This photograph, colorized by Marina Amaral, was taken by Jacob Riis and included in his book
How the Other Half Lives. The images in his book, like this one, showed an America that many people in the upper- and middle- class were unaware of.
Source: (Reddit/Colorized by Marina Amaral).
America became an industrial superpower after the Civil War. Unskilled southern and eastern European, Jewish and Asian immigrants arrived, with over 5.2 million immigrants arriving in the 1880s. Many of them remained in New York City, and the population of the city increased by 25%. This population boom made the tenement problem more severe. With the elevated railway in 1889, the neighborhood became worse.
Trying To Find Solutions
Prior to the publication of
How the Other Half Lives, the slums were viewed as a problem by various groups who all sought solutions to the problems in the slums; these groups ranged from the American Red Cross to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, but their focus was local rather than national.
Life In The Tenements
Lodgers in a crowded Bayard Street tenement. Source: (Wikipedia).
By 1865, prior to the mass immigration in the 1880s, there were already 15,309 tenements in New York and the population was nearly 1 million. The tenement, a maximum density housing for the poor, was within the constraints of a 25-by-100 foot lot; each tenement had more than three families living independently of one another or more than two families on a floor, often sharing bathrooms.
The Lower East Side neighborhood which Riis photographed was called the Five Points. It had been the site of a freshwater pond which was a source of drinking water. In the 18th century, businesses were built along its shores to use the water, and over time, they began to contaminate the pond. Eventually, they filled in the pond and middle- class people began to live there, but because the site was poorly designed, conditions disintegrated, and they fled, so the newly arrived immigrants began to reside there. Crime began to increase exponentially and was alleged to have the highest murder rate of anywhere in the world in the1800s. It was also the location of a number of outbreaks of infectious diseases. Overcrowding was rampant. One tenement, the Old Brewery, which had been Coulthard’s Brewery in the 1790s, was converted to a tenement/boarding house. According to the 1850 census, 221 people were living in the 35 apartments in the Old Brewery alone.
Jacob Riis And The Tenements
Children sleeping in Mulberry Street. Source: (vintagenews.com).
Jacob Riis, who captured the images of the Lower East Side tenements, was an immigrant himself, arriving from Denmark in 1870, and ending up living in the Lower East Side. He went back to Denmark for a while, eventually returning to New York and becoming a police reporter. He started taking pictures as a hobby and used his photography in his police reports. In order to capture the dark, dingy conditions in the tenements, he used magnesium powder. Using a detective camera, he began collecting images of life in the slums in 1888; less than a month later, he began lecturing in New York City churches, using his images on a projection screen. The lectures were reviewed in several newspapers, and in February 1889, he published a magazine article in Scribner magazine. His book, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York was published in January 1890, and was one of the first books of photojournalism.
Beyond The Photographs
Source: (vintagenews.com).
In the book, he described the conditions in the tenements and in the sweatshops where the poor earned a few cents per day. Riis claimed that the tenement system had failed because of the wealthier class’s greed and neglect. He also asserted that there was a correlation between the crime rate and behavior of the poor and their lack of decent housing. At the end of the book, he also posed a solution, as he explained that the living conditions for the poor were imposed by society.
Outcomes Of Publication
Mulberry Bend and the Italian Quarter, which was later razed. Source: ( Wikipedia).
The book was well received and it even influenced Theodore Roosevelt. While Roosevelt was President of the Police Board, he worked with Riis to abolish police lodging houses, reenact the Civil Service Law and the Tenement House Commission. They also worked to pass laws to increase the number of factory inspectors, and to make the eight-hour and prevailing rate of wages law effective.
Other reforms included the establishment of the Tenement House Committee in 1894, which established the New York Tenement House Act. This outlawed rear tenements. The Tenement House Act of 1901 included regulations to increase fire safety regulations, increase the light requirements and increase the room space for the tenements. It also led to the razing of Mulberry Bend, which was replaced with a city park, now known as Columbus Park.
