Jacob Riis

Ribe gave him a schoolteacher father, 14 brothers and sisters, and a brother who drowned at eleven. He wanted to be a carpenter. At 16 he wanted Elisabeth Gjørtz, whose family employed him, and she refused his proposal. So he took steerage from Glasgow aboard the steamer Iowa and landed in New York on June 5, 1870, carrying 40 dollars given him by friends and a gold locket holding a strand of her hair. He spent half the money that day on a revolver. Within months he was sleeping in police lodging houses and living on scavenged food and handouts from Delmonico's, his only companion a stray dog. One morning the locket was gone. He complained, and the sergeant threw him into the street.

A neighbor who edited the New-York Tribune got him a short contract, and he became a police reporter working out of an office across from headquarters on Mulberry Street. Words were not enough. In 1887 he read that photographs could now be taken by flashlight, recruited a friend from the city health department, and went into the tenements at night burning magnesium powder — fired first from a pistol-shaped device, later lit on a frying pan. He bought his own box camera in January 1888 for 25 dollars. How the Other Half Lives followed in 1890, among the first books to reproduce photographs in halftone instead of as engravings. In 1891 he photographed sewage running into the city's drinking water, and New York bought the watershed. In 1897 the Mulberry Bend tenements came down and a park went up.

The man who made the tenements visible also made their people into types. He called the Jewish quarter of the Lower East Side Jewtown and wrote that money is their god. Early in his career he said the Chinese must go, and 20 years later he was still defending a flat verdict of exclusion for Asians. Italians, he wrote, reproduce conditions of destitution and disorder. One reading of his books puts the pattern plainly: the Jews are nervous and inquisitive, the Orientals are sinister, the Italians are unsanitary. A biographer found him quick to condemn immigrants who failed to assimilate, which is a strange charge from a man who had slept on the same floors. The economist Thomas Sowell later asked whether tenement families had reasons of their own for living as cheaply as they did.

He died at his farm in Barre, Massachusetts, on May 26, 1914, and lies in Riverside Cemetery under a granite boulder with nothing written on it. Theodore Roosevelt, who as police commissioner had walked the night beat with him and then closed the lodging houses where Riis once slept, called him the most useful citizen of New York. His negatives ended up at the Museum of the City of New York, which is why the photographs survive and why every argument about him is conducted in front of them. His name is on a beach in Queens, a housing project in Manhattan, a school, and a museum in the Danish town he left.

Jacob Riis's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Bandits' Roost, 59 1/2 Mulberry Street artwork
  The best-known photograph of the alley he helped get demolished 1888
• How the Other Half Lives book
  One of the first books to use halftone photographic reproduction at length 1890
• Some Things We Drink article
  Six photographs of sewage entering the water supply — New York bought the watershed 1891
• The Children of the Poor book
  The sequel, on tenement childhood 1892
• The Making of an American book
  The autobiography a New York Times reviewer called a vanity project 1901
• Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen book
  A campaign biography of his friend 1904

• May 3, 1849 aged 0 Born in Ribe, the third of 15 children His father taught school and wrote for a newspaper.
• June 5, 1870 aged 21 Lands in New York and spends half his money on a revolver He had 40 dollars from friends and a locket holding Elisabeth Gjørtz's hair.
• Autumn 1870 aged ~21 Destitute, sleeping in police lodging houses The locket was stolen there, and the sergeant expelled him when he complained.
• Early 1887 aged ~38 Reads that photographs can be taken by flashlight He began going into the tenements at night with magnesium powder.
• January 1888 aged 38 Buys his own camera for 25 dollars and develops his own plates
• 1890 aged ~41 How the Other Half Lives is published Reviews were mostly good — some critics said it oversimplified and exaggerated.
• August 21, 1891 aged 42 Publishes his photographs of sewage entering the city water supply New York responded by buying land around the New Croton Reservoir.
• 1895 aged ~46 Takes police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt out on the night beat Nine of ten patrolmen were missing, and Riis printed it.
• 1897 aged ~48 Mulberry Bend is torn down and replaced by a park
• May 26, 1914 aged 65 Dies on his farm at Barre, Massachusetts

• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. walked the night beat with
• Jane Addams 1860–1935
  Social worker and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who founded Hull House and the settlement house movement. parallel in settlement reform
• Jane Jacobs 1916–2006
  Writer and activist whose defense of mixed, walkable neighborhoods transformed urban planning. later argued against slum clearance
• Robert Moses 1888–1981
  Master builder whose roads, parks, and public works reshaped metropolitan New York while displacing communities and entrenching car dependence. inherited the demolition argument
• Frances Perkins 1880–1965
  First woman in a presidential cabinet and labor secretary who helped create Social Security, minimum-wage, and workplace protections. carried tenement reform into federal law