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BANDIT’S ROOST, 59½ MULBERRY STREET by Jacob Riis
Late 19th-century New York City was a magnet for the
world’s immigrants, and the vast majority of them found
not streets paved with gold but nearly subhuman squalor.
While polite society turned a blind eye, brave reporters
like the Danish-born Jacob Riis documented this shame
of the Gilded Age. Riis did this by venturing into the city’s
most ominous neighborhoods with his blinding magnesium
flash powder lights, capturing the casual crime, grinding
poverty and frightful overcrowding. Most famous of these
was Riis’ image of a Lower East Side street gang, which
conveys the danger that lurked around every bend. Such
work became the basis of his revelatory book How the Other
Half Lives, which forced Americans to confront what they
had long ignored and galvanized reformers like the young
New York politician Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote to the
photographer, “I have read your book, and I have come to
help.” Riis’ work was instrumental in bringing about New
York State’s landmark Tenement House Act of 1901, which
improved conditions for the poor. And his crusading ap-
proach and direct, confrontational style ushered in the age
of documentary and muckraking photojournalism.