In the Manuscript Division of the library of congress. Cheryl this exhibition jacob riis revealing how the other half lives is a copresentation with the museum of the city of new york. It is the first time that the collections of the library of congress and the jacob riis papers have been married with the photographs that are in the stellar collection at the museum of the city of new york. We picked the word copresentation very carefully because the exhibition here actually follows an exhibit that was at the museum of the city of new york and that exhibit was called jacob riis revealing new yorks other half was slightly different. It looks at riis in a slightly different way, and sort of concentrating more on his biography, more on his photography. Here we are looking at riis as the journalist, because that is the strength of our collection. The papers here, which number 3000 in the Manuscript Division, are really featured well in this exhibition and sort of come to the forefront. Barbara we also really wanted to emphasize the combination of the photographs and manuscripts in terms of jacob riis career as a photojournalist. Often people think of him as either a writer or a photographer. We are emphasizing the combination of those two things and his role as a communicator. We have organized the exhibit by the different ways and different mediums riis used as a Police Reporter, a writer, a photographer, as a reformer, and as an ally with other people who are active in social change movements to get the word out and educate the public about urban poverty, about immigration, and the density of housing in lower manhattan, and to provide solutions to those kinds of issues. He really is a creature of the gilded age. He comes into real celebrity in the 1890s and early 1900s. So he is kind of on the cusp between older models of poverty from the gilded age in the late victorian period and the new progressive, more governmental policies and solutions. He had a foot in both worlds. That is another one of our major points in the exhibit. Jacob riis was born in 1849 in denmark. He was the son of a schoolteacher and was basically raised in this very beautiful small town in denmark. He was a rebellious youth and even though he was the son of a teacher, he was not a good student although he loved to read. He played hooky a lot and later when he was in new york, he had a lot of sympathy for truant young boys. A lot of his articles are about truancy and how we can get kids into school. He wrote from personal experience. A lot of what he wrote about he did have personal experience because he was an immigrant to the United States. When he was 21 years old, in 1870, he came to the United States by himself. He had a very hard time initially here finding work. He did all kinds of odd jobs. Worked as a laborer, worked as a doortodoor salesman, sometimes homeless. Sometimes sleeping at night in homeless shelters and police lodging houses. All of this experience he brought into his articles later when he was more established as a Police Reporter and actually had a salaried job in the lower part of manhattan. Bonnie my name is bonnie yochelson. I wrote the complete collection catalog of riis photographs published on the occasion of this exhibition. My engagement with the collection started in the 1980s when i was curator of the museum of the city of new york which owns his new york photographs. There is a great paradox to riis photographs. He was a journalist and celebrity. He saved all of the documentation of his career. He wanted to be remembered for posterity. He created scrapbooks, he saved his manuscripts. Every scrap of paper. And he abandoned his photographs because he did not think they were of any value apart from his words, arguments, articles, and his publications. The way they were discovered is really a fascinating story. Riis died in 1914. In the 1940s, a photographer named Alexander Alland noticed in riis book how the other half lives that on the title page it says with illustrations after photographs by the author. He said to himself, where are these photographs . After several years of searching, he tracked down rii son and with much coercing, got riis son to try to find the pictures which turned out to be in the attic of his familys home in queens, new york, that was about to be torn down. His son discovered a box filled with 400odd negatives, 300odd lantern slides, and almost 200 paper prints and delivered them to Alexander Alland, the photographer. Who, again, taking a couple of years, he created an exhibition from the negatives, making beautiful prints, modern prints from the negatives and working with the curator with the museum of new york to put on an exhibition called battle of the slums. Named for one of riisbooks. It established riis as an important photographer. That is how he entered the history of photography. My problem as a curator in the 1980s was, we dont have prints to show because those almost 200 vintage prints, about half were not by riis at all, and the rest, most were in Poor Condition and not exhibitable at all. Working with museum staff, i applied for a grant from the National Endowment for humanities and we made a set of what they call vintage material prints from the negatives. The purpose being to make prints that would look like those that riis would recognize. Not to turn him into an artist. He himself never worked in the dark room. He took his negatives to several commercial studios and said i need prints. I need prints. I need lantern sides. He is the camera but was not in any way an expert technician. We wanted these very expert technicians the museum hired to make these prints to make contact prints from the negatives. That is what is on exhibition here to represent riis photographs. At the beginning of the exhibit, we have chosen three very famous photographs from the lexicon of jacob riis. And to the left is perhaps his most famous photograph. It was in the middle of an area called mulberry bend, which is a section of mulberry street near baxter street that became a particular cause celebre for riis in terms of urban reform. He eventually would succeed in working with municipal authorities to demolish mulberry bend and replace it with a park which is another story we tell deeper into the exhibit with original items. Again, the paradox about riis is that he himself said he was a photographer after a fashion. In other words, he was not a real photographer. He used the camera for very few years, less than 10 years. He only took about 300 pictures. About a third of which were family snapshots and other things not of historic importance. His most famous picture today is bandits roost which shows a couple of italian toughs wearing bowler hats. In fact, that picture was copied by Martin Scorsese in a movie, gangs of new york. It is kind of an iconic image. When he first had the idea to use photographs to illustrate the slums in 1887, he reached out to a friend that was a photographer and found two photographers who were interested in flash. Flash photography was the reason he had the idea to even use photographs at all. He was a writer, journalist, writing in the daily newspaper about the conditions in the slum. He read in the newspaper in 1887 that there was this New Invention of flash powder that could eliminate the darkness and he said, a ha so he worked with two other photographers who were serious amateurs interested in flash, interested in the technology. Among their photographs is bandits roost which was taken with a stereoscopic camera with two lenses. So there are actually two images, but that one is the most famous image. Another irony is that his most famous image was not actually taken by him. Another famous one is demonstrating people that paid five cents or seven cents a night to have temporary lodging. Inside a tenement house where they were not living but would come to sleep for the night. Those people on the floor paid five cents. The people on the shelf paid seven. There was a law in new york that you had to provide a bed of some kind for someone and the lowest price you could charge was seven cents. So the title indicates to the viewer that this was illegal shelter. And riis took the picture. That was taken by him, not by the other amateurs. He took the picture with a member of the sanitary police, who were raiding the place, saying, get out, this is illegal. So, entering this room, which only had the slightest bit of light from a coal stove that was providing heat for the room, riis entered with the police, set up his camera, essentially set off an explosion which sounded like a gun, a boom with smoke and fire, and what is captured in the picture is the faces, some people are sleeping and others have been aroused, and look stricken, for good reason, by the circumstance. The picture in his description of the scene in his book, he says there were 13 people in a tiny little room, including an infant. A screaming infant. So it is a horrific scene. He used that picture to try to enforce, arouse authorities to enforcing the laws about these lodging houses. He describes that in his book. So that is a fantastic example of one of riis flash photographs, creating a powerful portrait of inhumane conditions. A picture like that, pictures like that have been criticized for essentially victimizing his subjects. He came in, there was no consent. He scared these people to death, and they look it. And that is a criticism, a modern criticism today of these flash photographs. It was not his intention, but it is from a contemporary point of view a problem. Barbara the middle photograph is the signature photograph for our exhibit. This is little katie. It represents another phase in riis approach to his subject matter and photography. Originally, he worked with amateur photographers to take the photographs. Then he started taking them himself. The bandits roost photograph and the five cent lodging photograph was in his first famous book. Katie was in his second book which came out in 1892 called children of the poor. In that book, he was more like a social worker or caseworker. He actually had discussions with his subject matters. Here, the letters were surprised the lodgers were surprised by men bursting into the room and taking a photograph. He talked to katie, and he learned her name. He learned her story. Her mother died. She was living with her siblings in a tenant. He took this picture at the 52nd Street Industrial school. When he said, what do you do, she said i scrubbed. She stayed home. She was nine years old. She scrubbed and cooked for the family and also went to school when she could. Cheryl this is a birds eye view of new york in 1879. Birds eye views were popular until slightly after the turn of the century. They put buildings and gave an idea of the density of space and put buildings in perspective. So you see the Lower East Side where riis was primarily working. It is astounding how many people are crammed and how many structures are crammed into this space. The u. S. Census bureau at the time said this was the most densely crowded city in the United States. 1. 5 Million People lived primarily in lower manhattan. Riis claimed it was the largest population, most densely populated city on earth. Which may or may not have been the case. But that is what he claimed in how the other half lives. I think if you look at this map, it really sort of speaks to that density. The issues that he was addressing. We have been talking about the importance that jacob riis had lived many of the issues he wrote about as a Police Reporter and how he came to the United States as an immigrant from denmark in 1870, he was 21 years old. And in our first case, we emphasize his life story or biography. One of the things we decided to do in making the exhibit is to use notes that we have in his manuscript collection at the library of congress from the making of an american, which was his autobiography which he published in 1901. He also gave this as a lantern slide lecture. And we have in his collection, his notes from a lantern slide collection. We have featured pages from the books in almost all the cases. Here, for biography, we used the very first one where he talks about his naivete when he first came to new york. Back in denmark, he loved to read american literature. Was quite fluid in english he was quite fluent in english when he came to the United States. One of his favorite authors was James Fenimore cooper. He had this vision as many scandinavians did that america was the wild west. He said we did not know the difference between east and west. Here he is, gets out in a in the metropolis of new york, and there are no buffaloes. The first thing he did was he bought a revolver. He was making fun of himself. He was often making jokes in his lecture. This is a funny story about this green kid getting off the boat and buying a revolver he strapped outside of his coat. Strutting down broadway and a policeman stops him and says you may want to get rid of the gun. It is a funny story. It actually was a very hard time for jacob riis when he first came. He had a lot of difficulty making a living, finding work, he was unable to find steady work. He worked a lot of odd jobs. He got very depressed. One of the things we are showing from the New York Public Library is a wonderful early diary of his written partly in danish and then he switches to english. In the diary, it is about his loneliness when he first came here and his pining for his love, elizabeth, which was at that point unrequited. She was back in denmark. And his suicidal feelings. So it was very difficult in the beginning. There is a great love story with riis and his wife elizabeth. Eventually, she does succumb to his courtship and they marry in 1876 in denmark and come back and they settle first in brooklyn and then in Richmond Hill in queens, new york, and have a family. A lot of jacob riis motivation in life is that everyone should have a healthy, safe, and Healthy Family like he does. He writes a lot about families and the welfare of children in particular. He would often tell his audiences there is no difference between these children or yours and mine. That is his wife elizabeth in the middle and the five children. There were some other children that died young. Cheryl next, we are going to talk about what looks like a strange assemblage of equipment. Things that we are not used to seeing these days. This is photographic equipment. Very similar to what riis would have used on his raiding parties barber described earlier. That barbara described earlier. What we have here is actually a camera, sort of a stealth camera that could be used without a tripod, it could be held by the strap on the side. So it gave the photographer some mobility. The other thing that was an innovation and sort of allowed for a lot of mobility at that time was the invention and introduction of dry plate negatives. Previous to this time, you had to coat a plate with collodion. It was a very laborious process. You had to expose your negative right away. This enabled you to buy these plates already prepared. This was the size of the plate. This was a holder here. You could carry a few with you and make a number of exposures. In a particular outing. What we have in the back here is a flash pan. Riis learns about the german invention of magnesium flash powder in 1887. He is very interested in it. He understands that he could be using this to great effect for his work. As barbara said earlier, the first application of the flash powder was put into pistols and you would go in and set it off and there would be a big boom, a big flash of light, and it would of course scare the people being photographed to know and. End. No this flash powder holder was not much better and very dangerous. You would put the magnesium flash powder in the pan. Take a fuse, light the fuse and it would go off in a big boom. Again, you would have a big burst of light and enable the photographs that riis took in these dark spaces, that these spaces would be illuminated so you would get some image on the dry plate. Barbara there is also the question of how he used the photographs. He really saw himself not as a photographer. He thought he was using photography as a tool for his journalism. We have to remember that at the same time he was doing lectures and showing them as lantern slides, he was also still a Police Reporter. And his intent was that he would use these images as illustrations of his articles. And in this case, which is about him as a Police Reporter, we wanted to demonstrate how it would look when you had an actual print of the photograph and how it would show as a line drawing in the periodical press. So what would happen is an illustrator would be hired, they would make a line drawing and then an engraving, and then that would be printed in the newspaper. The reason for that is that the technology was not there yet to do half tones the newspapers. They did make flat halftones in magazines and journals for which riis wrote as a freelance journalist. But it was not really until the 1890s that the quality was good enough to have good reproduction of photographs. At that time, riis stopped taking photographs and purchased photographs taken by other people. His original idea was to appeal visually and combine the image and the word in order to persuade people. Riis was hired to work on the beat, basically, reporting crimes and anything that happened through the police department. For six years, he was on night work where his newspaper office, where he worked for the new york tribune. We have a photograph from the library of congress collections of riis in the Tribune Office which was that 301 mulberry street right across the street from Police Headquarters. He is there with his friend and fellow reporter and riis is in the corner. His friend is at the desk. He would basically follow the police when they would get a call where a murder happened or a crime, and he would write about these stories. He got a lot of Human Interest stories. This is partly how he got access to the inside of tenement buildings. He was a recognized face. Many people in the neighborhood actually thought he was a doctor because he came so often with thertment of health and Sanitation Division when they were doing investigations of the tenements, and he would be with them. So he was a trusted and known face on the street. He reported for the newspapers. But he also started doing Human Interest stories that focused on the conditions faced by the poor. Grand they are the kinds of and they are the kinds of issues that we are showing in the exhibit on the sidewalls, including housing and Public Health and public space, labor, immigration. He wanted to expose how difficult the circumstances were under which the poor were living. Especially the immigrant poor. And to encourage people to either give money to charities, there were over 138 charities active at the time dealing with the indigent and poor in one way or another, or to encourage philanthropists to give a lot of money to endow things like lodging houses, and to also work with the government to bring about municipal reforms. When riis went on the road, he started off doing his lantern slide lectures in new york city. Eventually, he had tours all over the country. He would travel with just the lantern slides and a box. Every venue would have to supply the lantern projector. Cheryl and the operator to operate the lantern slide. He would be paid about 150 for his services, and he traveled across the country. It was astounding. We do have his appointment books which show he would be in a different city every night practically. So, this is a very deluxe model. But again, he could have been using this. It is a biennial stereopticon. It allows for one slide to fade in and one slide to fade out. And there are other models that just have one lens. Barbara we have this in the exhibit at the courtesy of the American Magic lantern theater that loaned it for the exhibit. It was also in the exhibit at the museum of the city of new york. Here in the exhibit we have a , video running based on the one transcript we have of riis lecture. Out of the alleys comes the problem of the children. This one came out of the alley just as she is here on the left. Her hair was matted with blood and her whole body was covered with sores. What will be the future of this child . Can you read it in her face . I can. And after she had been in the care of the society for the prevention to cruelty for children, this is the way she looked on the right. In the last 16 years, that society has thrown its arms around between 50000 and 60,000 children. What a record of work. This is the asylum known all over the world as sister irenes asylum. That good sister has gathered many thousands of waifs from the streets of new york. Into her full. D. Into her fol. Catholic or protestant, no difference. When one day the pearly gates swing wide to let in that dear woman, i tell you, such a flapping of little wings will be heard come to greet her as has not heard since the moving stars now you have seen the boys and girls. And you have seen their homes. Here is the father of some such so drunk that we fired the photographic flash he never woke up. This case is about his lecturing and the postcards show where he wrote from all over the country and europe. He wrote home to usually his daughter katie and also his wife, elizabeth, who he would often call sweet lamb of mine. As cheryl mentioned, the notebook shows the itineraries where he was traveling, and also, riis, the newspaperman, became a subject matter for other newspaperman. We also show reviews he got from other journalists that he kept in his scrapbook. The recreation we have done is based on the actual transcript here and lines are taken from it. The original lecture was two hours and we condensed it down to six minutes and 51 seconds. One of the historians that has written a lot about riis made the point it was almost like vaudeville type entertainment. He showed gruesome images of people being buried at potters field, Young Children who have been abused, very serious subject matter. But he lightened it up by telling jokes. Some of those are not funny to us anymore because they are ethnic jokes. But they are also the kind of humor that would have been common at the time in vaudeville. On one of my visits, i came upon this tramp. I told him if he would sit still for a minute so i could take his picture, i would give him . 10. That was probably the first and only . 10 that man earned by honest labor in the course of his entire life. And that was sitting down, at which he was an acknowledged expert. We talk about the ways he uses innovative photographs, and he gave lantern slide lectures, and used the images in his journalism. One day when he was giving a lantern slide lecture, there which he called, how the other half lives and dies, there were two scriveners editors in the audience. And they approached riis and asked him to write an article which came out in december, 1889, in the christmas issue. It included many of the images. And from the article, he was asked to write a book. And we do feature the First Edition of that book in our case about him as a writer. The result of that wonderful meeting was that jacob riis received a contract to write how the other half lives. He was still a Police Reporter at the time. He wrote in the evening hours at home. We have a wonderful First Edition owned by a close friend of scribners editor and also the head of what was known as the builder committee, the tenement house committee. That was a Government Committee assigned to investigate the conditions of the poor, particularly the issues of sanitation and crowding. Much to riis surprise, how the other half lives was a huge bestseller. It came out at a time when there was almost a prurient interest in the slums among the middle class. The slum tour was popular. Other people had written books that describe conditions of the poor, but riis had a special storytelling style and almost a sociological approach to describing the different ethnic communities that were in the Lower East Side. One of the things he did was use statistics. He used statistics. In fact, i had never read how the other half lives. I listen to it as an audiobook. It was astounding to hear a voice sort of illuminate his words. You realize listening to it how he was evangelizing for reform, describing these dark places that he was bringing light to with his photography. He is most effective when he uses statistics. When he talks about population density, when he talks about death on a particular block of children. That is when the power of his words really comes through. I also think that the power of his scribners article was also attributed to the professional artists that they got to engrave his photographs in the magazine. Kenyon cox is the artist that is translating riis photographs. You see a chinese opium den on the bottom. And again, that five cents photo that we started with enlarged on the front wall, it is on the lefthand page. One of the things he was very concerned about was the very huge infant mortality rates. The guilder committee i mentioned, they refer to the rear tenements as slaughterhouses for infants. One out of five babies born in the tenements, especially the rear tenements, died in early childhood. When we talk about rear tenements, it is not only that the tenement buildings themselves were overcrowded. Many people could not even afford to live in the building. So where else can they live . They lived in dumps, on the street, and woodshack structures. They were built into the back alleyways of brick tenement buildings. High mortality rates and also the issues of Public Health, cholera, diphtheria, typhus, contagious disease. Also disease that was foodborne or based on polluted water. One of the points of the statistics is how closely riis worked with individuals in the board of health. There was a governmental connection for him in municipal government to work with the sanitation engineers, the scientists. It worked both ways. He got information from them in terms of the statistics, and he also gave them evidence they used in the statistics. Here in the exhibit, we basically have two major ways to see the material. When you come in the front, you see the originals in the cases. And when you get to the back and turn around, you have a big surprise because we are showing some of the famous photographs in very large graphic size. One reason we wanted to do that is to show people how people in the audience is at the lantern the audiences at the lantern slide lectures would have seen those images. They would not have been the small things based on the actual size of the Magic Lantern or the prints in the newspaper or the kind of crude illustrations that appeared in his articles. They would have been these very large, detailed images that would have been projected on the wall from the Magic Lantern projector that people can really study. And they are lifesized. It helps people to really identify with these other human beings that are the same as us. It helped with the empathy. Jacob riis was not alone as a social reformer. And he himself said i was only 11 thousandth of the solution and was just the one that yelled the loudest. We dont want to portray that he was singly, the only person pointing out these kinds of problems, and, in urban decay and the way immigrants were having to live on they arrived in the United States. Many people had been addressing these issues from earlier in the 19th century. What was special about him was that he was a very good publicist. And the lantern slide lectures really did help with that, with bringing the message all across the country. With the publication of how the other half lives, so many people read the books that he really raised awareness and consciousness on issues of poverty. He also had very important allies in high places. There were many of them, we had only a little bit of space so we chose three. They are Theodore Roosevelt, booker t. Washington, and louise and andrew carnegie. One reason we chose those is we have major collections of all those individuals in the library of congress. We are highlighting here an image that comes from our prints and photographs division. It is a political cartoon. It is portraying what we would call Theodore Roosevelts kitchen cabinet. It is not the actual members of the cabinet. It is people who were friends of his and close to him, political allies and people he relied on for advice. You can see that jacob riis is in the picture. He is in that circle. He is the small figure in colonial uniform, second from the left, holding a hanky to his face. You can see that booker t. Washington is also in the doorway. It is sort of a metaphor of the civil rights status at that time and him being welcomed at the white house by Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt himself is the only person in the picture not crying. How did riis meet Theodore Roosevelt . That is the story of his activism in new york city. We have we have here in our case on allies the basic story of the bromance between Theodore Roosevelt and jacob riis. They first met in 1894. The new administration was elected in new york city that was a Reform Administration under mayor william strong. It is often described as the Good Government movement. In that one administration, a lot of the social reforms riis had been recommending along with other people in his network of reform were manifested, including better sanitation. One of the things strong was famous for was appointing sanitation engineers who wore created the white wings, who were senator he workers who wore pristine white uniforms and prorated down for fifth avenue as an army of sanitation. The issue roosevelt and riis worked on primarily was the closing of police lodging houses. The way they met was, mayor strong appointed Theodore Roosevelt as Police Commissioner during his administration and Police Headquarters was across the street from jacob riis journalism office. Theodore roosevelt was already aware of riis. He had read his articles and book. So they met. Jacob riis said i loved him the moment i saw him. They immediately formed a bond. They went about at night on these night raids so that riis could familiarize roosevelt with the neighborhood and what was going on in terms of criminality and police work at night. He showed them some of the things that were happening in tenements, and they checked up on what policemen were doing. One of the cause celebs for riis was the issue of using police lodging houses as homeless shelters. Riis had a personal reason for having a grudge about police lodging houses. As i mentioned earlier, when he was a young immigrant, he sometimes stayed overnight in these homeless shelters. He tells a story in his autobiography of a night when he was in particular despair where he had considered throwing himself into the east river. And he was befriended by a stray dog. The dog was his little buddy, his only friend in america. That night, he went to stay at a lodging house. They would not let the dog in. The dog was waiting for him outside. As he slept, a precious golden locket that he had brought with him to america that had a picture of his beloved elizabeth was stolen from him. When he went to report this to the policeman on duty, the policeman did not believe him. He thought why would this tramp boy have a golden locket. He was very rough in throwing riis out of the lodging house. The dog saw him being roughed up by the police and snarled. The policeman beat the dog to death. It is a very tragic story. Riis never forgot it. And when he wrote about the closing of the police lodging houses which he successfully did with Theodore Roosevelt help, he titled the chapter in his autobiography my dog is avenged. He was concerned about the lodging houses because of the crowdedness and criminality. A lot of younger people were exposed to hardened criminals or recruited to be pickpockets. It was not a wholesome environment for the young. Also, there was the spread of disease because of the crowdedness. This particular article we are highlighting is the story of a man shown lying on the floor. He is very ill. He is at the Police Station and he did have typhus. Riis uses this as an example of the danger of contagious diseases to the people staying there who would spread it when they left in the morning. But also to the policemen themselves. The police were concerned about this issue. They do succeed in closing down the lodging houses. And the idea that the policing authority should have a major role in supplying homeless shelters. Riis believed private charities should take over that role in partnership with the municipality. With shared funds, both city and charitable funds, to open model lodging houses that would have showers and ways to bathe, and ways to wash clothes, and a real bed for people to sleep in, and so on. On the sidewalls, we have paired photographs attributed to riis with a Fire Insurance map from the Harrison Brown company. Each Panel Features one of these maps that locates where the photograph was probably taken. These date from 1880. They are block by block. What you can see is what the Building Materials are made of. Yellow indicates wooden structure. Pink is brick. Green indicates there is some sort of Fire Insurance hazard, whether it be because of what goes on in the building or Building Materials. You can see where the Police Station is. It is in the lower right quadrant here. The lower right portion of the map. Also, this illustrates what riis was railing against. There was no light or air circulation in these structures. If you can imagine that there is a window on the street side, but then you see that there are buildings back to back. There is no light getting in. One of the reforms that happened through the Tenement House Commission was regulations to require that would this be that windows be cut due to through interior rooms. There were some 40,000 windows that were cut through so there could be like from an exterior window inside rooms that we saw in the five cent spot. That was a 13 by 13 room with no ventilation and no light. These films are taken by the Thomas Edison company. And the american biographic company, right around the same time that riis is working in new york. So primarily, they are dating these films in particular are dating from 19031904. This is the fish market on the Lower East Side, on the righthand side. And you see a vibrancy that is missing in the static images. It shows the life of the street. I think it adds a nice dimension to the exhibition. These particular films date mainly from the 1903 era, so they are from riis lifetime and how he would have seen new york at the time. One of the things they are showing, like this particular one are men that are sorting things at the dump. And we see the famous article about men who, and children, who, there was a picture called children of the dump, who lived underneath the street, at the dump, and other places. Part of what they are doing is, they are sorting things out of the garbage that can be recycled for money. They sorted rags that would be recycled to make paper. They also sorted and cleaned bones. The bones would be used for fertilizer or baking soda. He covered this partly as an issue of homelessness but also as an issue of disease and sanitation. We had mentioned earlier that jacob riis came into fame during the gilded age. He dies in 1914 during the progressive era. He had many friends that were progressive reformers. That included lillian walsh. The head of the nurses settlement, known as the henry street settlement in the in the Lower East Side. He became a particular patron of another settlement house that was the kings daughters settlement. We have here in the section about his legacy something that he saved, actually his wife, his second wife, mary, saved from the jacob riis papers. He was a patron of the kings daughters group. It was a group of episcopal women who started off helping health inspectors. They eventually had purchased this property and he helped them do it by giving lantern slide lectures and donating the money that he gave. He was a major fundraiser for the creation of the settlement. He continued to raise funds for this operation. They had a kindergarten. They offered social services. They offered nursing services. They had a playground in the backyard for the kids. It was a churchbased settlement house. As a very pious protestant, he was comfortable with the churchbased charity. Some of the other settlements were more secular. Among the people who lived there was florence kelley. Florence kelly had lived previously at hull house chicago founded by jane addams in 1869. She had become a factory inspector for the state of illinois. She came to new york. She moved into the henry street settlement and she worked on child labor, the eighthour day for women, and working womens rights. She was the leader of the National Consumers league. We have papers from the National Consumers league at the library of congress. And we highlight one of the articles Florence Kelly wrote and published, very much in riis style, very much an expose about the issue of women and children in the labor force and their poor wages and lack of protection. This article was illustrated by a photograph by lewis hine. We have the papers of the National Child labor committee, and lewis hine was hired by them to go undercover and basically do investigative reports. This is another riislike activity. Riis was doing the exposes of the slums. Basically pioneering investigative reporting. Hine went into factories and canneries fields and took photographs that are now considered some of the most important documentary photographs of the 20th century. Particularly of child labor. He used them like riis used the pictures of the children of the slums in an earlier time to show as Magic Lantern slides to social reformers and testify before congress. It did lead to major child labor legislation. One importance about this exhibit and especially the kind of issues we emphasize on the sidewalls about Public Housing and Public Health, the attitudes and status of immigrants. All these issues are still very much with us today. We would like people to understand that they go back far into the 19th century. That people grappled with them at that time, and we continue to grapple with them today. I think riis would be astounded today to learn that he is best known for being a photographer, which is not what he thought of himself as. I think that this exhibit, as does, as did the exhibit in new york and the upcoming exhibits in denmark, they are repositioning riis more as he saw himself, as a communicator. The exhibition can be viewed online at the library of congress website, loc. Gov. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] this is American History tv on cspan3, where each weekend, we feature 48 hours of programs exploring our nations past. Hire cities tour travels the country, exploring america. 2011, we have been to more than 200 communities across the nation. Our staff is staying close to home due to the coronavirus. Next, a look at one of our visits. We are standing on the historic part of the san antonio riverwalk, which has developed into one of the worlds great linear parks. This is not what it started out to be. Back in the 1700s when san antonio was first established. This was the major source of water for the city. There were various your negation ditches that came from it