After reading How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis’s blistering condemnation of slum life in 1890 New York City, Theodore Roosevelt, then head of the New York Police Board of Commissioners, left Riis a note at his office: “I have read your book, and I have come to help.” How the Other Half Lives was a pioneering work of muckraking journalism featuring 15 photos and 43 drawings, some exploiting the cutting-edge technology of flash photography. Riis’s book sold through 11 editions in five years and woke New Yorkers to the crushing poverty and horrible conditions of the tenements, where population density in one ward reached almost 350,000 inhabitants per square mile.

Born in Ribe, Denmark in 1849, Riis was the third of fourteen children. As a teenager, he apprenticed to become a carpenter and fell in love with his employer’s daughter. The gir's parents disapproved of the match, and the rejected suitor left for America to make something of himself, arriving in New York in 1840. Riis’s life in New York got off to an inauspicious start. He drifted from one odd job to another, sleeping in tenement slums and, occasionally, squalid charity shelters operated by the police.

Eventually Riis succeeded in obtaining steady employment as a carpenter. He began dabbling in journalism and soon found that he was able to make a living by his pen. He even earned enough money to return to Denmark, marry his sweetheart and bring her to New York. In 1877, Riis landed a job with the New York Tribune and Associated Press Bureau. As a police beat reporter, he chronicled the crime and misery that plagued the teeming lodging houses on the Lower East Side.

Mulberry Street in Lower Manhattan, shown here circa 1900, belonged to one of the most crowded neighborhoods on earth in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

How the Other Half Lives was meant to challenge the collective conscience of the more affluent segments of New York society. “The tenements today are New York, harboring three-fourths of its population,” wrote Riis. “When another generation shall have doubled the census of our city, and to that vast army of workers, held captive by poverty, the very name of home shall be as a bitter mockery, what will the harvest be?” 

Riis’s book helped spur reforms such as new playgrounds and parks, building requirements, and the closing of police lodging rooms.   

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