PHOTO LIBRARY OF NEW YORK BY JACOB RIIS

"The doors are opened unwillingly enough.... It was photographed by flashlight.... In a room not thirteen feet either way slept twelve men and women.... The 'apartment' was one of three in two adjoining buildings we had found... similarly crowded. Most of the men were lodgers, who slept there for five cents a spot."

Women's Lodging Room in the West 47th Street Station

Police Station Lodger, A Plank for a Bed

Men's Lodging Room in the West 47th Street Station

One of Four Pedlars Who Slept in the Cellar of 11 Ludlow Street

Mulberry Bend

What the Boys Learn on Their Street Playground

"At 59 Baxter Street... is an alley leading in from the sidewalk with tenements on either side crowding so close as to almost shut out the light of day. On one side they are brick and on the other wood, but there is little difference in their ricketiness and squalor."

"...The bulk of the sweater's work is done in the tenements, which the law that regulates factory labor does not reach....Ten hours is the legal work-day in the factories, and nine o'clock the closing hour at the latest. Forty-five minutes at least must be allowed for dinner, and children under sixteen must not be employed unless they can read and write English; none at all under fourteen.... But the tenement has defeated its benevolent purpose. In it the child works unchallenged from the day he is old enough to pull a thread."

"In the front room, man and wife work at the bench from six in the morning till nine at night. They make a team, stripping the tobacco leaves together; then he makes the filler, and she rolls the wrapper on and finishes the cigar. For a thousand they receive $3.75, and can turn out together three thousand cigars a week." Cigar Makers

"This shoemaker, knows a trick...He has his 'flat' as well as his shop here. A curtain hung back of his stool in the narrow passage half-conceals his bed that fills it entirely from wall to wall."

A New York Tenement Flat

"A dozen years ago [l890], I gave a stockbroker a good blowing up for hammering his cellar door full of envious nails to prevent the children using it as a slide. It was all the playground they had."

Homeless Children

Children sleeping in Mulberry Street

Tenement Housing

Jacob Riis taking a photograph of an Italian vegetable stand

Jacob Riis (1849 – 1914)