Out of Mulberry Street: Stories of Tenement Life in New York City was published by the Century Company in 1898, collecting stories and sketches that Riis had published in various magazines over the preceding years. The title refers to Mulberry Street — the center of Little Italy on the Lower East Side and the location of the Mulberry Bend, one of New York’s most notorious slums — and to Riis’s years working out of the police headquarters on Mulberry Street, where he had reported on crime, poverty, and tenement conditions since the 1870s.
The stories are drawn from Riis’s reporting but shaped into narrative form: character sketches of people he met in the slums, accounts of incidents he witnessed or investigated, portraits of institutions (churches, settlement houses, saloons, lodging houses) and the people who inhabited them. Some are sentimental — Riis knew what moved his middle-class readers — but the best are vivid and specific, capturing the texture of immigrant life with the authority of someone who had spent decades among his subjects.
Collecting Out of Mulberry Street
First edition (Century Company, New York, 1898): Cloth binding, illustrated.
Market values:
- First edition, good condition: $40–$100
- Later editions: $8–$20