ancient cities

672 Riis, Jacob
Manhattan news agency, and finally as editor for
the South Brooklyn News. He eventually bought
the News and, doing every job himself, turned it
into a profitable independent paper featuring righteous
editorials against deadbeat grocery customers
and neighborhood boarding houses. Finally
successful, Riis married his beloved Elisabeth, sold
the paper, and in 1877 joined the New York
Tribune.
Exposing How the Other Half Lives
Riis’s work as a police reporter for the Tribune
and Associated Press launched his career as an
investigative journalist and publicist of slum conditions.
His office was in the heart of Manhattan’s
East Side slums. In pursuit of newsworthy stories,
Riis often trailed police officers through the tenement
district at night and accompanied sanitation
inspectors by day.
Riis was moved and outraged by the conditions
of life in the slums. By 1880, more than a million
people, many of them immigrants, were crammed
into New York’s dark, filthy tenements, both older
wooden structures and newer, four- to six-story
stone buildings. Apartments doubled as sweatshops;
cellars doubled as lodging. Tenants often
took in additional boarders to pay the rent, further
taxing plumbing and waste systems. The stench,
Riis wrote, was often unbearable.
In 1888, to garner more notice for slum conditions,
Riis began taking photographs for slide
lectures, using a new flash technique for the
dark interiors. The photographs did indeed draw
attention, leading to an article in Scribner’s,
which was then expanded into How the Other
Half Lives. Riis’s book was not unique in revealing
the environment of the urban poor, but his
passionate prose, his anecdotes backed by statistical
data, and especially the photographs made
it a bestseller.
Riis continued his investigative reporting, moving
to the Evening Sun in 1890. In 1891, he discovered
a health report noting nitrates in the
Croton Reservoir. Riis tracked the source: human
and animal sewage dumped into streams flowing
into the Croton River. His articles and the furor
they provoked led the city to protect its water supply
by buying land around its reservoirs.
Creating Light Where There Is Darkness
Riis’s greatest passion was slum reform. In newspaper
columns, articles in the Atlantic Monthly,
Century, Scribner’s, and Harper’s Weekly, and his
subsequent books, he called for playgrounds and
parks in slum neighborhoods, better school facilities
and the noncriminalization of truants, development
of model tenements, and enforcement of
stricter housing, health, labor, and safety laws.
Riis also encouraged private reforms from organized
charities to model housing investments.
Riis blamed greedy landlords and neglectful—if
not corrupt—government for perpetuating tenement
slums, and he targeted the slums themselves
as breeding grounds for disease, depravity, and
disorder. His writings expressed his dislike of
tramps, disdain for paupers (alms seekers), and
sometimes disparaging views of Blacks, Jews,
Italians, and Chinese amid a full range of ethnic
generalizations, yet his portrayals of the poor were
sympathetic. An immigrant himself, he excluded
no one from the American dream of social mobility,
provided the conditions were amenable. Like
other Progressives of his time, Riis held the slum
environment, rather than the residents themselves,
responsible for drunkenness, truancy, youth gangs,
and moral turpitude.
Contagion was a recurring theme. Epidemics
that began in the tenements quickly spread throughout
the slums and sometimes into the rest of the
city. Riis specified moral contagion as well—pure
young rural migrants drawn into lives of licentiousness
and crime, innocent children corrupted
by vice and disrespect for life. Perhaps most dangerous,
slum conditions were ripe for fomenting
revolution. It was in society’s best interest to
improve tenement life, he argued.
Riis made much of the physical and moral
health ramifications of darkness, arguing that
bringing sunshine and fresh air would go a long
way to solving the slum’s problems. Laws regulating
tenement building mandated minimal airshafts
in 1867 but even the improved “dumb-bell” tenements
resulting from the 1879 law allowed in little
light or circulating air beyond the building’s front
and rear rooms. Parks and playgrounds would
provide all residents with healthful air and space
and give boys (specifically) an outlet other than the
mean streets. Riis lobbied successfully for new