In the late 19th century, New York City was booming, but behind its growing wealth and towering buildings was another world entirely. Crowded into dark, poorly ventilated tenements, thousands of working class families and newly arrived immigrants lived in conditions that much of the city’s wealthier population rarely saw.
Photographer and journalist Jacob Riis set out to make those conditions impossible to ignore. Using the relatively new technology of flash photography, he ventured into tenements, lodging houses, alleys, and cramped apartments to document everyday life among New York’s poorest residents. His photographs became the foundation of his influential 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives.
More than a century later, Riis’s images remain an extraordinary and often unsettling visual record of a city divided by wealth, opportunity, and circumstance. These photographs offer a glimpse into the lives, homes, and streets that existed just beyond the view of Gilded Age New York’s more prosperous residents.
Five Cent a Spot” Unauthorized Lodgings in a Bayard Street Tenement.
Mulberry Bend.
Home of an Italian Ragpicker.
Bandit`s Roost” 59 1/2 Mullbery Street.
The cellar of 11 Ludlow Street, where beggars sleep in squalid conditions. 1887.
Baxter Street in Mulberry Bend.
Elizabeth Street Police Station-Womans Lodgers
A Class in the Condemned Essex Market School, With the Gas Burning by Day.
Tenement Yard,
Police Station Lodgers
Hell on Earth
A Bohemian family of four makes cigars at home in their tenement. Working from six in the morning ’til nine at night, they earn $3.75 for a thousand cigars, and can turn out together 3,000 cigars a week. 1890.
Talmud School in Hester Street
Shoemaker Working in a house in the Yard of 219 Broome Street. Rent $ 12 a Month
An English Coal-Heaver`s Home.
A backlot house on Bleecker Street between Mercer and Greene Streets, adjacent to an excavation site. 1890.
Men and women make neckties inside a tenement on Division Street in Little Italy. 1890.
Children play with barrels in an alley between tenement buildings in Gotham Court, 38 Cherry Street. 1890.
Mrs. Benoit, a Native American widow, sews and beads while smoking a pipe in her Hudson Street apartment. 1897.
Men sleep on the floor of a New York City homeless shelter. In 1886, the fee for sleeping indoors was five cents a night. Circa 1886.
Dens of Death, circa 1888.
A Jewish cobbler ready for Sabbath Eve in a coal cellar where he lives with his family. 1887.
Street children huddle over a grate for warmth on Mulberry Street..
Italian immigrant families living in shacks on Jersey Street. 1897.
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