Tenement+Life


 * // Jacob August Riis //** (May 3, 1849 - May 26, 1914), a Denmark-United States muckraker journalist, photographer, and social reformer, was born in Ribe, Denmark. He is known for his dedication to using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the less fortunate in New York City, which was the subject of most of his prolific writings and photographic essays.   Jacob Riis was the first of fifteen children born to Niels Riis. Riis was influenced both by his stern father and by the authors he read, among whom Charles Dickens and James Fenimore Cooper were his favorites. At age eleven, Riis's younger brother drowned.    Riis would be haunted for the rest of his life by the images of his drowning brother and of his mother staring at his brother's empty chair at the dinner table.    Riis came to the United States by steamer in 1870, when he was 21, seeking employment as a carpenter. He arrived during an era of social turmoil. Riis held various jobs before he landed a position as a police reporter in 1873 with the //New York Sun (historical)// newspaper. In 1874, he joined the news bureau of the //Brooklyn News.// In 1877 he served as police reporter, this time for the //New York Tribune.// During these stints as a police reporter, Riis worked the most crime-ridden and impoverished slums of the city. Through his own experiences in the poor houses, and witnessing the conditions of the poor in the city slums, he decided to make a difference for those who had no voice. He was one of the first Americans to use flash powder, allowing his documentation of New York City slums to penetrate the dark of night, and helping him capture the hardships faced by the poor and criminal along his police beats, especially on the notorious Mulberry Street (Manhattan).    Contemporary critics have noted that, despite Riis's sense of Populism justice, he had a deprecating attitude towards women and people of certain ethnic and racial groups, as was common in his time. //Jacob Riis Park//, located on Rockaway Peninsula in the Gateway National Recreation Area, Gateway, is named after Riis.

Tenement life> Gas lighting was initially installed but electic lighting followed quickly behind. Structurally New York City tenements were generally of two types: - smaller houses of three or four floors that may have originally been one family and were converted into three or four family dwellings - larger buildings constructed as tenements that were typically five or six floors with four families to a floor. In the oldest and poorest tenements water had to be obtained from an outside pump, frequently frozen in winter. The privy was in the back yard. Later buildings generally had a sink and "water closet" in the hall on each floor. Newer and better class tenements had sinks in the kitchen. They were all "cold water". Water for washing dishes and clothes and for taking baths was heated on the stove. Many of the larger tenements had a housekeeper, often a widow, who received free rent in exchange for maintaining and cleaning the halls stairs and sweeping the sidewalk in fount of the building. As a result many of these larger tenements were remarkably clean. There were many dirty, poverty stricken, hovels. And while most tenements were crowded, the majority of tenement apartments were as clean as soap and elbow grease could make them. Many of the larger tenements were very attractive buildings. The brick facades were often decorated with elaborate tin moldings and a network of beautiful wrought iron fire escapes. A typical tenement image is of multiple lines of laundry flapping merrily in the breeze - which is both a pleasant sight in and of itself and an indication of the industry and cleanliness of the inhabitants. While some neighborhoods were comprised of a heavy percentage of a given ethnic group most tenements contained a wide variety of nationalities and the smells (good and bad) of the diverse cuisines filled the air. What made a tenement a "tenement" was the location and how recently the immigrants had arrived. Similar size apartments in better neighborhoods were called "flats".

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