Seeing How the Other Half Lives Using Photo Journalism To Expose Social Issues

Jacob A. Riis 1849-1914 1870 arrived in New York as a Danish immigrant He too spent nights in police station lodging houses Left city and worked variety of rural jobs, returned in 1877 found steady employment as a police reporter for the Tribune (1877-1887) wrote and lectured stressing his view that the poor were victims rather than makers of their fate 1887 invention of flash photography allowed photos of dark tenements

Flash photography allowed Riis to photograph slum life (did this to shift public opinion from acceptance to realization that living conditions as that must be improved) Riis added “magic lantern” slide show to his lectures People talked to photographs and were able to immediately understand it as a severe and intolerable threat to human dignity Major influence in launching tenement housing reform, improving sanitary conditions, and creating public parks and playgrounds The Jacob A. Riis collection is at the Museum of the City of New York

Hell’s Kitchen and Sebastopol

Tenement Turf Wars Once a bastion of poor working-class Irish Americans Neighborhoods and tenements usually dominated by certain race or nationality gangs battled over “turf”

Evolution of the tenement in twenty years Tenement of 1863, for twelve families on each flat

An Old Rear-Tenement in Roosevelt Street

Tenement Troubles Fire escapes were placed so that they were hard to reach “The Ship” was famous for being a “ramshackle tenement” filled with the oddest tenants Some tenements were so dark you might stumble over the children in the hallway

The Mulberry Bend

Now known as “Little Italy” Shops very small hardly enough room “The woman do all the carrying, all the work one sees going on in ‘the Bend.’ The men sit or stand in the streets, on trucks, or in the open doors of saloons smoking black clay pipes,”

Lodgers in a Crowded Bayard Street Tenement- “Five Cents a Spot”

Bunks in a Seven-Cent Lodging House, Pell Street

What has been done “Their number will decrease steadily until they shall have become a bad tradition of a heedless past. The dark, unventilated bedroom is going with them , and the open sewer.” Still needed more law enforcement Landlords would claim their “private rights, for which he is ready and bound to fight to the last.”

Sewing and Starving in an Elizabeth Street Attic

Women/Child Labor “American girls never whimper” Many women Calico wrappers made a $1.50 a dozen The Women’s Investigating Committee found the majority of the children employed in these factories to be under the working age, truant officers would send the youngest children home, but they would be back to work within a months time

“knee-pants” at Forty-Five Cents a Dozen- a Ludlow Street Sweater’s Shop

“The bulk of the sweater’s work is done in tenements” Children under 14 not allowed to work; however children worked from when they were old enough to “pull a thread” Legal work days were ten hours; but work days went much longer than that Workers were supposed to have a 45 min. dinner break, but they had to eat while they worked

A Black-and-Tan Dive in “Africa”

“There is no more clean and orderly community in New York than the new settlement of colored people that is growing up on the East Side from Yorkville to Harlem.” “In this respect he is immensely the superior of the lowest of the whites, the Italians, and the Polish Jews, below whom he has been classed in the past in the tenant scale.” African Americans always had to pay more in rent even higher than those in the worst rooms

A Growler Gang in Session

Every block had a gang, but not always on the best of terms with the next block All the gangs were about “defiance of law and order They all wanted to be “pinched” (arrested) this would make them a hero among their peers An ambitious boy wanting to work his way up in the gang might rob a “lush” (a drunken man who has “strayed his way”)

Bandits Roost

The Tramp

Also called “sitters” Occasionally find jobs in saloons on cold winter nights “the barkeeper permits them to sit about the stove and by shivering invite the sympathy of transient customers.” To look as miserable as possible they have to stay awake To ensure that they stay awake the barkeepers will have them sit with their leg swinging and if they stop or start to fall asleep they are awakened by a kick

A Tramp’s nest in Ludlow Street

“Didn’t Live Nowhere”

There were lodging houses for boys and girls They were allowed to come and go as they pleased as long as they behaved themselves The boys were said to be “growing character” which would be better for them than if they had a fortune

Street Arabs at Night, Mulberry Street

Street Arabs, Mulberry Street, Retreat in Church Corner

Street Arabs “They are to be found all over the city, these Street Arabs, where the neighborhood offers a chance of picking up a living in the daytime and of ‘turning in’ at night with a promise of security from surprise A truck in the street in warm weather would be a convenient out house Some were caught making a “nest” in an iron pipe by Harlem Bridge

How can pictures bring more attention to a problem or issue than a written description?