The 19th-century slums of New York

It was as a police reporter for the New-York Tribune, working in the city’s most impoverished and crime-ridden slums, that Riis chose to raise awareness of the plight of New York’s poorest inhabitants. Using a newly invented flash powder, which allowed him to light up even the very darkest of rooms, Riis photographed the appalling and unsanitary conditions of the city’s worst slums. In 1890, Riis published his photographs – some of which you can see over the following pages – in one of the first works of photojournalism, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. Riis’ sobering images, and those of other social documentary photographers of the day, highlighted what life was truly like in the crowded, multiple dwellings – known as tenements – that, by 1900, served as home for some two-thirds of the city’s population.

c1900: Making the best of it

Despite the cheery facade, flags and bicycles, these are the children of detained or waiting immigrants at Ellis Island immigration centre. This rooftop area was the only outside space in which children could play while they and their families waited – often for months.

c1889: A city sweatshop

A 12-year-old boy with a large bruise on his face – who, according to Riis, initially claimed to be 16 – ‘pulls threads’ in a New York sweatshop. Many sweatshops were based in the tenement apartment of the contractor and children were often required to contribute to a family’s meagre income. Although the law limited the factory day to 10 hours, workers would often take their work home with them in the evening in a bid to earn more money through overtime.

1887: Bare basics

An Italian rag-picker sits with her baby in a small, run-down tenement room. The infant death rate in the tenements could be as high as 1 in 10.

c1897: Daily toil

‘Old Mrs Benoit’, a Native American widow, smokes a pipe while she sews and beads in her attic room on Hudson Street. According to Riis, she lived there for four years.

1888: Bandit's Roost

This alley, known as Bandit’s Roost, at 591⁄2 Mulberry Street, had a reputation for being one of the most dangerous and crime-ridden places in New York.

c1892: Hotbed of crime?

A group of women bed down for the night in a police station on West 47th Street. Police lodging houses like this one served as de facto homeless shelters for much of the 19th century. Riis condemned such locations as breeding grounds for crime and public health crises, such as outbreaks of typhus.

c1900s: Under inspection

In 1901, the Tenement House Act introduced a number of reforms to improve conditions in New York tenements; it was the job of officials of the New York City Tenement House Department (two of whom can be seen here, inspecting a cramped basement tenement in an image by an unknown photographer), to inspect and report on what they encountered. Despite the new act, a 1902 report recorded “vile privies... cellars full of rubbish... garbage and decomposing fecal matter... dilapidated and dangerous stairs... dangerous old fire traps without fire escapes (and) disease-breeding rags...”. In its first two years, department employees made 337,246 inspections and filed 55,055 violations.

1888: Earning a penny

A blind man stands on a street corner, selling pencils. In his book, How The Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis writes of Blind Man’s Alley, where “dark burrows harbored a colony of blind beggars, tenants of a blind landlord, old Daniel Murphy”. Murphy was eventually compelled by the Board of Health to repair and clean his squalid tenements.

1888-95: School days

A crowded classroom of boys in the Essex Market School on the Lower East Side. Classes at the school continued, despite the site being twice condemned by the authorities as being wholly unfit for children to be in.

c1890: Dusk 'til dawn

A Czech family make cigars in their tenement home. According to Riis, cigarmakers worked from 6am until 9pm, seven days a week. They earned just $3.75 for every thousand cigars made and produced around 3,000 cigars a week.

1889: 'Five cents a spot'

Immigrant lodgers cram into a boarding room on Bayard Street, which charged ‘five cents a spot’. Riis wrote: “In a room not 13 feet either way slept 12 men and women, two or three in bunks set in a sort of alcove, the rest on the floor.”

1888/9: Gangs of New York

Members of the Short Tail gang, which terrorised New York’s east side, gather under the pier in what is now Corlears Hook. Known for their distinctive short-tailed jacket coats, the gang was described in a newspaper report from 1884 as being “known to police as hard drinkers, thieves, pickpockets and highwaymen”, often committing crimes on boats along the water front.

Read more social history:

Who were the real Peaky Blinders?

This feature first appeared in the November 2020 issue of BBC History Revealed magazine