New York, NY - Urban Archive

South of Union Square

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Interior Life: How the Other Half Lived

On June 5th, 1870 Jacob Riis arrived in New York with 40$ and a revolver. Riis was one of the millions of immigrants arriving on the shores of the United States at the end of the 19th century. Seeking a better life, the immigrants were packed into the tenements and slums of New York. In the 1880s, the Lower East Side was the most densely populated place in the world. Riis's documentation of the inhabitants of these neighborhoods would make him famous and drive a reformist movement.

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Urban Archive

1

Mott Street Barracks

Mott Street Barracks

The Mott Street Barracks was a prime example of the squalid housing available to recent immigrants. A series of six tenements on Mott Street (308-318), each had two apartments on every floor. Each apartment had only one window, little light, and no plumbing. Packed in like sardines, the residents would empty their chamberpots in the cellar.

2

Mott Street Barracks

Mott Street Barracks

A hotbed of disease and violent crime, the Mott Street Barracks were plagued with thievery and violent crime including numerous murders. Riis noted that the child mortality rate was almost one in three. But many poor Irish and Italian migrants could only afford tenements like the Mott Street Barracks and kept on inhabiting it. The Health Department would eventually seize the building (in exchange for one dollar) and demolish it.

3

Lower East Side

Lower East Side

However, some lodging houses made the Mott Street Barracks look like an Astor Mansion. Charging by the day, lodging houses provided cheap housing to unskilled laborers. Stacking men in bunk beds or piles of rags, the flophouses provided some of the most squalid housing for rent. Mice, fleas, lice, and infestations were rampant. Disease spread quickly.

4

Eldridge Street Police Station

Eldridge Street Police Station

Reformers pushed for Police Stations to provide housing for those who couldn't afford other lodgings. Stations throughout the city would both round up and take men and women in. The Station rooms were clean but spare. They would offer hard unpadded benches, and the floor to sleep on.

5

Eldridge Street Police Station

Eldridge Street Police Station

Separated by genders, the police station rooms would often be full of lodgers. Nor did the locale prevent crime. Jacob Riis was robbed one of the Church Station lodgings that he stayed at while destitute.

6

East Side Hebrew Institute (Formerly Tompkins Square Lodging for Boys and Industrial School.)

East Side Hebrew Institute (Formerly Tompkins Square Lodging for Boys and Industrial School.)

Charitable institutions like the Tompkins Square Lodging for Boys and Industrial School were sponsored by the Children's Aid Society to educate and shelter "destitute working children, particularly newsboys and bootblacks."

7

Newsboys Lodging Home

Newsboys Lodging Home

The Children's Aid Society ran a number of homes throughout the city aimed at providing clean housing and education for the working youth. Each of the homes tended to serve different industries or ethnicities.

8

East Side Hebrew Institute (Formerly Tompkins Square Lodging for Boys and Industrial School.)

East Side Hebrew Institute (Formerly Tompkins Square Lodging for Boys and Industrial School.)

However, even at these homes the lodging wasn't free. A Harper's article recounts the boys “can sleep in a common dormitory for a nickel a night. …The boy willing to cough up a dime can sleep like a little prince in his own bed.”

9

Rivington Street Dump

Rivington Street Dump

The slim lodging stock of the Police Stations and charitable institutions did little to solve the larger problem of housing. Many resorted to building lean-tos and shantytowns in unoccupied parts of the city. Often this meant going where others would not such- from the wilderness to city dumps.

10

Mulberry Bend

Mulberry Bend

The life of the poor in New York was night and day from that of the Gilded Age wealthy. As robber barons built spacious mansions, millions were crammed together in the city's tenements, flophouses, and police stations. While they by no means solved the issues, the photos Riis took were vital in spurring reform and progressive movements in New York.

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