Jacob Riis (1849-1914) was a Danish-American who had a big influence in America during his lifetime. He was a social reformer, journalist, photographer – and confidante to presidents. Richard Bluttal explains.
Jacob Riis in 1906.
The great mass. . . . of newsboys who cry their “extrees” in the street by day . . . are children with homes who contribute to their family’s earnings, and sleep out, if they do, either because they have not sold their papers or gambled away their money at “craps” and are afraid to go home . . . . In winter the boys curl themselves up on the steam-pipes in the newspaper offices that open their doors at midnight on secret purpose to let them in.
Imagine it's 1888, New York City. The Lower East Side is the most densely populated place on Earth: block after block of tenements house the working-poor immigrants of the city, including Italians, Irish, Germans, Jews, Czechs and Chinese. Imagine the darkness of an unlit corridor in one of those tenements, a corridor that opens onto windowless rooms, 10 feet square, where entire families live and might even work — sewing or rolling cigars. Out of the darkness, a door opens. A man with a Danish accent leads a team of amateur photographers, who are accompanied by a policeman. They position their camera on a tripod and ignite a mixture of magnesium and potassium chlorate powder. A flash explodes, illuminating their squalor. It would take the photographers a few minutes to reload that early ancestor of the flash bulb. And then, on to another tenement scene. And despite the blackness of a room or an unlit street, a picture is taken, a document of urban poverty.
In 1873, Riis became a police reporter and was assigned to cover New York City’s Lower East Side. This role, as described by Riis, meant he was “the one who gathers and handles all the news that means trouble to someone: the murders, fires, suicides, robberies, and all that sort”. His investigations led him to some stunning discoveries, including the horrible living conditions of New York tenements. He found that some tenement conditions were so abysmal that the infant death rate was 1 in 10. These experiences drove Riis to continue his efforts; by the late 1880’s, Riis was conducting in-depth investigations into the conditions of the slums, using flashbulb photography to capture these deplorable conditions.
Social activist
At what point did Riis become a social activist. As the story goes, “One cold night of wandering led to a chance encounter with a little dog, who loyally followed him around the city. When Riis sought refuge in a police lodging house, the dog was denied entry. Riis awoke in the middle of the night to find another lodger had robbed him. When he complained to a policeman, he was called a liar and thrown out of the lodging house.
His loyal friend, who had been patiently waiting at the door, reacted to seeing Riis treated this way by attacking the policeman and biting his leg. The policeman grabbed the dog and smashed him against the station steps, killing him. Riis was beside himself with grief and rage and pinpoints this exact moment as launching his life as a social activist.
The kind of police lodging where Riis had attempted to spend the night had become an increasingly since the 1860s. Low Life author Luc Sante estimates that between 100,000 and 250,000 people per year took shelter there. As Eric Monkkonen documents in Police in Urban America, these cold, leaky, drafty lodging houses were a petri dish of diseases that would spread quickly through their populations and onto the police force.
One police doctor lamented, “More miserable, unhealthy, horrible dungeons could not well be conceived of,” which sounds pretty rough by 19th century standards. The most common afflictions were tuberculosis, lice, and syphilis. Reformers had long hoped to shut such institutions down. In 1894, when Riis met Teddy Roosevelt, they got their best chance.
Confidante
Jacob Riis was once one of the most famous men in America: and became a close friend and confidante of President Theodore Roosevelt and the epitome of the immigrant made good — good, in his case, being measured by political and social influence, not by wealth. One of his books, How the Other Half Lives (1890), exposed the horrors of tenement life. It caught the attention of Civil Service Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, who viewed it as a call to action. Immediately after finishing this book, Roosevelt marched into Riis’s office to tender his assistance. In 1895, when Roosevelt was New York Police Commissioner and Riis was employed as a police reporter at the Mulberry Street station, the two often worked together. They ventured out on urban expeditions together to witness first-hand the calamitous conditions affecting the poor. Through their investigations, they hoped to bring about better living situations as well as to eliminate corruption within the police department that added to the burden of destitute New Yorkers. . On February 8, 1896, Riis took Roosevelt on a tour of police lodging houses, including the specific one that had mistreated him nearly 20 years earlier. A disgusted Roosevelt promised Riis, “I will smash them tomorrow.” A week later, Commissioner Roosevelt shut down all of the police lodging houses in the city. Afterwards, Riis wrote, “The battle is won. The murder of my dog is avenged.” For the for the rest of his career, Riis would end lectures thundering, “My dog did not die unavenged!”Through their investigations, they hoped to bring about better living situations as well as to eliminate corruption within the police department that added to the burden of destitute New Yorkers. Riis was active in bringing about anti-child labor and tenement reform laws.
After Roosevelt resigned as Police Commissioner, he and Riis remained close. United by their passion for reform, the pair’s unlikely friendship surpassed purely political matters Riis was active in bringing about anti-child labor and tenement reform laws.
Photos
One of Riis' most famous photos was taken on Bayard Street. It's called "5 Cents a Spot," which shows a room full of people bedding down for the night. (A "spot" meant a place on the floor.) They must have been shocked. Magnesium flash powder was something new. It was developed in Germany in 1887. Riis' burst of light must have been a stunning surprise, but it made the dim, airless lives of the poor visible to the middle class.
Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom, co-authors of Rediscovering Jacob Riis, took a walk through the neighborhood. The neighborhood is recently gentrified, but this was where Riis campaigned against the housing conditions of the day. "You can still see the really small size of the building lots," says Czitrom, who is a historian. "The typical building lot in New York for a tenement was 25 feet wide and 100 feet deep going back," and the buildings often took up the entire lot, he says. So-called rear tenements, built behind other tenements, would have no access to light or air, and all the rooms were interior rooms, Czitrom says.
A court decision from that era essentially said there is no right to light or air for a renter or an owner, he says. "So, the idea that you have a right to a window or the right to some breathing space was not a legal right that anyone recognized until much later," Czitrom says.
Riis thought of himself as a writer, and he was evidently a gripping storyteller in the lectures he gave to accompany his lantern slideshows.
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