Plate 10249: “One of the dirtiest and most unsanitary rooms ever found by the Tenement House Department. Cleaned by order of Department,” from the series New York City Tenement House Department Photographic Prints Illustrating Conditions and Problems of Tenement Housing 1902–1922

The photographs in Jacob Riis’s groundbreaking 1890 publication, How the Other Half Lives, inspired public policy reform to address the squalid living conditions of the urban poor.



In 1898 Lawrence Veiller, the organizer and first Deputy Commissioner of the New York City Tenement House Department and the director of a charitable group’s Tenement House Committee, said that the committee’s chief aim was to “make a general study of the tenement house question.” He launched a comprehensive method for documenting in a card file every tenement building in New York City—already in excess of 80,000 in 1902. The committee’s photographs, reminiscent of Riis’s jarring visuals and combined with dramatically worded descriptions, were intended specifically for communication with the public. This image includes a glimpse of a child in the background, blurred by the camera’s long shutter speed—a phantom alerting the viewer that this seemingly abandoned space is actually very much occupied.