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.