How the Other Half Lives

Jacob Riis, 1890

Squalid housing tenements were referred to as "Dens of Death.“

In one of Jacob Riis' most famous photos, "Five Cents a Spot," 1888–89, lodgers crowd in a Bayard Street tenement.

Thousands of children slept in the spaces between buildings on Mulberry Street and along the many streets in the Lower East Side. They often begged for food until they became old enough to join the local gang.

The human hell and indignities suffered by the immigrant Irish, Italians, Jewish, Greeks and Germans was particularly gruesome. Here an immigrant mother and her two children live in a one-room space and have no creature comforts such as a mattress for the bed.

Most neighborhoods hosted respectable families alongside thieves, gangsters, prostitutes and murderers, which made walking home through the dark, blind alleys a life or death situation.

Immigrants worked 12+ hour days but they couldn’t keep up with the rents of the slumlords. Taking in borders was the easiest way to offset the cost; it wasn’t unusual to have 14-16 adults and children occupying the same filthy 13 x 13 room. Overcrowding combined with poor or no sanitation, waste disposal & windowless, airless rooms led to rampant diseases.

Mulberry Bend, where Mulberry Street turned, now Columbus Park, was an Italian immigrant enclave in the late 1800s, the remnants of which can still be found today.

Craps in the Hall of the Newboy’s boarding house

The space allowed by law between the backs of tenements, from which tenants got their 'fresh' air and 'light', was barely 10 feet. Then as now in New York, the higher the apartment, the higher the rent. You must pay extra for 'air' and 'light'. This often meant an 8 story walk-up. Men, women and children died every summer by rolling off the rooftops in their sleep, where they took refuge in the sweltering heat.

Bohemian Cigar-makers at work in their tenement.

Tenement house yards, New York

A wilderness of tenements jammed the space between Bowery Street to the Brooklyn Bridge, housing numbers of people too vast to grasp. A five-story tenement on Orchard Street, preserved as the Lower East Side Tenement National Historic Site, housed 7,000 people of more than twenty nationalities, with two toilets per floor. There were more Italians in New York than in Naples, more Irish than in Dublin. The hopeful came from some twenty countries, each of them wondering, How much will I have to let go of who I have been?

A Black and Tan Dive in “Africa”

“Minding baby,” Cherry Hill, 1890. The photo’stilted frame and the abrupt cropping were probably the result of Riis’ single-minded attention to the children. The picture's strength is the product of its formal instability, even when the publishers "corrected" it, to some extent, in the book illustration.