How the Other Half Lives: Heartbreaking Photos Depicting Gritty Life Of New York Slums In The Late 19th Century

During the 19th century, the number of immigrants increased rapidly. The population of New York City doubled from 1800 to 1880. To accommodate the rapid growth of the population, especially the immigrants, the lower areas of the city were used to provide quick and cheap housing options. Landlords bought up buildings and subdivided them into ever smaller partitions. Houses that were once for single families were divided to accommodate as many people as possible. Streets were narrowed and corners were cut. The buildings were constructed with cheap material, unventilated rooms and had little or no indoor plumbing. By 1900, more than 80,000 tenements had been built and housed 2.3 million people.

The Danish-born carpenter Jacob Riis (1849-1914) migrated to the US in 1870 with only $40 in his pocket. When Jacob became a reporter for the New York Tribune in 1888, he was assigned to probe into police investigations taking place in the Lower Manhattan. The police investigations largely focused on these slum areas. He photographed the horrible conditions and everyday life of sums. In 1889, he published these photographs in Scribner’s Magazine and later he expanded that into a book entitled “How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York” with more than a hundred photographs. These photographs contributed a lot to several social reforms of the 19th century. Theodore Roosevelt became an admirer of Riis and supporter of his causes of slum reform and renewal.

#1 Mrs. Benoit, a Native American widow, sews and beads while smoking a pipe in her Hudson Street apartment, 1897

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#2 Mountain Eagle and his family make Native American handicrafts while his son plays violin in their tenement at 6 Beach Street, 1895

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#3 Street children huddle over a grate for warmth on Mulberry Street, 1895

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#4 A group of men loiter in an alley off Mulberry Street known as “Bandits’ Roost.” 1888

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#5 A Jewish cobbler ready for Sabbath Eve in a coal cellar where he lives with his family, 1887

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#6 Pupils in the Essex Market school in a poor quarter of New York, 1887

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#7 A young girl holds a baby in a doorway, 1890

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#8 Members of the “Short Tail” gang, which terrorized New York’s east side, gather under the pier at the foot of Jackson Street, 1887

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#9 Children pray in the nursery in Five Points House, 1887

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#10 An Italian immigrant rag-picker sits with her baby in a small run-down tenement room on Jersey Street, 1887

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#11 The cellar of 11 Ludlow Street, where beggars sleep in squalid conditions, 1887

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#12 Men play cards in a New York building, 1890

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#13 An Italian immigrant man smokes a pipe in his makeshift home under the Rivington Street Dump, 1890

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#14 Two young ragpickers stand at a staircase in Baxter Alley, in Little Italy, 1890

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#15 A backlot house on Bleecker Street between Mercer and Greene Streets, adjacent to an excavation site, 1890

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#16 Men and women make neckties inside a tenement on Division Street in Little Italy, 1890

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#17 Lodgers in a crowded and squalid tenement, which rented for five cents a spot on Bayard Street. Twelve men and women slept in a room less than 13 feet long, 1890

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#18 A shoeshine boy named Tommy holds his shoeshine kit on a sidewalk, 1890

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#19 The Mulberry Bend area in Little Italy, 1890

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#20 Two young boys laugh and steal items from a vendor’s pushcart on Hester Street in the Lower East Side, 1895

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#21 A crowd stands in front of the frozen facade of a burned building on Crosby Street at Jersey Street, 1896

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#22 Italian immigrant families living in shacks on Jersey Street, 1897

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#23 Children play with barrels in an alley between tenement buildings in Gotham Court, 38 Cherry Street, 1890

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#24 A group of prisoners are lined up at the Lock-step Penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island), 1890

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#25 Hester Street in New York’s Lower East Side, 1890

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#26 Street Arabs – tens of thousands of begging homeless kids, mostly boys

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#27 A shoemaker in 219 Broome Street

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#28 Bunks in a seven-cent lodging house named Happy Jack’s Canvas Palace, Pell Street

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#29 A Black-and-Tan Dive in “Africa”

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#30 A Talmud school in Hester Street

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#31 Lodgers

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#32 Hell’s Kitchen

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#33 Mountain Eagle and his Family of Iroquois Indians — One of the few Indian families in the city, found at 6 Beach Street

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#34 Eldridge Street Police Station

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#35 Getting ready for supper in the newsboys’ lodging-house

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#36 A school on the East Side

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#37 A Rear Tenement in Roosevelt Street

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#38 Baxter Street Alley, behind the Bandit’s Roost

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#39 A downtown “morgue” (an unlicensed saloon)

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#40 West 47th Street

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#41 Immigrant children saluting the flag in the Mott Street Industrial School

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#42 Headquarters of the Whyo gang, Bottle Alley

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#43 Men’s lodging room in West 47th Street Station

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#44 Under the dump at West 35th Street

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#45 Under the dump at West 35th Street

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#46 A family making artificial flowers

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#47 A Flat in the Pauper’s Barracks with All Its Furniture

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#48 A Swine in the streets of tenements

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#49 Police Station Lodgers

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#50 Scene on the Roof on the Mott Street Barracks

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#51 “Knee-pants” at forty-five cents a dozen – A Ludlow street sweatshop

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#52 Bandits Roost, a Mulberry Street back alley

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#53 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

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