riis how the other half lived ch 767

How the Other Half Lived:

Social Problems Crying Out

For a Social Gospel

Photographs by Jacob Riis, 1890-1910

NEW POPULATIONS

Children on Ellis Island

In Poverty Gap, West 28 Street: an English coal-heavers’ home

Old Barney in Cat Alley

Greek children in Gotham Court

Italian Feast of Saint Roco, Mulberry Street

Talmud School in Hester Street tenement

Jewish Sabbath Eve in a coal cellar, Ludlow Street

Chinese man reading notices

Mountain Eagle, an Iroquois, and his family

African American man in a saloon

THE CITY STREETS

“The Bend” (Mulberry Street in Five Points)

Hester Street, early 1890’s

Boys and men in a Jewish neighborhood

Street vendors

Children in front of store

Horse-drawn merry-go-round

On the slide

Livestock on “the Bend”

Willett Street

Sanitation under Tammany Hall regime

Street cleaning, Fourth Street

An ash-barrel, about 1888

HOUSING

“Shanty town”

Block of tenements

“The Homestead” in “the Bend”

Old house on a Bleecker Street back lot

Hell’s Kitchen and Sebastopol

“Dens of death”

“The sun never enters here”

The Barracks, tenements on Mott Street

“Chinatown”

Panorama of fire-escapes

Typical tenement fire-escape serving as an extension of the flat, Allen Street

Fire escapes as additional living space

Outlawed rear tenements

Archway from illegal first rear tenement leading to stairs to second illegal rear tenement

“Blindman’s Alley”

Playing in the alley

Jersey Street tenements

Baxter Street Court

Bottle Alley, backyard in Mulberry Bend

Tenement-house backyard

Ice on a burnt-out building

“The last mulberry”

INSIDE THE TENEMENTS

Entry way to tenement building

Tenement hallway

Child playing in tenement hallway

Attic living space

“Living quarters”

Interior view of tenement flat

Room in a tenement, 1910

Couple in their home

Old Mrs. Benoir, an Indian woman, in her Hudson Street attic

Upstairs in Blind Man’s Alley

A flat in the pauper barracks, West 38 Street, with all its furniture

Ludlow Street cellar habitation

The man slept in this cellar for four years, about 1890

Pig inside tenement

MAKING A LIVING

Lodgers in a crowded Bayard Street tenement--- “five cents a spot”

Vegetable stand in the bend

Elderly street vendor with well-dressed customer

Stale bread vendor

Selling pencils

Shoemaker, Broome Street, early 1890’s

Baxter Street alley, Rag-Pickers’ Row

Bags waiting for rag pickers

In the home of an Italian rag-picker, Jersey Street

Delivering clothes from sweatshop

“Knee-pants” at forty-five cents a dozen--- a Ludlow Street sweater’s shop

Two women and a girl sewing pants

Women doing piece work for the “sweater”

Sewing in an Elizabeth Street attic

Necktie workshop in a Division Street tenement, 1889

12-year-old boy in a sweat-shop

Family making artificial flowers

Women doing needlework in tenement sweatshop

Czech cigar makers at work in their tenement

FAMILIES

Gotham Court girls at home

Italian boy learning to write

Classroom in the condemned Essex Street Public School

Cooling off on the roof of the Barracks

The street as playground

“Their playground a truck”

Minding the baby--- scene in Gotham Court

Boys from the Italian quarter next to a “Keep Off the Grass” sign

Boys ball team

Fighting tuberculosis on the roof

“A home nurse”

“A little mother”

Minding the baby on Cherry Hill

Elderly sisters, Vandam Street

Ancient lodger, Eldridge police station, about 1890

“The white badge of mourning”

Potter’s Field common trench

ADDICTIONS AND VIOLENCE

A down-town ‘morgue’ or saloon

Women drinking in a dive

Boy sent out to buy beer

Opium smoker in Chinatown

Mug shots of “typical toughs”

The Short Tail Gang, meeting under a pier at the foot of Jackson Street

Bandit’s Roost

The “Montgomery Guards”

Young gang members being drilled

“Safe from the cops”

Members of the gang showing how they “did the trick”

Stealing from a street vendor

Blackwell Island Penitentiary

Prisoners breaking stone at Blackwell Island Penitentiary

Blackwell Island Female Almshouse

DESTITUTION

Tramp in a Mulberry Street yard

Ludlow Street cellar lodging house

Women bundled up on floor of boarding house

Bunks in a lodging house

Bunks in “Happy Jack’s Canvas Palace,” seven-cent lodging house

Lodger in “Happy Jack’s Canvas Palace”

An all-night two-cent restaurant in the Bend

Police station lodgers waiting to be let out

Police station lodgers, Madison Street

Quarters for the night in police station

22nd Street Police Station lodgers “where the typhus came”

Women lodgers in police station, West 47th Street

Women in Elizabeth Street police station

Living under the dump, Rivington Street

Under the dump at West 35 Street

Child of the dump

THE LEAST OF THESE

Kids shooting craps

Night messenger

Tommy holding his shoeshine kit

Boys making paper bags

News boys in the Sun press room, 2 A.M.

Newsboys in the Sun office, 3 A.M.

“Didn’t live nowhere”

“Scotty in his lair up at the Hudson River”

Homeless children in sleeping quarters (areaway, Mulberry Street)

Abandoned children in sleeping spot

Homeless boys in night quarters

Homeless children outside a church (Mulberry Street)

Battered girl

Lost Children’s Department at police station

Girl of the tenements