Street Arabs–homeless child beggars, mostly boys
New York City during the 1880s and 1990s was known as “the Gilded Age”, a time where wealth was restricted to the upper classes, and the gap between the rich and poor was immense.
Thanks to io9, we now have a glimpse of what life was like for the down and out through these eye-opening photographs taken by photographer and journalist Jacob Riis.
Originally a carpenter from Denmark, Riis migrated to America in 1870. He started his journalistic career in 1873, and later became the city editor of the New York Tribune.
With the advent of flash photography in 1887, he set out to capture the city’s slums together with three photographer friends. His photographs of homeless children begging on the streets, overcrowded tenement flats, and lodgers seeking shelter in police stations exposed their dire living conditions, and shocked New York City.
They were published in a book called How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York in 1890, which contains over 100 photographs documenting the lives of the poor in the Lower East Side.
Scroll down for more images and read the entire book here.
Baxter Street, Mulberry Bend
Bohemian cigarmakers at work in their tenement
Police station lodgers in Elizabeth Street Station
Lodgers in a crowded flat on Bayard Street. It cost five cents a day.
A homeless person under a dump along Rivington Street
An Italian ragpicker in her home
A Ludlow Street sweatshop
[via io9, images via Zeno.org]