“Riis’s pioneering use of flash photography |
"[Riis had] the great gift of making others see what he saw and feel what he felt" |
“Rural Americans and new immigrants crowded into urban areas. Tenements spread across city landscapes, teeming with crime and filth. Americans had sewing machines, phonographs, skyscrapers, and even electric lights, yet most people labored in the shadow of poverty.”
–American Experience: Gilded Age
Police Street Stations
"[T]he lodgers find shelter over night in the cells of the police stations, and are dismissed in the morning to go whither they will. Nobody knows them by day; they spring to the surface like mushrooms at night." |
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“In 1892 and 1893, in a series of four articles and his touring lantern slide lecture, Riis decried the appalling conditions of New York’s police lodging houses, which served as de facto homeless shelters" |
- “Riis’s news accounts cast the police station lodging houses as breeding grounds for crime and public health crises, such as outbreaks of typhus… Riis’s crusade was based not just on combating communicable disease, but observations of the vulnerability of young people to physical harm or recruitment by seasoned criminals and on his own bitter experiences as a newly arrived immigrant, homeless and unable to afford rent. In 1896, the lodging houses were finally closed with the support of then Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt"
–Library of Congress
The conditions in the tenement housing were “too far removed from the day-to-day experience of most Americans, or at least most voting Americans. And so the political mandate to clean up the cities never quite amassed enough support to overcome the barriers of remote indifference”
–Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now
“Each apartment had only three rooms: a living room or ‘front’ room, a kitchen, and a tiny bedroom. Often seven or more people lived in each apartment. Not only was the tenement crowded, but also, until 1905, there were no bathrooms inside the building. Residents also did not have electric power until after 1918.” "We used to go in the small hours of the morning into the worst tenements to count noses and see if the law against overcrowding was violated, and the sights I saw there gripped my heart until I felt that I must tell of them, or burst, or turn anarchist, or something" |
“The hard facts included in Riis’ book–such as the fact that 12 adults slept in a room some 13 feet across, and that the infant death rate in the tenements was as high as 1 in 10–stunned many in America and around the world and led to a renewed call for reform” |
“Jacob Riis was very concerned about the impact of poverty on the young, which was a persistent theme both in his writing and lectures. For the sequel to How the Other Half Lives, Riis focused on the plight of immigrant children and efforts to aid them. Riis....argued that teaching immigrant children about American democracy would help to make them productive citizens” |
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“ 'What kind of work do you do?' I asked, thinking to interest her while I made ready. 'I scrubs,' she replied, promptly, and her look guaranteed that what she scrubbed came out clean” |