A short life of the author
Jacob Riis was the man who showed America how the other half lived — a Danish immigrant who became a police reporter on the Lower East Side of New York City and used the new technology of flash photography to penetrate the darkest corners of the tenement slums, producing a body of photographs and journalism that shocked the American middle class into awareness of the desperate poverty in which millions of their fellow citizens existed. How the Other Half Lives (1890), his most famous work, combined photographs, statistics, and vivid reportage to create a portrait of slum life that was unprecedented in its directness and its emotional impact. The book led directly to tenement reform legislation, influenced Theodore Roosevelt’s career as a reformer, and established photojournalism as a tool of social change.
Ribe to New York
Jacob August Riis was born in 1849 in Ribe, Denmark, the third of fifteen children. His father was a schoolteacher and newspaper editor. Riis trained as a carpenter, emigrated to America in 1870 at the age of twenty-one, and spent his first years in the country in desperate poverty — sleeping in doorways, eating from garbage, and experiencing firsthand the misery he would later document. He worked as a labourer, a peddler, and a brick maker before finding a job as a journalist.
In 1877, he became a police reporter for the New York Tribune and later the Evening Sun, covering the Lower East Side — the most densely populated slum district in the world. For the next two decades, he walked the streets of Mulberry Bend, Bottle Alley, and Bandit’s Roost, observing the conditions in which immigrants from Italy, Ireland, Germany, China, and Eastern Europe lived, worked, and died.
Flash Photography
Riis’s great innovation was the use of flash photography — a technology that had only recently become available — to photograph the interiors of tenements, sweatshops, and lodging houses that no middle-class American had ever seen. His photographs of immigrants sleeping twelve to a room, of children working in basement sweatshops, of families living in windowless rooms without plumbing or ventilation, were the first images of urban poverty to reach a mass audience.
The photographs were technically crude — flash powder produced harsh, flat lighting — but their documentary power was overwhelming. They made poverty visible in a way that words alone could not.
How the Other Half Lives
How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890) was published by Scribner’s with seventeen halftone reproductions of Riis’s photographs and numerous line drawings based on his images. The book was a sensation. It combined statistical evidence, personal anecdotes, and photographic documentation to create a comprehensive portrait of tenement life — the overcrowding, the disease, the child labour, the crime, the alcoholism, and the exploitation of immigrants by landlords and employers.
The book’s impact was immediate. Theodore Roosevelt, then a member of the U.S. Civil Service Commission, read it and sought out Riis, beginning a friendship that lasted until Riis’s death. Roosevelt later wrote: “The countless evils which lurk in the dark corners of our civic institutions, which stalk abroad in the slums, and have their permanent abode in the crowded tenement houses, have met in Mr. Riis the most formidable opponent ever encountered by them.”
Reform
Riis’s subsequent books — The Children of the Poor (1892), Out of Mulberry Street (1898), The Battle with the Slum (1902), and A Ten Years’ War (1900) — continued his crusade. He campaigned for the destruction of the worst tenements, the creation of parks and playgrounds in slum neighbourhoods, the reform of child labour laws, and the improvement of public schools. Many of his specific proposals were enacted into law.
The Making of an American (1901) was his autobiography — the story of his own immigrant experience, from his arrival in America with nothing to his career as the most influential journalist in New York.
Collecting Riis
How the Other Half Lives (Scribner’s, 1890) in first edition with the halftone photographs is the primary target — one of the most important American books of the Gilded Age. The Making of an American (Macmillan, 1901) is the autobiography. Riis’s original photographs, rediscovered at the Museum of the City of New York in the 1940s, are held in various institutional collections. Signed copies are uncommon.
Bibliography
| Title | Year | Publisher | Language |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Ten Years' War Riis's account of a decade of tenement reform in New York — from the publication of How the Other Half Lives in 1890 to 1900 — documents the battles won and lost, the laws passed and evaded, and the slow, grinding process of transforming public outrage into permanent institutional change. | 1900 | Houghton Mifflin | English |
| Children of the Tenements Riis's collection of stories about the children of the Lower East Side — based on his years of observation as a police reporter and housing reformer — combines fiction and reportage to depict the lives of immigrant children with a warmth and specificity that made them real to middle-class readers who might otherwise never have encountered them. | 1903 | Macmillan | English |
| How the Other Half Lives Riis's groundbreaking exposé of tenement life on Manhattan's Lower East Side — combining photographs, statistics, and vivid reporting — shocked middle-class America into awareness of immigrant poverty and became one of the most influential works of social reform journalism in American history, directly inspiring housing legislation and Theodore Roosevelt's political career. | 1890 | Charles Scribner's Sons | English |
| Nibsy's Christmas Riis's Christmas story follows a tenement boy named Nibsy who has never experienced Christmas until a charitable visitor brings the holiday into his world — a sentimental tale designed to open middle-class hearts (and pocketbooks) to the children of the slums, but grounded in Riis's intimate knowledge of the lives it depicts. | 1893 | Charles Scribner's Sons | English |
| Out of Mulberry Street: Stories of Tenement Life in New York City Riis's collection of stories drawn from his years as a police reporter on Mulberry Street — the heart of the Lower East Side immigrant district — blends journalism with fiction to create portraits of tenement life that humanize the statistics of poverty through individual stories of courage, humor, and endurance. | 1898 | Century Company | English |
| The Battle with the Slum Riis's follow-up to How the Other Half Lives documents the progress made in tenement reform since 1890 — the new laws, the demolished rookeries, the parks and playgrounds built in their place — while arguing that the battle is far from won and that the forces of greed and indifference are always ready to undo whatever gains have been made. | 1902 | Macmillan | English |
| The Children of the Poor Riis's companion volume to How the Other Half Lives focuses specifically on children — their living conditions, their education, their labor, and their encounters with the justice system — arguing that children are both the most vulnerable victims of tenement poverty and the key to breaking the cycle of degradation through education and opportunity. | 1892 | Charles Scribner's Sons | English |
| The Making of an American Riis's autobiography tells the story of his immigration from Denmark to America in 1870, his years of desperate poverty and near-starvation in New York, and his eventual success as a journalist and reformer — a classic immigrant narrative that embodies the American myth of self-making while documenting the brutal reality that most immigrants faced. | 1901 | Macmillan | English |
| The Peril and the Preservation of the Home Riis's lecture-turned-book argues that the tenement system threatens the foundation of American democracy — the home — and that preserving the possibility of decent family life requires not charity but systemic reform of housing, labor, and education. | 1903 | Jacobs | English |
| Theodore Roosevelt the Citizen Riis's biography of his friend Theodore Roosevelt traces Roosevelt's development from privileged Harvard student through police commissioner to President — written by the man who knew him best in his reforming years and who saw him as the embodiment of the civic ideals they both served. | 1904 | Outlook Company | English |