Jacob Riis and How The Other Half Lives

At the turn of the 19th century, a Danish immigrant by the name of Jacob Riis set out to change New York City’s slums. Jacob, born in Denmark in the year 1849, emigrated to America when he was 21, carrying little money in his pocket searching for work in the northeast. He ended up working several labor jobs including farming, sales, and ironwork. In 1873, he landed a job at a local newspaper as a police reporter covering stories that eventually landed him in the heart of the tenement slums. It was this turn of fate that caused Jacob to write his book, “How the Other Half Lives,” and push social reform to pass the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901.

Riis worked on Mulberry Street Police Station as a police reporter. There he made professional acquittances with all manner of police officials, including Theodore Roosevelt, the President of the Police Board in New York City. While working there, Riis learned what stories to publish and what stories to keep to himself, so his career and professional relationships would continue. In one instance, Riis was presented, in confidence, a story about an affair known only by Police Commissioner Matthews at the time, and nearly printed it. The Commissioner advised against telling anyone about the affair as it would do no good. Riis persisted about publishing it when Matthews changed the subject by offering Jacob the handles of an electric battery, which Matthews was using for medical reasons at the time. As Jacob said in his autobiography, “I took them, unsuspecting, and felt the current tingle in my finger-tips. The next instant it gripped me like a vice. I squirmed with pain. (Riis, 1901, p216)” This is one of many anecdotes that make up Jacob’s time with the Mulberry Police, as they were not always on his side.

On Jacob’s many trips down Mulberry Street and the lower east side of Manhattan, he came upon the degradation of the slums. As he puts it, ‘It was upon my midnight trips with the sanitary police that the wish kept cropping up in me that there were some way of putting before the people what I saw there. (Riis, 1901, p266)” So he decided to take to photography to record this horrible environment, because his sketches did not depict what he saw very well. While reading the newspaper, Jacob came upon an article that described a way to take photographs in dim lighting, “A way had been discovered, it ran, to take pictures by flashlight.” With this excitement, he sought out Dr. John Nagle, who was working with the Health Department as well as being an amateur photographer, to help him with this new pursuit to illuminate the tenements of the Bend, a particularly nasty part of Mulberry Street. Jacob pulled a group of amateur night photographers together with a few police officers to try and photograph the Bend, with little to no success. All the light cartridges were held in large revolvers, which, when carried around by several men after 12am, scared the daylights out of many of the tenants, who ran before any reasonable photo could be made. After this setback, Jacob hired his own photographer to help him. The photographer proved to be unreliable during the early hours and also sold any photos they took behind Jacob’s back. This compelled Jacob to learn how to photograph on his own, taking a camera with some plates to Potter’s Field, and, consequently, overexposing all the photos he took there. After nearly burning his house down, Riis refined his photography and made the ‘Blitzlicht – literally, flash light” work for him by having it work in a frying pan. Blitzlicht was possible by mixing magnesium and potassium chlorate to create a brief but powerful flash of light. This allowed him to begin work on his book, How the Other Half Live: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890).

Jacob Riis began documentation of the urban decay from Mulberry Bend and Five Points. Taking photos during the late hours, he would come upon unsuspecting dwellers with his flashbulb’s bright glare. This kind of photography is evident in his photo, “Lodgers in a Crowded Bayard Street Tenement — “Five Cents a Spot””, where six or possibly seven men are seen sleeping in a cramped apartment. In 1887, Jacob took a photo of a group of men with full brimmed hats, “…loitering in an alley known as ‘Bandits’ Roost’ (Johnson, 2019)” Riis continued his crusade through Five Points taking photographs in the late hours of the night using Blitzlicht. Soon after, Jacob had collected all the photos he believed he required and finished his book, publishing it 1890. Roosevelt, who read the book, stopped by Riis’ employer, The Evening Sun, and left a note for him stating simply, “come to help. (Riis, 1901, p328)” The two of them would begin to patrol the streets together at night. Roosevelt was looking over how the police were performing their duties, specifically whether they were conscious or not. The two of them did more than just watch over the patrols, “sometimes it was the tenements we went inspecting when the tenants slept.”

Overcrowding was a crime at the time and the police were in a situation where they were responsible for dealing with slums and the underbelly of Five Points. The police, however, had the very same issue with their station’s lodging, where homeless men could stay for a night. Police lodging had severe health concerns ranging from Typhus, which broke out in 1891, and damp dirty planks used as beds. Riis took photos of these lodgings and brought the negatives to the Academy of Medicine, “…doctors knew the real extent of the peril we were then facing. (Riis, 1901, p256)” With Teddy Roosevelt, Jacob went to each of the lodgings and inspected them. Roosevelt brought swift reform to the New York City police lodgings, despite how it made him look, “the yellow newspapers…printed cartoons of homeless men shivering at a barred door ‘closed by order of T. Roosevelt’ (Riis, 1901, p259)” Five years after the Typhus outbreak, the police lodging rooms closed for good.

Jacob faced opposition at every turn when he first began his search for the reform of Mulberry Bend and Five Points. Politician’s from Tammany Hall, department heads at the Mulberry Police Department, and members of yellow journalism made life for Jacob more difficult, further tempering his resolve to pursue photography and document the living situation in New York City. Following his publications and work with Theodore Roosevelt, the Five Points became the Mulberry Bend Park. With the invention of Blitzlicht, Jacobs became a pioneer of flash photography, “but no one would have predicted that its very first mainstream use would come in the form of a crusade against urban poverty”.   

Works Cited

1. Johnson, C. (2019). Bandits’ Roost: The Photography of Jacob Riis. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/lens/bandits-roost-the-photography-of-jacob-riis.html
2. Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives. (2018). Jacob A. Riis Papers. Cornell University Library.
3. PBS. (2003). New York: A Documentary Film - Episode 3. PBS. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/newyork/series/episode3.html
4. Riis, J. A. (1890). How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. Charles Scribner’s Sons.
5. Riis, J. A. (1901). The Making of an American. The Macmillan Company.
6. Rosenfeld, S. (1997). American Labor and the Indiscreet Camera: The ‘Slum’ Photography of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. The Journal of American History, 84(2), 609–633.
7. Schlereth, T. J. (1986). From Exhibition to Exposition: Public Display and Popular Recreation in Nineteenth-Century America. Smithsonian Institution Press.
8. Smith, A. (1998). Riis, Jacob August (1849-1914). In J. Garraty & M. C. Carnes (Eds.), American National Biography (Vol. 18, pp. 499-501). Oxford University Press.
9. Solow, B. L. (1984). Jacob A. Riis: Photographer and Citizen. American Quarterly, 36(1), 56–73.
10. Tchen, J. K., & Ye, J. (2013). Shaping America: The Remarkable Legacy of the Chinese “Gold Rush” in the Lone Star State. University of Texas Press.