Wealth flowed during the 1880s and 90s, but only to the upper echelons of society. A vast gulf opened between rich and poor, earning this era the nickname "the Gilded Age." One immigrant photographer captured what it was like for New York's poor during this time, and his images remain arresting today.
The Danish-born carpenter Jacob Riis (1849-1914) migrated to the US in 1870. He started his career as a journalist in 1873 as a police reporter, only three years after he arrived in New York. Later he became the city editor of the New York Tribune.
When flash photography was born in 1887, he and three photographer friends began to photograph the slums of New York City and three years later he published How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York with more than a hundred photographs.
Later he wrote some other books, but none of those could approach the success of How the Other Half Lives. The whole book with photos and illustrations is available here.
Baxter Street, Mulberry Bend
Mulberry Bend
Bandits Roost, a Mulberry Street back alley
Baxter Street Alley, behind the Bandit's Roost
Street Arabs – tens of thousands of begging homeless kids, mostly boys
A shoemaker in 219 Broome Street
Police Station lodgers in Elizabeth Street Station
Scene on the Roof on the Mott Street Barracks
Sabbath Eve in a coal cellar, Ludlow Street
Dens of Death
Bohemian cigarmakers at work in their tenement
Lodgers in a crowded flat on Bayard Street. It cost five cents a day.
The old Mrs. Benoit in her tenement on Hudson Street
Mulberry Bend Park
"Knee-pants" at forty-five cents a dozen – A Ludlow street sweatshop
A school on the East Side
Immigrant children saluting the flag in the Mott Street Industrial School
Home of an Italian ragpicker
Essex Market School, East Side
A Flat in the Pauper's Barracks with All Its Furniture
Swine
Bunks in a seven-cent lodging house named Happy Jack's Canvas Palace, Pell Street
Hell's Kitchen
A Rear Tenement in Roosevelt Street
A pedlar who slept in the cellar of 11 Ludlow Street
Under the dump, Rivington Street
Under the dump at West 35th Street
Headquarters of the Whyo gang, Bottle Alley
Men's lodging room in West 47th Street Station
Mountain Eagle and his Family of Iroquois Indians — One of the few Indian families in the city, found at 6 Beach Street
A Black-and-Tan Dive in "Africa"
The Short-Tail Gang, Corlears Hook, under the Pier at the foot of Jackson Street
It cost a dollar a month to sleep in these sheds
A Talmud school in Hester Street
A downtown "morgue" (an unlicensed saloon)
Lodgers
A family making artificial flowers
Police Station Lodgers
Eldridge Street Police Station:
West 47th Street:
Getting ready for supper in the newsboys' lodging-house
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The photos are from Zeno, except when noted otherwise.