The Photographer Who Changed the World

After seeing the photos in my previous blogs that revealed the horrors of the slums of Five Points, in NYC, some of you wondered how the photographs affected the photographer. Here’s the answer.

The photographer who documented these slums was Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant who suffered in poverty when he first arrived in NYC in 1870. A writer and carpenter, he eventually got a job for the “New York Tribune”. He had a real heart for the poor and decided to take the night shift, where he took photographs of the harrowing victims of the Lower East Side. Robert Hughs said, "In the 1880s 334,000 people were crammed into a single square mile of the Lower East Side, making it the most densely populated place on earth. They were packed into filthy, disease-ridden tenements, 10 or 15 to a room, and the well-off knew nothing about them and cared less."

Riis wanted to change all that. He was one of the first to use flash photography, which enabled him to get photographs of the night, including the stale-beer dives where men (and women) would go to sleep for two-cents. They overpaid. “Usually, as in this instance, it is in some cellar giving on a back alley. Doctored, unlicensed beer is its chief ware. Sometimes a cup of “coffee” and a stale roll may be had for two cents. The men pay the score. To the women—unutterable horror of the suggestion—the place is free. The beer is collected from the kegs put on the sidewalk by the saloon-keeper to await the brewer’s cart, and is touched up with drugs to put a froth on it. The privilege to sit all night on a chair, or sleep on a table, or in a barrel, goes with each round of drinks. Generally an Italian, sometimes a negro, occasionally a woman, “runs” the dive. Their customers, alike homeless and hopeless in their utter wretchedness, are the professional tramps, and these only. The meanest thief is infinitely above the stale-beer level. Once upon that plane there is no escape. To sink below it is impossible; no one ever rose from it.”

The preceding was a quote from Riis’ book How the Other Half Lives, which was instrumental in creating awareness of the slums, and in eliciting change—for in the back of the book, Riis offered suggestions.
 

Riis’ photographs could not be reproduced at the time, but were the source and inspiration for ink drawings that appeared in many magazines and newspapers.

 The work of Riis inspired Theodore Roosevelt (at the time the New York police commissioner) and Lincoln Steffens, one of many who helped create investigative journalism. "He (Riis) not only got the news; he cared about the news. He hated passionately all tyrannies, abuses, miseries, and he fought them. He was a terror to the officials and landlords responsible, as he saw it, for the desperate condition of the tenements where the poor lived. He had exposed them in articles, books, and public speeches, and with results. All the philanthropists in town knew and backed Riis, who was able then, as a reformer and a reporter, too, to force the appointment of a Tenement House Commission that he gently led and fiercely drove to an investigation and a report which—followed up by this terrible reporter—resulted in the wiping out of whole blocks of rookeries, the making of small parks, and the regulation of the tenements."

 I am inspired by Riis. Without his photographs we might not know how things really were for the immigrants of the nineteenth century. The world changed for the better because of his tenacity./Nancy Moser

The Children of the Streets

The immigrant slums of Five Points (what's currently the Lower East Side in New York City) were hell for the children who lived there in the nineteenth century. Children were street-wise by a ridiculously early age. And what did they encounter on the streets?  Danger from horses, carts, and lack of food, gangs, criminals, boredom, freezing temperatures, and an absence of supervision. 

To make ends meet both parents had to work, often leaving the children to fend on their own, to take care of each other, or even to find ways to make money themselves.  They sold what they could find: scrap wood, bits of coal, newspapers, or stale bread.  Or they'd steal.  Or gamble.  Now, living in an age when we're wary of letting our children walk a few blocks to school or go to the mall by themselves, this freedom--and its consequences--is beyond comprehension.

And then there were the orphans. Tens of thousands of them (who actually had parents, or not) all alone, without anyone to love or hold them. It tears my heart out to see the pictures of children huddled together in the cold.

The photo below is of a mere baby playing in the hallway of a tenement near the communal water tap. Did this child live?  Flourish? Was she hungry?

There were organizations who tried to help. The New York Foundling Hospital, the Children's Aid Society, and other organizations did their best to take in the poor children, often sending them out West to willing families (ever hear of the Orphan Trains?) One orphanage used to put a crib outside its door so mothers would leave their baby there rather than on the curb.  But it kept filling up so quickly, they had to bring it indoors.//Nancy Moser

Where the Immigrants Lived

If you were an immigrant traveling to America via New York city in the last half of the nineteenth century, New York might have been but a pause on a longer journey. But if you planned to stay in New York and check out those heralded “streets paved with gold” you often ended up—you often looked for—an area of the city where there were others of your kind. And that place for Italians, Jews, Irish, Russians...was Five Points. If you’ve seen the horrendously violent movie, “The Gangs of New York” (I do NOT recommend it--I couldn't get through it) you know that in the 1840’s and 50’s this area of what is now the Lower East Side was not for the faint of heart.

Five Points, and Mulberry Street, the area where the Scarpellis live in my novel Masquerade, at one time was a neighborhood for the middle class. But when they had water problems because of an underground spring, the area was abandoned to the poor. It was the first American slum. In 1880 there were 37,000 tenements housing nearly 1.1 million people. Most were one or two room apartments.  There was no running water and the bedrooms often had no windows at all.  The buildings were so close together people could hand things across the alley, window to window.

More than 100,000 immigrants lived in rear apartments (behind other buildings) that were wholly unfit for human habitation. "In a room not thirteen feet either way slept twelve men and women, two or three in bunks set in a sort of alcove, the rest on the floor."  There were also rooms where people could sleep for five cents a night, stranger next to stranger.

Most people--if they could get a job--worked 12-14 hours a day. There were thousands of homeless children on the streets, often abandoned by their parents.  I can't imagine the angst of those mothers and fathers, not being able to provide food or shelter... In the summer months 3-4 babies would suffocate in the airless tenements every night.

Mulberry Bend was one of the worst stretch of slums and in 1896 it was demolished to be turned into Columbus Park. Chinatown and Little Italy encroached, as did federal buildings to the south. If you'd like to see more pictures and a virtual tour, go here, to the Tenement Museum site: New York Tenement Museum

In future blogs I'll tell you a little about the children, how people earned a living, and the man who took it upon himself to change things. //Nancy Moser