"Jacob Riis brought the city’s attention, and really the country’s attention, to the suffering of those people and it resulted in a change of laws and somewhat better conditions for the people living there." |
Achievements
"Jacob Riis startled a complacent New York into a sense of responsibility on slum conditions and he lived to see a substantial beginning made on reforms." -"In Memory of Jacob Riis" [New York Times, May 3, 1949]
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"Theodore Roosevelt became a friend and supporter of Riis'...Roosevelt and Riis collaborated to eliminate the notorious police station lodging houses. Settlement Houses:
"Settlement houses were...beginning to appear in New York, marking the beginning of a growing social service movement...Jacob Riis played a large part in the life of the early New York settlements." -Not Charity, but Justice, Edith Patterson Meyer |
Campaigns: "Flowers for the Poors"
"There are too many sad little eyes in the crowded tenements, where the summer sunshine means disease and death, not play or vacation, that will close without ever having looked upon a field of daisies." -Jacob Riis' Scrapbook, June 23, 1888