Bandits Roost, an alleyway in the notorious slum known as the Bend. (Image by Jacob Riis.)

Muckraking newspaperman Jacob Riis wasn’t any sort of radical socialist, just a very humane police reporter who knew how to use his abundant writing talent for forces of good. His 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, was a landmark work of photojournalism that sought to expose the well-to-do classes of the city to the incredible hardships (child labor, sweatshops, unsanitary conditions, etc.) endured by the denizens of its poorest quarters, who were out of sight and out of mind.

The book succeeded tremendously in alerting the city to its Dickensian lack of social safety nets, but it continues to be a great read because it’s a genuine work of art, beautifully written and photographed. An excerpt from the chapter, “The Bend”:

“WHERE Mulberry Street crooks like an elbow within hail of the old depravity of the Five Points, is ‘the Bend,’ foul core of New York’s slums. Long years ago the cows coming home from the pasture trod a path over this hill. Echoes of tinkling bells linger there still, but they do not call up memories of green meadows and summer fields; they proclaim the home-coming of the ragpicker’s cart. In the memory of man the old cow-path has never been other than a vast human pig-sty. There is but one ‘Bend’ in the world, and it is enough. The city authorities, moved by the angry protests of ten years of sanitary reform effort, have decided that it is too much and must come down. Another Paradise Park will take its place and let in sunlight and air to work such transformation as at the Five Points, around the corner of the next block. Never was change more urgently needed. Around ‘the Bend’ cluster the bulk of the tenements that are stamped as altogether bad, even by the optimists of the Health Department. Incessant raids cannot keep down the crowds that make them their home. In the scores of back alleys, of stable lanes and hidden byways, of which the rent collector alone can keep track, they share such shelter as the ramshackle structures afford with every kind of abomination rifled from the dumps and ash-barrels of the city. Here, too, shunning the light, skulks the unclean beast of dishonest idleness. ‘The Bend’ is the home of the tramp as well as the rag-picker.”

Mulberry Street: It was like "Our Gang" with lots of pulmonary tuberculosis.