Ten of Riis' Most Famous and Captivating Works with Descriptions:
Click each image to view full rendering [Image Sources: MCNY & MoMa Collections]
Click each image to view full rendering [Image Sources: MCNY & MoMa Collections]
"Bandits' Roost: 59 1/2 Mulberry Street
At 59 Mulberry Street, in the famous Bend, is another alley of this sort except it is as much worse in character as its name, 'Bandits' Roost' is worse than the designations of most of these alleys...Many Italians live here...They are devoted to the stale beer in room after room...After buying a round the customer is entitled to a seat on the floor, otherwise known as a 'lodging' for the night..." -New York Sun Article (February 12, 1888) |
"'It Costs a Dollar a Month to Sleep in These Sheds' Jersey Street (Now Gone)"
"In that yard were habitations (now gone) built of old boards and discarded roof tin, in which lived men, women and cildren that had been crowded out of the tenements...They paid regularly for their piggeries. I feel almost like apologizing for the pig; no pig would have been content to live in such a place without a loud outcry..." -The Peril and the Preservation of the Home (1903) |
"'Five Cents a Spot': Unauthorized Lodgings in a Bayard Street Tenement
What squalar and degradation inhabit these dens that health officers know...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. A kerosene lamp burned dimly in the fearful atmosphere...Most of the men were lodgers, who slept there for five cents a spot..." -How the Other Half Lives, (1890) |
"Baby in slum tenement, dark stairs--it's playground
I went up the dark stairs in one of those tenements there I trod upon a baby...I...photographed that baby standing...in a pool of filth that overflowed on the floor. I do not marvel much...that one in five of the children in the rear tenement into which the sunlight never comes was killed by the house. It seemed strange, rather, that any survived." -The Peril and the Preservation of the Home, (1903) |
"Street Arabs in sleeping quarters
...Crowded out of the tenements to shift for himself...he meets there a host of adventurous runaways from every state in the Union..The Street Arab has all the faults and...virtues of the lawless life he leads...Anyone, whom business or curiosity has taken through Park Row or across Printing House Square in the midnight hour, when the air is filled with the roar of great presses...has seen little groups of these boys hanging about the newspaper offices: in winter...fighting for warm spots around the grated vent-holes...and in summer playing craps and 7-11 on the curb for their hard-earned pennies..." -How the Other Half Lives (1890) |
"The Verdict of the Rogues Gallery
...That such conditions as were all about us should result in making 'toughs' of the boys was not strange...With the home corrupted by the tenement...and the children thrown upon the street...with honest play interdicted, every natural right of the child turned into a means oppression, a game of ball became a crime for which children were thrust into Jail, indeed, shot down like dangerous criminals when running away from the policeman...it seems as if we had set out to deliberately make trouble under which we groaned." -- This supports Riis' ideas on the basis of "Naturalism" -The Making of an American (1901) |
"In the home of an Italian Ragpicker, Jersey Street
Sometimes they ask me, What is all this about, with your 'infant slaughter' in the tenements?...A doctor once...said, 'It is a clear case of the survival of the fittest. Only those who are strong as cattle can ever stand it.'...Here is one of them, an Italian baby in its swaddling clothes. You have seen how they wrap them around and around until you can almost stand them on either end, and they won't bend, so tightly they are bound." -Jacob Riis Lecture (1894) |
"'I Scrubs,' Katie, Who Keeps House in West 49th Street
'What kind of work do you do?' I asked. 'I scrubs,' she replied promptly...Katie was one of the little mothers whose work never ends...She was keeping house for her older sister and two brothers, all of whom worked. Katie did the cleaning and the cooking...She scrubbed and swept and went to school all as a matter of course and ran the house ...with an occasional lift from...neighbors, who were poorer than they..." -The Children of the Poor (1892) |
"Police Station Lodging Rooms, Church Street Station, in Which Jacob A. Riis Slept in 1870
1870- The lodging room was jammed with a foul and stewing crowd of tramps...I smothered my disgust at the place as well as I could, and slept, wearied nearly to death. 1896- Down the cellar steps to the men's lodging room I led [Theodore Roosevelt]. It was unchanged- just as it was the day I slept there. Three men lay stretched full length on the dirty planks...Orders were issued to close the doors of the police lodging rooms on February 15, 1896...The battle was won..." -The Making of an American (1901) |
"The Man Slept in This Cellar for Four Years (11 Ludlow Street Rear)
...I had occasion to visit...a double tenement at the lower end of Ludlow Street, which the police census showed to contain 297 tenants, 45 of whom were under five years of age, not counting 3 pedlars who slept in the mouldy cellar, where the water was ankle deep on the mud floor. The feeblest ray of daylight never found its way down here...The three, with their unkempt beards and hair and sallow faces, looked more like ideous ghosts than living men. Yet they had slept here among and upon decaying fruit and wreckage of all sorts...for over three years..." -The Children of the Poor (1892) |