By 1880, New York City held twice the population it had at the start of the century. Immigrants poured in from Europe, arriving with little money and fewer options. Landlords in Lower Manhattan saw opportunity in the flood of newcomers and moved quickly to profit from it. Buildings once meant for single families were carved into smaller and smaller units. Walls went up, rooms shrank, and hallways disappeared. The goal was simple: fit in as many paying tenants as possible and spend as little on construction as the law — and sometimes less than the law — would allow.
The buildings that rose from this rush were dark, cramped, and dangerous. Rooms had no windows. Ventilation was almost nonexistent. Indoor plumbing was rare, and what little existed was often shared by dozens of people. Streets in these neighborhoods narrowed as builders maximized every inch of ground. By 1900, more than 80,000 tenements had been built across the city, housing approximately 2.3 million people. These were not temporary conditions. For most residents, this was simply life.
Jacob Riis was born in Denmark in 1849 and arrived in New York in 1870 with $40 to his name. He knew poverty from the inside — he had slept in police lodging houses and gone hungry on the streets of the very city he would later document. By 1888, he had worked his way into a job as a reporter for the New York Tribune and was assigned to cover police investigations in Lower Manhattan. Those investigations led him directly into the tenement districts, and what he saw there pushed him to pick up a camera.
Riis used flash photography — a new and jarring technology at the time — to light up the darkest corners of tenement life. He entered basements, back alleys, sweatshops, and crowded lodging rooms without warning, capturing scenes that most of the city’s wealthier residents had never seen and had little reason to seek out. His photographs were not posed portraits. They were raw snapshots of people surviving in conditions that most Americans would not have believed existed in the country’s largest city.
Children were everywhere in these neighborhoods, and their lives were shaped entirely by the streets and tenements around them. Some attended crowded schools. Many worked. A large number — known at the time as “Street Arabs” — had no home at all and survived by begging, scavenging, or stealing. Riis photographed them sleeping on steam grates for warmth, clustering in doorways, and working jobs no child should have been doing.
Gang activity was a constant presence in these blocks. Alleys like Bandits’ Roost on Mulberry Street were controlled by groups of men who gathered there day and night. Other gangs, like the Short Tail gang on the Lower East Side, operated out of the piers and waterfront areas, while the Whyo gang claimed Bottle Alley as their headquarters. These were not abstract threats — they were a daily reality for everyone who lived nearby.
Religious and community institutions tried to provide stability in the chaos. The Five Points House of Industry ran a nursery for young children. Talmud schools on Hester Street gave Jewish children a place to study. The Mott Street Industrial School taught immigrant children practical skills and had them saluting the American flag — a pointed symbol of the assimilation being asked of people who had barely found their footing in a new country.
Immigrant families came from across Europe and beyond, and their specific nationalities often determined which blocks or even which buildings they ended up in. Italian families clustered in Little Italy on Mulberry Street and Jersey Street. Jewish families filled the Lower East Side. Each group brought their own trades, customs, and languages, but all of them shared the same cramped, poorly built tenements and the same struggle to get by.
The lowest rung of lodging in these neighborhoods was the five-cent-a-night flophouse. At places like Happy Jack’s Canvas Palace on Pell Street, men slept in canvas bunks stacked in rows. On Bayard Street, twelve men and women shared a room less than thirteen feet long, paying five cents each for a spot on the floor. These were not emergency shelters — they were regular, ongoing arrangements for people who had no other option.
Work in the tenements often meant home-based labor, and entire families participated. A Bohemian family photographed by Riis made cigars at home, working from six in the morning until nine at night. Together, the four of them produced 3,000 cigars per week and earned $3.75 per thousand — a rate that kept them just above starvation. On Division Street, men and women bent over tables in tenement rooms making neckties. Elsewhere, families assembled artificial flowers or took in piecework sewing. Sweatshops like the one on Ludlow Street — where workers sewed knee-pants for forty-five cents a dozen — operated just one floor above where families slept.
Some residents had built shelters in even more marginal spaces. One Italian immigrant man photographed by Riis lived in a makeshift home dug out beneath the Rivington Street dump. Another photograph shows a man living beneath the dump at West 35th Street. These were not abandoned spaces — they were inhabited, claimed, and lived in by people with nowhere else to go.
The physical landscape of these neighborhoods was layered and dense. Backlot houses sat wedged between larger buildings and construction sites. Rear tenements on streets like Roosevelt Street received almost no direct light. Gotham Court at 38 Cherry Street was a particularly grim example — a long row of tenements built around a narrow courtyard where residents shared outdoor space with little privacy and no greenery.
In 1889, Riis published a selection of his photographs in Scribner’s Magazine, bringing these scenes before a national readership for the first time. The response was significant enough that he expanded the work into a full book: How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, which included more than a hundred photographs. The book put names, faces, and specifics to a problem that most middle- and upper-class New Yorkers had been comfortable ignoring.
Hester Street on the Lower East Side was one of the most photographed and well-known streets in the tenement districts. It was dense with pushcart vendors, pedestrians, and the constant noise of commerce. Street life there was chaotic and relentless, with every inch of sidewalk occupied by someone selling, buying, hauling, or simply trying to get through the day.
Fires were a constant danger in neighborhoods built from cheap wood and packed with people. When a building on Crosby Street burned in 1896, the frozen water from firefighting efforts coated the facade in thick ice. Riis photographed the aftermath — a crowd standing in front of the frosted wreckage in the cold. Blackwell’s Island, just off the coast of Manhattan in the East River, housed the city’s penitentiary, where prisoners were marched in the lock-step formation that was standard in American prisons at the time.
Not all of the people Riis photographed were recent European immigrants. Mrs. Benoit, a Native American widow, lived in an apartment on Hudson Street where she sewed, beaded, and smoked a pipe. Mountain Eagle, an Iroquois man, lived with his family at 6 Beach Street, where his son played violin and the family made traditional handicrafts in their tenement apartment. These photographs are rare documentation of Native American families living in urban New York in the 1890s.
Theodore Roosevelt, then serving as a New York City Police Commissioner, read Riis’s work and became one of his most prominent supporters. Roosevelt visited the neighborhoods Riis had documented and backed efforts to address the conditions described. The photographs gave reformers concrete, visual evidence of what needed to change — not statistics or reports, but actual images of actual people in actual rooms.
Police station lodging rooms were another layer of the city’s makeshift shelter system. Stations like the one on Eldridge Street and the West 47th Street station kept rooms where the homeless could sleep on bare boards. These were not comfortable spaces — they were overflow arrangements that the city used to manage people it had no formal plan for. The newsboys’ lodging house offered something slightly better: a supervised space where the boys who sold newspapers on street corners could get a meal and sleep in an actual bunk before heading back out at dawn.
An essential NYC read. So are the Hone and Strong diaries.