Jacob A. Riis was a social reformer and photojournalist in New York between 1873 and the early 1900s. A majority of immigrants who migrated to the United States in the late 1800s came from cultural backgrounds, particularly Eastern Europe, that New York did not initially welcome with open arms. Unlike other new immigrants, Riis’s Danish heritage was accepted. He immigrated to New York from Denmark in 1870 and moved to various places including Fordham, Buffalo, and even Pittsburgh for a short time. At one point, like many immigrants of the era, Riis lived in the impoverished conditions of the Lower East Side particularly on the Bowery. Riis’s cultural background and his ability to speak English gave him an advantage over other immigrants.
In 1873, Riis began began his career as a journalist and was a police reporter for The New York Tribune from 1877-1890. Riis saw photography as a method of persuasion and began photographing in 1888 to aid his argument that reform of the Lower East Side is necessary. He was particularly fond of the recent invention of flash photography which helped him to capture the naturally dark areas of tenement homes. Riis gave lectures on the issues within the Lower East Side utilizing lantern slides of images as support for his claims.
An editor of Scribner’s magazine attended his lecture at the Broadway Tabernacle and asked Riis to write an article to accompany the photographs. The article how “How the Other Half Lives” appeared in Scribner’s at Christmas 1889. The immense popularity of the article led to the publication of How the Other Half Lives in book form in late 1890 including Riis’s written account and his image converted to line drawings and halftone prints. Riis understood the citizens of the Lower East Side as victims of their harsh environment. This view is demonstrated in his photographs as they parallel the natural darkness of the tenement, it’s cramped and overcrowded space with saloons, crime, and parentless children. One particular image of a young boy holding a growler was enough to cause alarm amongst reformers and non-reformers alike. Riis attempted to persuade the elite to take action by describing how issues born in the Lower East Side such as crime and disease could eventually trickle their way uptown. Riis claims that disease could be transferred via clothing made for the upper class in the tenement sweatshops. The possibility of a class war where the Lower East Side rises up against the elite is also suggested in the text.
Throughout How the Other Half Lives, Riis refers several times to the horrid conditions found in the slums in “the Bend” on Mulberry Street. According to Riis, the inhumane conditions of the tenements is what breeds violence, disease, alcoholism, and immoral behavior. Riis determines that the only way to remove issues in the Lower East Side is remove the source of the problem: the tenement. Riis often promoted the building of parks and recreational areas for those living in the slums. Eventually, the tenements in “the Bend” were replaced by a park known as Columbus Park today.
In 1907, Riis moved to a farm in Barre, Massachusetts where he died in 1914. The architect and urban planner, Robert Moses, developed a beach for poor immigrants in 1936 at the western end of Rockaway, Brooklyn. The park was named was appropriately named Jacob Riis Park and nicknamed the “people’s beach.” Today, Jacob Riis is referred to by some as a pioneer in social documentary photography. The full archive of Riis’s photographs can be found at the Museum of the City of New York.
| sight | Columbus Park |
| tidbit | 1961 Zoning Ordinance |