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

Lying for a Living

Novelists sometimes get teased about "lying for a living." After all. . . we make it up, right?


I remember the first time I told someone that for every novel I write, I probably read at least two dozen works of non-fiction. "But. . . don't you just make it all up?" the wide-eyed and, I think, tempted-to-disbelieve person on the other end of that conversation asked.



Well, of course I make it up. I made up this paragraph for A Claim of Her Own:


"She would have recognized him anywhere. Even if he'd cut the brown hair that hung in ringlets around his broad shoulders. Even if he'd stopped wearing the long, heavily embroidered buckskin coat or abandoned his gleaming ivory-gripped pistols--always worn butt out. In fact, Mattie would recognize Wild Bill Hickok if all she could see whas his hands, because she'd spent more hours than she could count dealing cards to those hands down in Kansas, both before and after Bill's short stint as the sheriff of Abilene."


The thing is. . . to write that paragraph I had to know: What did Wild Bill Hickok look like? What did he wear? When was he in Deadwood? Would the truth fit the timeline of my novel? Why did he wear his guns that way? Did he cross-draw? Where would Mattie have had to have lived before coming to Deadwood, in order to have met and played cards with him? When was Wild Bill Hickok sheriff of Abilene, Kansas? Would that historical fact fit my imagined story? And all of that was just to enable one paragraph in a 100,000 word novel.



It's a good thing I adore the research part of writing historical fiction. Photographs of Wild Bill Hickok aren't hard to find. I used the one above after learning what Deadwood was like in 1876. I could honestly visualize a man dressed like this walking what Mattie sees as "the frenzied and filthy" main street in Deadwood.


As to Wild Bill's guns, those weren't the only weapons I had to research, because Mattie needed to pack, too. What would a young woman carry to defend herself back then? After thinking I knew, I decided I'd better verify my selection. It't not always possible to double check everything, but laziness shouldn't be one of the reasons I make a mistake.


I asked friend and fellow novelist Stephen Bly (http://www.blybooks.com/) what he thought of my choice. His reply began, "Steph. . . sending a lady alone into Deadwood in 1876 is a dangerous thing. . . " and then he showed me the scale of the pistol I had given Mattie next to what she likely would have carried (a Colt pocket pistol). There was no way Mattie would have "hidden" the weapon I chose in the specially-constructed pocket she sewed into every dress she owned. None. Stephen Bly not only saved me from making a big mistake, but also made me laugh when he ended his advice, "...if you really want her safe in Deadwood...give her a double barreled sawed off 10 gauge shotgun. Of course, if she had to fire it, the recoil would knock her into Wyoming." Mattie does end up having to fire a double barreled shotgun...and I made sure to have the recoil knock her a "fur piece." Just not quite into Wyoming.


Another source, Wild Bill Blackerby, was kind enough to show me the "Cavalry Twist." Wild Bill Hickok didn't cross draw, and if I had had him do so in my novel, that would have been a bad mistake. A lot of people know a lot about Wild Bill Hickok!


In the process of researching A Claim of Her Own, I learned about placer mining, Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, small pox (not to be the topic of a future blog), and a man named Reverend Smith who became the prototype for my fictional preacher Aron Gallagher. (That's me at Preacher Smith's grave in Mt. Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood.) Of course I also stopped and photographed the most recent "Dead Man's hand"



someone left at the base of Wild Bill's impressive monument. The stone wall in the foreground of the photo of Wild Bill's grave is where Calamity Jane is buried. And by the way. . . Mt. Moriah Cemetery isn't the original graveyard used in 1876 ... or in my novel. Ingleside was the first cemetery. The bodies were exhumed and moved to Mt. Moriah later. I couldn't have Mattie going up the hill to Mt. Moriah in 1876 to sing at Wild Bill's funeral for more reasons than one. Mt. Moriah wasn't there yet, and Hickok's funeral happened in his friend Charlie's camp.



I may lie for a living, but I do try to make certain it's convincing thanks to my spending time with my literary nose to the grindstone. Now that I think about it ... who invented the grindstone? what kind of 'stone' is it? how much does one weigh? how long does it take to sharpen?

Have a blessed Lord's day, friends ... I have some research to do!



--Stephanie G.

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