difficulty in truly communicating the profoundly squalid living conditions of the Lower East Side of the mid-19th century. So Riis was constantly on the lookout for new methods of explaining poverty to his readers. He felt that his words and even drawings could not adequately capture the city’s grim living conditions. He reflected in his autobiography that, “though a drawing might have done it, I cannot draw, and never could. I wrote, but it seemed to make no impression.” The solution, as it often does, would arrive in the form of a new technology that would help reveal the depth of America’s social ills.
A picture (and a flash) worth 1,000 words
Although photojournalism was a common tool by the time Riis was hired at the New York Tribune, using cameras was impractical and in many cases impossible for the kind of investigative reporting he was doing. Unlike the gruesome images that exposed Americans to the horrors of slavery and the Civil War decades earlier, the slums of the Lower East Side presented a unique set of photographic difficulties. As a police journalist, Riis did most of his investigative field work at night. Cameras of the era could not capture images without plenty of light. Also, tenements were notoriously dark, even during the day. These factors made photographing the poverty of the Lower East Side impractical. Riis knew that only a technological innovation could bring his line of journalism and photography together. In 1887, such an innovation suddenly emerged. Riis knew immediately that it could have a profound impact on his work.
“One morning, scanning my newspaper at the breakfast table, I put it down with an outcry that startled my wife,” he wrote. “There it was, the thing I had been looking for all those years. A way had been discovered to take picture by flashlight. The darkest corner might now be photographed.”
What Riis had read was an article about magnesium flash powder. Invented by two German chemists, this technology was the first practical and affordable means of brightening an environment for photographic purposes. Though this compound was relatively safe, it was not without flaws. Incorrectly mixing magnesium and barium nitrate could inadvertently result in explosions capable of severing limbs or permanently blinding those present. Early accounts retell how it startled bystanders and horses, and "even police officers could confuse its effects with those of Fenian dynamiters.” Despite its drawbacks, Riis knew this technology could be central to his fight against the darkness of the Lower East Side.
Within several weeks of reading about magnesium flash powder, Riis had assembled a team of photographers willing to accompany him on one of his evening expeditions through the tenements. Riis recalls that they set out in earnest and “invaded the East Side by night, bent on letting in the light where it was so much needed.”
Initially, residents of the tenements did not respond kindly to this new technology. In recalling his first several attempts at taking flash photographs, Riis writes that, “The flash powder was contained in cartridges fired from a revolver. The spectacle of half a dozen strange men invading a house in the midnight hour armed with big pistols which they shot off recklessly was hardly reassuring. It was not to be wondered if the tenants bolted through windows and down fire escapes wherever we went. But as no one was murdered, things calmed down after a while.” Despite these troubles, Riis had finally found a method of bringing the American middle and upper classes into his fight for urban reform.
This technology instantly altered the effectiveness of his work. Previously, reports of overcrowding or sanitation issues could only be recorded and documented through Riis’s words, but with photographs, Riis could now display visual proof to the American public and its elected officials. His first pictures proved more effective than any of his previous articles or drawings. A story headlined “Five Cents a Spot” shows several individuals sitting within a filthy and crowded tenement room. This room was designed to accommodate four people at most, but 15 people, including an infant, were living there for a cost of five cents each, giving this now infamous photo its name.
After this discovery, Riis followed his standard procedure and submitted a report to the Health Board of New York City, but “it did not make much of an impression -- these things rarely do when put in mere words.” It was only after he revealed the images that verifiable action arrived. Riis recalls that after showing the images, “there was no appeal. Neither the landlord’s protests nor the tenant’s plea could refute the camera’s evidence. I had at last an ally in the fight.” After Riis embraced flash photography, public outrage and political action soon followed, forever altering the relationship between journalism, photography, and policy making.
Photo essay changes American politcal history
Riis published his most consequential work in Scribner’s Magazine in 1889. “How the Other Half Lives” included 18 images depicting life in the Lower East Side. Despite Riis’ initial struggle to find a publisher, this work would soon become one of the most transformative works in American political history.
“How the Other Half Lives” proved an immediate success, becoming a national bestseller and receiving almost exclusively positive reviews in the press. Public opinion ultimately aligned with Riis, as well, gradually forcing the slow gears of government to move in furtherance of reform.
By 1901, Theodore Roosevelt was describing Riis as “the most useful citizen of New York.” His exciting prose and disheartening images allowed people to finally understand the plight of the invisible. With this transformative work came a public fascination that only craved more images and information, and a newly reinvigorated effort towards political action developed not just in New York, but across the nation.
After publication of “How the Other Half Lives,” urban reform became central to political discussions throughout the United States. In a matter of days, conversations on the Lower East Side became a topic of outrage everywhere and pressure rapidly mounted on local officials to act. Embarrassed by the detailed portrayal of the area and its many problems, New York officials voted to demolish the structures in Mulberry Bend and build a public park on the spot instead.
New York passed 'Tenement House Law'
In 1901, New York’s legislature passed landmark legislation, the Tenement House Law, which set minimum square footage requirements, lighting standards, and required indoor plumbing. Crucially, it also outlawed the construction of dumbbell tenements. These units dominated the landscape of the Lower East Side, and because of their architecture, did not allow air to circulate throughout the entire unit. Additionally, the small alleyways between dumbbell units were famously hazardous and became centers for garbage, human waste disposal, and crime. This legislative victory was a defining threshold in the progressive movement, American journalism, and the life of Jacob Riis. Though challenging social issues inevitably persisted in New York and other major urban centers, this success showed the effectiveness of modern journalism and established a revised framework for channeling public outrage into tangible action.
Riis continued to be a force in American politics for decades beyond the publication of “How the Other Half Lives.” “It was Riis who exposed the contamination of the city’s water supply,” investigative journalist Lincoln Steffens said at that time. “Riis spoke the word that incited Roosevelt to abolish police station lodging houses. He demanded light for the darkest tenement hallways. He even worked for the abolition of child labor and when a law was enacted, compelled its enforcement. No citizen ever devoted himself so completely to the welfare of the city and no one has accomplished so many specific, tangible reforms.”
Riis not only became one of America’s most influential reformers, but he created a new approach to journalism that remains effective today. Truly capturing the extent of human struggle often demands the utilization of means of expression beyond the written word. Riis knew that to make his pain felt by others, he would have to show the Lower East Side as he witnessed it every day. Achieving this required a creative embrace of modern technology and a zealous attitude for reform. Collective action is difficult in any circumstance, but Jacob Riis proves that if a deep-seated passion can be effectively channeled and illustrated, progress can be made on even the most daunting problems.
