Slums ● Urbanization: a dirty and overcrowded urban street or neighborhood inhabited by very poor people.

Another famous muckraker was Jacob A. Riis. He was a writer and a photographer. During the Progressive Era, he took it upon himself to capture images of the poor living conditions that urban

workers, especially immigrants lived in.

Primary source #1—How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among The Tenements of New York by Jacob A. Riis (1906)

“Long ago it was said that one half of the world does not know how the other half lives… the half that was on top cared little for the struggles and less for the fate of those who were underneath… The younger criminals seem to come almost exclusively (solely) from the tenement house districts… in the tenements all the influences make for evil: because they are the hot-beds of the epidemics (diseases) that carry death…the nurseries of pauperism (very poor people) and crime that fill our jails and police courts...” …

[Then, Mr. Riis begins to explain what he saw in the tenement neighborhoods] The death of a child in a tenement was registered at the Bureau of Vital Statistics as ‘plainly due to suffocation in the foul air (disgusting and unpleasant smell) of an unventilated apartment’”

“[One day] in taking a flash-light picture of a group of blind beggars (person who is very poor and begs for money) in one of the tenements down here… I managed to set fire to the house…There were six of us, five blind men and women who knew nothing of their danger, and myself in an attic room…The thought: how were they ever to get out? Made my blood run cold as I saw the flames creeping up the wall, and my first impulse was to bolt for the street and shout for help. The next was to smother the fire myself, and I did, with a vast deal of trouble. Afterward, when I came down to the street I told a friendly policeman of my trouble. For some reason, he thought it rather a good joke, and laughed immoderately (a lot) at my concern… He told me why, when he found time to draw breath, “Why, don’t you know,” he said, “that house is the Dirty Spoon?” It caught fire six times last winter, but it wouldn’t burn. The dirt was so thick on the walls, it smothered (put out) the fire!”

Jacob A. Riis. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenement of New York. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906)

Primary source #2—How the Other Half Lives by Jacob A. Riis (1906)

“Bandits’ Roost” chapter VI page 63. (photograph by Jacob A. Riis)

“Bottle Alley” chapter VII page 66. (photograph by Jacob A. Riis)

“Lodgers in a crowded Bayard Street Tenement” chapter VII page 69. (photograph by Jacob A. Riis)

In this picture a mother is taking care of her sick baby.

Reform

When Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives in 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau ranked New York as the most densely populated city in the United States. Jacob Riis main intentions were making New York’s wealthy become aware of how the poor lived in their same city. Riis novel led to several reforms.

How the Other Half Lives was an immediate success. Many middle- and upper-class New Yorkers were shocked by the abhorrent (horrible) conditions in the city’s slums, and their outrage was quickly channeled into reform. A few years after the book’s publication, the Tenement House Committee was created. The very next year, the committee passed new tenement requirements to prevent the construction of dark and poorly ventilated buildings. Riis’s work also inspired the New York Tenement House Act of 1901, which implemented new safety regulations such as a fire escape for every apartment and provided for improved living conditions in tenement housing such as an indoor bathroom. Another reform that greatly improved the conditions of slums was the creation of the Department of Sanitation and its commissioner's efforts George Waring, to clean up the streets and create sewage systems.

Under the leadership of NYPD (New York Police Department) Commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, NY police enacted new reforms and new units, such as the Bomb Squad in 1905, Motorcycle Squad in 1911, Automobile Squad in 1919, and more. The department was also among the earliest to implement fingerprinting techniques and mug shots.

Jane Addams was a Progressive reformer and the most prominent advocate for the settlement house movement, which was dedicated to improving social conditions for immigrants and other residents of urban slums. In 1931, she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Addams established Hull-House which was a nursery, kindergarten, playground, gymnasium, and housing for young working women. She worked hard to abolish child labor, establish juvenile courts, limit the hours of working women, make school attendance compulsory, and ensure safe working conditions in factories.

A two-horse street cleaner, NYC, 1905

Jacob RiisAMERICAN MUCKRAKER

Jacob Riis was born on May 3, 1849, in Ribe, Denmark, and emigrated to the United States in 1870 on a steamship. All he carried with him was $40 and a locket containing a hair from a girl he loved. Upon his arrival in New York City, Riis struggled his way through various jobs—ironworker, farmer, bricklayer, salesman—all jobs that gave him an up-close look at the less prosperous side of the American urban environment.

In 1873, Riis became a police reporter, and he quickly found that his deep dive into New York’s underbelly was just beginning. His beat was the Lower East Side, a neighborhood riddled with crime and poverty. With a little digging, Riis discovered the depth of the area’s despair well represented in the fact that in certain tenement buildings the infant death rate was 10 percent.

Riis was moved by what he saw in the neighborhood, and he taught himself basic photography and started taking a camera with him when he hit the streets at night. In a stroke of good timing, flash photography had only recently been invented, and Riis became a pioneer in its use, employing the new technique to capture stark indoor and outdoor night scenes. The images he brought to the public’s eye were full of crowded tenements, dangerous slums and poignant street scene—images of a downtrodden underclass that most readers had only previously read about, at best.

Riis’ photos appeared in books, newspapers and magazines, and before long they were used as tools for social reform. In 1890, Riis’ book, How the Other Half Lives, was published. The book presented statistics about New York’s poverty and contained drawings of the photos from Riis’ unending tour of the city’s worst slums.

The book was an instant success and had an immediate impact. Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, intent on improving life in New York, famously say to Riis, “I have read your book, and I have come to help.” Together Riis and Roosevelt walked around New York, with Riis showing the future president the deplorable conditions in which so many people lived. Roosevelt was moved to close the worst of the city’s police lodging houses, and demanded that city officials pass the first significant legislation to improve the state of affairs in immigrant neighborhoods.

Now a legend for his work toward social reform, and for his use of photography to bring previously hidden worlds to light, Riis went on to write many other books. Riis died on his Massachusetts farm on May 26, 1914.