BrinkLindsey.com – The Age of Abundance

The past is another country — a dirt-poor country, that is.

In my book, I tell the story of Jacob Riis, the Danish immigrant who eventually found his calling as the chronicler of the Lower East Side’s les misérables. His 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, was a powerful prod to the social conscience when it was written; it is an equally powerful prod to the historical imagination today.

It is difficult for us to conceive how poor our country was just a century or so ago. Yet in the New York of Riis’s day, approximately 100,000 children lived on the streets, eking out survival by selling newspapers, blacking boots, begging, and stealing. “In warm weather a truck in the street, a convenient outhouse, or a dugout in a hay barge make good bunks,” Riis wrote. “Two were found making their nest once in the end of a big iron pipe up by the Harlem Bridge, and an old boiler at the end of the East River served as an elegant flat for another couple.”

Riis arrived in the U.S. in 1870.  After three years of odd jobs and a stint of begging, he finally found steady work as a police photographer for the New York Tribune.

How the Other Half Lives is illustrated with Riis’s photographs — including the one above, entitled “Children Sleeping on Mulberry Street.” Here’s another great shot — “Five Cents Lodging, Bayard Street”: