January 4, 1890: How the Other Half Lived

"Lodgers in Bayard Street Tenement, Five Cents a Spot"

January 4, 1890: How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York is published by Scribner's Magazine. It exposed the life of New York City's poorest people.

Born in Denmark in 1849, Jacob Riis knew poverty, and immigrated to America in 1868. He became a carpenter, and noticed a newspaper ad for an editor, and got that job. He eventually found work at publisher Horace Greeley's New York Tribune.

By the time Riis was born, the Five Points section of Lower Manhattan was already the worst slum in America. About 1809, Anthony Street was extended east to the junction of Cross and Orange Streets. As a result, the surrounding neighborhood came to be called Five Points. In 1854, the three streets were renamed from Anthony Street to Worth Street, Orange Street to Baxter Street, and Cross Street to Park Street. In 1868, Worth Street was again extended eastward, from the five-pointed intersection to Chatham Square, adding a sixth point. The neighborhood was generally defined as being bound by Centre Street to the west, the Bowery to the east, Canal Street to the north, and Park Row to the south.

Many people in upper- and middle-class society were unaware of the dangerous conditions in the slums among poor immigrants. After the American Civil War, the country transformed into an industrial superpower and became largely urban.

A wave of unskilled southern European, eastern European, Asian, and Jewish immigrants came to settle in the "promised land" of the United States. This migration was vastly different from the previous booms due to the influx of non-western European and non-Protestant individuals. Therefore, making the split between the "new" and "old" immigrants much larger. In the 1880s, over 5.2 million immigrants came to the United States, with many of these people staying in New York City. This increased the City's population by 25 percent, making the tenement problem much more extreme.

With the advent of better flash photography making indoor photography considerably easier, Riis set out in January 1888 to document just how bad the living conditions in New York's "tenements" were. Among the photos he took was the one at the top of this entry, which he titled Lodgers in Bayard Street Tenement, Five Cents a Spot, and which he described as follows: 

In a room not thirteen feet either way slept twelve men and women, two or three in bunks set in a sort of alcove, the rest on the floor. A kerosene lamp burned dimly in the fearful atmosphere, probably to guide other and later arrivals to their beds, for it was only just past midnight. A baby's fretful wail came from an adjoining hall-room, where, in the semi-darkness, three recumbent figures could be made out. The apartment was one of three in two adjoining buildings we had found, within half an hour, similarly crowded.

The other photo familiar to people today was titled Bandits' Roost, 59 1/2 Mulberry Street. It shows 11 men, one holding what appears to be a shotgun, in an alley, with laundry hanging above them. They look like messing with them is not a good idea, and it's not clear whether they agreed to pose that way for Riis, or whether he had actually messed with them by invading their territory and they are genuinely angry. 

You be the judge. They might be the jury...

and the executioners.

Riis also took pictures of workplaces, including showing child labor, which must have really pissed off the bosses of such places. On January 28, 1888, Riis presented "The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies in New York," using his images on a projection screen, and taking the viewer on a journey by describing the images. Throughout 1888, Riis continued his lectures in local New York City churches, which were reviewed in several newspapers.

In February 1889, Riis wrote a magazine article based on his lectures in Scribner's magazine, which was a resounding success. The book version of Riis' work was published the following year as How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. The title of the book is a reference to a 1534 sentence by French writer François Rabelais: "One half of the world does not know how the other half lives."

In the book, Riis described a system of tenement housing that had failed, as he claimed, because of greed and neglect from wealthier people. He claims a correlation between the high crime rate, drunkenness, and reckless behavior of the poor and their lack of a proper home. He ended with a plan of how to fix the problem. He asserts that the plan is achievable and that the upper classes will not only profit financially from such ventures, but have a moral obligation to tend to them as well.

The difference introduced photography to prove the squalid conditions and to increase sympathy for the individuals living in these slums. Riis finally convinced the average reader of newspapers that the poor were not so by choice; that the dangerous and unhygienic conditions in which they lived were imposed by society, rather than the result of loose moral standards; and that the slums were something that needed to be fixed rather than gaped at or shunned. In a way, Riis could be called the the Founding Father of what President Franklin D. Roosevelt would later call the New Deal.

Riis died in 1914. Jacob Riis Park in Brooklyn is named for him, confusing some later people who thought he might have been related to Brooklyn Dodger star Harold "Pee Wee" Reese.

By the time Riis died, the work he recommended was well underway, to the point where the Five Points no longer existed. Baxter Street (formerly Orange) has been eliminated south of the intersection and Park (formerly Cross) has been eliminated on both sides of it; thus, the junction of Baxter and Worth that remains today has only two corners. Also, what remained of Park Street was renamed to Mosco Street in 1982.

But more than just renaming streets, the City began to build new housing, as Manhattan Island was soon filled up. Granted, many of these buildings would later be called "tenements" and "slums," but they still provided more room and amenities than what had been in the Five Points. This allowed people to move into such buildings.

And that allowed the elimination of the buildings that Riis was talking about. What had been Bandit's Roost was demolished, and is now Columbus Park. And New York City's major court complexes -- local, State and federal -- take up a big portion of what had been the Five Points neighborhood.

The area is considerably safer now -- not least because it contains so many people in law enforcement, as it includes the New York Police Buildings, built in 1909 in the Beaux-Arts style, at 240 Centre Street, now an apartment building; One Police Plaza (a.k.a. 1PP), its successor, built in 1973 in the Brutalist style; and the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building, also known by its address, 26 Federal Plaza (a.k.a. 26 Fed), another Brutalist building that went up in 1969, and includes the New York offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as seen in the CBS crime drama FBI.

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January 4, 1890 was a Saturday. Aside from baseball, professional sports wasn't really a thing in America. No other team sports were ongoing at this point. Indeed, basketball wouldn't be invented for nearly another 2 years.

In England, soccer was slowly turning professional, although amateur teams still dominated. Royal Arsenal Football Club were founded in 1886, and, upon turning professional in 1893, were legally forced to drop "Royal" from their name, lest they be accused of trading on the monarchy for profit. So this "works side" (what Americans would call a "company team") added the locality of the Royal Arsenal, and became Woolwich Arsenal. In 1913, they moved across the River Thames, to Highbury in North London, and became simply Arsenal Football Club.

On this day, Royal Arsenal defeated Windsor Phoenix, 3-1 at Manor Field in Plumstead, in what was then Kent, but is now South-East London.