THIS PHOTOGRAPH BY JACOB RIIS (1889) REFLECTS THE CONDITIONS THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN FOUND IN

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will certainly L. Taylor. The City of new York. Brand-new York: Galt & Hoy, 1879. Geography and Map Division, Library of congress (002.00.00)

as soon as Jacob Riis released How the Other half Lives in 1890, the U.S. Census bureau ranked new York as the most densely lived in city in the joined States—1.5 million inhabitants. Riis asserted that every square mile, the was among the many densely occupied places ~ above the planet. The city is pictured in this large-scale panoramic map, a famous cartographic type used to depict U.S. And also Canadian cities and also towns throughout the late nineteenth and early twenty centuries. Known likewise as bird’s-eye views or view maps, summary maps render areas as if regarded from above at an tilt angle. Although not generally drawn to scale, they display street patterns, separation, personal, instance buildings, and significant landscape features in perspective. This map helps visualize the excessive density, particularly in the reduced East and West sides of Manhattan, and Jacob Riis’s lifelong issue with ameliorating the many those that resided in its crowded slums.

As governor of new York, Riis’s girlfriend Theodore Roosevelt appointed a Tenement residence Commission, i m sorry led in 1901 come the development of the Tenement home Department, top by an additional Riis friend, Robert de forest of the Charity organization Society. Riis and this one of municipal citizen-reformers, which contained social welfare activists Josephine demonstrate Lowell and also Lillian Wald, functioned to gather statistics evidence and raise windy awareness. They supported for new housing draft to ease crowding and also improve fire safety, sanitation, and access to air and also light. Riis described the development of tenement house reform as a forty-year effort, which included demolishing the five Points and also Mulberry bending neighborhoods, initiating new construction, clean the streets, producing parks and also playgrounds, tearing under rear tenements, and cutting much more than 40,000 home windows through interior walls to let in light.

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Flat in Hell’s Kitchen top top the West Side

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Public Health

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“Playgrounds together a Cure because that City Crime,” Brooklyn Times, April 27, 1900, from page in Riis’s scrapbook. Jacob A. Riis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of conference (017.00.00)

Riis photographed a privately funded, experimental playground at West 28th Street in between 11th and also 12th Avenues, the bbsci-ch.orgk pictured in the map above, where equipment was installed, and a janitor and two teachers were hired to watch the children. Riis described the park: “It was not exactly an attractive place. . . . Yet the children thought the lovely, and lovely it was for poverty Gap, if no for 5th Avenue.” Riis helped create several small public parks in tenement areas including a park ~ above Rivington Street. This petition, signed by 300 school girls “to make the corporation garden at the foot that Rivington St. Right into a windy play-ground,” succeeded. Hamilton Fish Park opened in 1900.

Crime

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Piece Work—Cigar-Making

Riis devoted a chapter of How the Other fifty percent Lives come “The Bohemians—Tenement-House Cigar Making.” Riis described these eastern European immigrant as functioning seventeen-hour days, seven days a week, inside your apartments rank with toxic fumes, making pennies one hour by stripping and drying piles the tobacco leaves and also rolling finished products. In the Riis photograph, the parents job-related at the cigar mold and their oldest child, in ~ the center of the frame, prepares the tobacco pipeline for rolling.

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Fire insurance money Map

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Educating the Young

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Immigration

In Jersey Street

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Sections: biography | Reporter | Photographer | Writer | Reformer | Lecturer | allied | Riis and Reform | Legacy

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