Tenement+Life

Biography of Jacob Riss Jacob Riis was the third of the 15 children (one of whom, an orphaned niece, was fostered. Among the 15, only Jacob, one sister, and the foster-sister would survive into the twentieth century. Riis was influenced by his father, whose school Riis delighted in disrupting, but who persuaded him to read Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round and the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. Although his father had hoped that Jacob would pursue a literary career, Jacob wanted to be a carpenter. Riis returned to Ribe in 1868 at age 19. Discouraged by poor job prospects in the region and by Gjortz's rejection of his marriage proposal, Riis decided to emigrate to the United States. Riis came to the United States by steamer in 1870, when he was 21, seeking employment as a carpenter. Riis spent most of his nights in police-run poor houses, whose conditions were so ghastly that Riis dedicated himself to having them shut down. 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. In 1889, //Scribner's Magazine// published Riis's photographic essay on city life, which Riis later expanded to create his magnum opus //How the Other Half Lives//. This work was directly responsible for convincing then-Commissioner of Police Theodore Roosevelt to close the police-run poor houses in which Riis suffered during his first months as an American. After reading it, Roosevelt was so deeply moved by Riis's sense of justice that he met Riis and befriended him for life, calling him "the best American I ever knew." Roosevelt himself coined the term "Muckraker", of which Riis is a recognized protagonist, in 1906. At age 25, he proposed to Elizabeth Gortz again and he married her.  he spent the next 25 years using his artistic medium to advance the concerns of the poor.

Tenement Living Conditons

They deveopled this in the late 18th century, the area was mostly masonry row homes. The Association for Improving the Conditions of the Poor described the early tenements as “generally defective in size, supplies of water, warmth, and ventilation". The Lower East side over time became overcrowded; as a result the city council found out that half of the city lived in tenements. There was estimated number of 240,000 people every square mile. Infectious epidemics started to spread from these dirty, crammed conditions.