On View, the Jacob Riis Photos That Exposed Downtown Slums

SLIDE SHOW Click photo to see more pictures 

A ragpicker sits with her swaddled baby. She and her family lived in a windowless room on Jersey Street in what is now an alleyway in Soho.

At 2 a.m. newsboys for the Evening Sun on Park Row sleep above the steam pipes until it is time for them to go to work.

A young girl does piecework at home to help support the family. They lived along with 700 other residents in a building on Cherry Street with no interior light, ventilation or plumbing.

Riis's office at the New York Tribune was a few blocks from Mulberry Bend, one of the city's worst slums.

Twelve men and one woman squeezed into in a small room in a lodging house on Bayard Street where a space to sleep on the bare floor was available for five cents.

Students at the Beach Street Industrial School, at 36 Beach Street, have a lessont in democracy by voting on whether or not to salute the American flag in the morning.

On a cold, stormy night, homeless men and women waited to be let in to the Mulberry Street Police Station where they hope to spend the night. The line stretched up the stairs and into the street.

The New York Tribune Police Headquarters, 1887-88, where Riis (left) shared an office with his colleague Amos Ensign.

Boys wash up in the Newsboys Lodging House near Newspaper Row across from City Hall. The Children's Aid Society built six lodging hhouses in the city for homeless children.

How surprised Jacob A. Riis would be were he to happen upon the show of his photos now at the Museum of the City of New York until March 4.

The Danish-born journalist who so famously documented the plight of the city's poor in the late 1800s, never even considered himself a photographer.

"Riis was not a photographer in any normal sense," said Bonnie Yochelson, the show's curator and a longtime Tribeca resident. "In 1887, he read about flash powder which would allow him to take photos in the dark. He arranged for two wealthy amateur photographers to help him. But they tired of the slum and so he reluctantly learned to use the camera himself." (The devices were dangerous—Riis once set himself on fire, and twice ignited a house.)

Many of the photos in the show, "Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York's Other Half," were in Lower Manhattan. The infamous Mulberry Bend, where he photographed barefoot children sleeping on the streets, is now Columbus Park on the western edge of Chinatown. The newsboys lodging house for homeless boys who paid six cents for a bed was across from City Hall. A picture of three women sleeping without bedding on the floor was taken on Washington Street, once known as Little Syria.

The images, which ran alongside his newspaper and magazine articles and published in his 1890 book, "How the Other Half Lives," movingly exposed the squalor and crime of the city's  tenements.

Although he meticulously archived his writing, Riis thought so little of his photographs that he left them behind when he moved from Richmond Hills in 1912.

"It wasn't until 1940 that photographer Alexander Alland got in touch with Riis's son [Roger William Riis]," Yochelson said. "He badgered him for a couple of years until the son went to their old home and asked the owner if he could check around in the attic."

There he found a box of prints, negatives and lantern slides (used in the first image projectors), many in poor condition. Roger Riis handed them over to Alland, who reprinted them and in 1947, the Museum of the City of New York mounted the exhibit,  "The Battle With the Slum 1887-1897."

"Riis became a national spokesman for poor immigrants," said Yochelson whose research on Riis began 25 years ago when she was Curator of Prints and Photograph at the City Museum, and is the author of the complete catalog of Riis's photos. "His goal was to change the national conversation about poverty and immigration."

Museum of the City of New York,  1220 Fifth Ave. Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., mcny.org.