New York Challenged – The City’s Response to Crisis and Change from Colonial Times to Present

Document P - Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, (1890)

In the 1880s the torch of slum reform was passed to the muckrakers, specifically the crusading journalist Jacob Riis. As a police reporter for the Tribune and the Associated Press, Riis saw firsthand the suffering of those living in the "foul core of New York’s slums," what was called "Mulberry Bend," the area immediately north of what remained of the Five Points. His searing exposés of conditions in "the Bend" for the Tribune soon led to the appointment of a new Tenement House Commission in 1884, which included housing philanthropist Alfred T. White who remarked at one session that profitable, well-constructed tenements were the solution, "it was just a question whether a man would take seven percent and save his soul, or twenty five and lose it

Where Mulberry Street crooks like an elbow within hail of the depravity of the Five Points, is "the Bend," foul core of New York’s slums... Around "the Bend" cluster the bulk of the tenements that are stamped as altogether bad, even by the optimists in the Health Department... In scores of back alleys, of stable lanes, and hidden byways... [the poor] share such shelter as the ramshackle structures afford with every kind of abomination rifled from the dumps and ash barrels of the city... There is scarce a lot that has not two, three or four tenements upon it, swarming with unwholesome crowds.

There is but one "Bend" in the world, and it is enough. The city authorities, moved by the angry protests of ten years of sanitary reform effort, have decided that it is too much and must come down. Another Paradise Park will take its place and let sunlight and air to work such transformation as at the Five Points, around the corner of the next block. Never was change more urgently needed.

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