Jacob Riis

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Flower Bouquets Come To Ragpicker’s Row

June 14, 2011 in Excerpts, Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ragpicker's Row, 59 Baxter Street. (Image Jacob Riis.)

This classic 1898 photograph of New York City’s Ragpicker’s Row was taken by the famed muckraking journalist Jacob Riis. This impoverished section of the city was described (in the most offensive manner possible) in a 1879 New York Times article, “Flowers for the Poorest.” In that piece, a journalist tagged along with the well-meaning but dopey Ladies’ Flower and Fruit Mission, as members of the group visited the poorest quarters of Manhattan and handed out free flowers. An excerpt:

“The visitors shook loose from the crowd of children that clung to them begging for flowers, and made their way to Mulberry-street, in search of ‘Ragpicker’s Row.’ They found it at Nos. 56 and 59, and here encountered poverty in the most squalid and filthy aspects. In the little courts lying between the front and rear houses water stood in sickening fetid pools. The houses swarmed with the Italians who collect refuse, rags, bones, and bits of paper from the ash-barrels, or who work on the garbage scows, and bring back to the City much of the refuse matter once thrown away as worthless. In these houses and in these yards this reeking refuse is sorted, dried, and made up into bales. Men, women, and children engage in the work, and all are alike dirty and ragged to a degree. Most of the men are low-browed ugly-looking fellows, and many of the women are toothless hags. Occasionally there is to be seen among them a young woman holding her swathed bambino in her arms, whose face is so beautiful that, with the flat head-dress–which many of them still wear–she might be the original of the Italian Madonna. These people were the most clamorous for the flowers of any kind that had been met; nor did they wait to be bidden, but many of them helped themselves  from the baskets, laughing at the efforts of the visitors to prevent them and to secure an even distribution. In this way the baskets were quickly emptied, and the visitors were glad when they were, and they were at liberty to escape from the filthy yard and their noisy occupants.”

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Bohemian Family Rolls Cigars (1890)

February 15, 2011 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

Journalist Jacob Riis was one of the early adapters of flash photography.

This classic photograph of a Bohemian family rolling cigars in New York in 1890 was taken by Jacob Riis for his book, How the Other Half Lives. As was usually the case with immigrant families, the entire clan, even the children, were involved in the industry, which was conducted over long hours in the cramp tenement in which they lived. It was a hard-knock life, and as the following excerpt from a 1898 article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle about a cigar-making family makes clear, it was sometimes hard to fathom:

“CIGAR MAKER’S SUICIDE: John Wachtel, 50 years old, a cigarmaker, who lived with his wife and three children on the third floor of the tenement at 48 Morgan avenue, in the Eastern District, committed suicide there shortly after 2 o’clock this morning by shooting himself in the abdomen with a .32 caliber revolver. Wachtel had been drinking heavily for some time. Latterly he entertained the impression, which was groundless, that his oldest daughter, Abbie, was disobedient. The girl helped him to make cigars and her hours were sometimes unusually long. Wachtel for the past few weeks frequently quarreled with his wife regarding his daughter’s supposed disobedience. The mother generally took her daughter’s part and this seemed to annoy Wachtel all the more. He left the house yesterday about 2 o’clock. Wachtel did not reach home until 2 o’clock this morning. A quarrel ensued, after which Wachtel went to the front room and shot himself.”

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“There Is But One ‘Bend’ In The World, And It Is Enough”

February 8, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

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.


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