How Did Jacob Riis Contribute To Urban Reform

Jacob Riis and Urban Reform

At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States went through a series of major changes known as Industrialization and Urbanization. These developments had a major impact on American life, especially in newly urbanized cities such as New York and Chicago. Americans moved very rapidly from agriculture to machinery, and big businesses boomed, as well as the pockets of a select few. However, along with this change, unprecedented consequences faced thousands of unfortunate Americans who lived in these inner cities but did not get the chance to share in the profits of the country’s economic growth. As other Americans grew extremely rich due to their successful business and investments, the poor in America

. Out of the 1.7 million people living in New York City, 1.2 million on those people lived in one of 37,000 tenement houses where conditions were harsh and life was very difficult (“Matters We Ought to Know”). He often captured pictures of the poor living in these tenements in the middle of the night using a magnesium flash powder, a new innovation to help photographers take pictures in the dark. He continued to show these photographs in his lectures and speeches to the wealthy, where they were mainly shown as a form of entertainment (Jacob A. Riis). The use of photography was essential to Mr. Riis’s reform because it was a way of proving to the rich citizens of the city that there were people that existed in such horrible conditions that they had never even known about. He wanted to get his point across to other people, and photography was one of the easiest ways, because each picture was worth a thousand words and expressed more emotion than did in his writing. However, he used pictures to be the main support of his very famous novel, “How the Other Half Lives,” in which he details in writing his experiences and thoughts about tenement housing and social

The biggest achievement that Riis accomplished was the passing of the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901. This law passed by the city council forbade the creation of murky and poorly-ventilated tenements in the entire state of New York (New York State Tenement House Act). The law was passed to augment healthiness among the people living in the tenements, and not for financial reasons, which were the reasons for the past construction of previous tenement housing (Tenement House Reform). The passing of this law must have been one of Riis’s greatest achievements because he was the primary social reformer in the city of New York and expressed the discontent of the families living in these tenements. In the last chapter of Riis’s novel, he discussed the future of tenements and how they would slowly disappear from society, not physical, but the horrors of them (Riis). Through all of his efforts, he successfully achieved what he pursued and limited the terrible conditions of tenements in New York City. Another achievement of Riis’s work was the passing of the Small Park Act of 1887, which destroyed the slums around Five Points in New York City and eventually replaced it with a park (“Jacob Riis”). Riis was most likely content with any progress to ending the horrors of tenement housing, and both of these acts did just