Christopher M. Talarico
Seeing the “Other Half” Through Jacob Riis’s Lens
J.R. Lowell of Cambridge, Massachusetts could hardly keep the sadness he felt to himself. Having just read Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, which depicted in vivid detail the crowded tenement neighborhoods of New York City, Lowell was compelled to write directly to the author, detailing his personal anguish in seeing the squalor, decay, and poverty that was rotting the nation’s cities:
21st Nov: 1890
Dear Sir,
I have read your book with deep and painful interest. I felt as Dante must when he looked
over the edge of the abyss at the bottom of which Gorgon lay in ambush. I had but a vague idea of these horrors before you brought them so feelingly home to me. I cannot conceive how such a book should fail of doing great good, if it move other people as it has moved me. I found it hard to get asleep the night after I had been reading it.
Faithfully yours
J. R. Lowell
Lowell, like so many Americans, was dismayed as to how such conditions could exist; after all, America was becoming the beacon of prosperity and innovation around the world. The nation’s newfound industrial and economic success — producing sixty-seven percent of all manufactured goods sold around the world — was in many ways the greatest thing to happen to the country, and America’s urban centers were often considered the crown jewels of America’s new “gilded” image. New technologies and innovations, such as Edison’s electric light bulb, teemed across America’s cities, forever leaving behind the “head-ache” of gas lamps, and giving a “soft, mellow, and grateful” peek into a shining new future. But what most Americans did not see — or perhaps, chose not to — was lurking in the tenements untouched by Edison’s “wizardry.” The overcrowding, the stench, the buildings that crumbled only blocks away from the grand mansions of New York’s Madison Avenue were too much for people like Lowell to handle or accept. How could the buildings of America’s great cities be in such disrepair? How could Americans ever allow such conditions to be acceptable to live in? How did the nation’s cities become cesspools of inhumane poverty?
Figure 1: Jacob Riis, Dens of Death, ca. 1888-1898. International Center of Photography, Gift of Alexander Alland Sr. with additional funds provided by the Lois and Bruce Zenkel Purchase Fund, 1982 (183.1982)
Figure 2. Jacob Riis, Survival of the Unfittest, ca. 1888-1898. International Center of Photography, Gift of Alexander Alland Sr. with additional funds provided by the Lois and Bruce Zenkel Purchase Fund, 1982 (183.1982)
Figure 3: Jacob Riis, Bandits Roost, ca. 1888-1898. International Center of Photography, Gift of Alexander Alland Sr. with additional funds provided by the Lois and Bruce Zenkel Purchase Fund, 1982 (183.1982)
The sketches and eventual photographs of Riis’s work stirred the public (some believed Riis’s project to be revealing and genuine; others thought Riis to be exploitative) while also inspiring some government action. The State of New York, for example, formed a special Tenement House Committee in 1894 to report first hand to the state assembly the social conditions of the nation’s largest city. What they determined to be the root of the social problems made public by Riis was familiar: overcrowding into narrow spaces and lack of open areas and facilities. This physical environment generated “unhealthy growth” and living conditions which were the primary causes of the city’s impoverished state:
The conditions affecting tenement-house life in New York are unique and render especially difficult the correction of existing evils. The ample waterways which surround the city, while they give it commercial supremacy… at the same time crowd the chief part of its population into extremely narrow limits. Ferries, bridges, and transit facilities have not kept pace with the growth of population. In consequence land is held at high prices…[and] landlords are driven to pile story upon story upon narrow lots leaving on each lot insufficient uncovered area; and…authorities neglect to supply the necessary open spaces…making it the most crowded on the face of the earth.
Figure 4:Jacob Riis, Arch & Alley at 55 Baxter Street, ca. 1888-1898. International Center of Photography, Gift of Alexander Alland Sr. with additional funds provided by the Lois and Bruce Zenkel Purchase Fund, 1982 (183.1982)
Figure 5. Jacob Riis, Bona Alley Park Site, ca. 1888-1898. International Center of Photography, Gift of Alexander Alland Sr. with additional funds provided by the Lois and Bruce Zenkel Purchase Fund, 1982 (183.1982)
Addressing the Urban Sprawl: The City Beautiful Movement Successfully Fails
These reactions, investigations, and changes were the point of Riis’s photographic work: to create discomfort and to stir a desire to humanize and improve the cities and their inhabitants. As Lowell predicted, How the Other Half Lives “moved other people” to do good and change the state of the nation’s urban sprawl. One of those people “so moved” was Charles Follen McKim, one of three partners whose name christened one of the nation’s leading architectural firms: McKim, Meade and White. McKim saw in Riis’s photographs a need to restore American cities by reestablishing them as centers of splendor, dignity, and order. McKim’s vision of cities reborn with “palaces for the people” and large open-air public spaces became the hallmark of a massive architectural movement which engulfed America’s urban centers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From New York to Harrisburg and from Chicago to Detroit, the City Beautiful Movement drew on classic European design and philosophy and adopted new techniques of city planning to make America’s urban centers competitors to the great metropolises of old.
With the partnership of “politicians, social workers, civic leaders, philanthropists, and of course architects and city planners,” the City Beautiful Movement would create some of the nation’s most renowned urban spaces, structures, and cultural institutions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But would this “dream of a beautiful, ideal city” actually assist in the extinction of inconceivable urban poverty? This is a critical question to ask of this architectural crusade.
Often, the City Beautiful Movement is studied narrowly for its artistic value — particularly, its widespread adoption of an Ecole des Beaux-Arts style that drew inspiration from imperial France and ancient Greece and Rome. However, beyond its artistic merits, the City Beautiful Movement was first and foremost a movement, a philosophy of urban planning carefully crafted and executed to meet the needs of a crumbling and crowded urban space and the subsequent social issues that followed in its wake. It was often the assumption by proponents of the City Beautiful Movement that spacial limitations and lack of “noble architecture” combined in creating impoverished urban communities. Simply, the movement posited that it was the space itself and its lack of aesthetic culture and beauty, that allowed poverty to expand and not the social and economic conditions of the time. The gatekeepers of alleviating this city/ urban poverty would be trained architectural professionals such as McKim. Architects dominated discussions of city beautification efforts, from the heavy reliance on the testimony of architects like David W. King during the Tenement House Committee Report to the inclusion of architects like McKim, Daniel Burnham, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Augustus Saint-Guadens during the 1901 redesign of the National Mall in Washington, DC.
What historically hangs over the City Beautiful Movement is its misguided assumption that “noble architecture, heroic sculptures, refreshing fountains and lovely landscape parks” were the solution to fixing the nation’s urban economic and “moral” decay. Notwithstanding these serious oversights, the City Beautiful Movement’s analysis was nearly universally accepted by reformers and capitalists alike. Yet, despite success in creating new cultural institutions and public spaces that now accommodate millions of visitors and generate millions of dollars per annum, the City Beautiful Movement’s legacy in combating and eradicating the very poverty that spurred its existence is complicated and incomplete. Despite the enormous union and investment of public and private enterprise in the construction of new urban spaces, the movement focused too narrowly on the classical European concepts of being “changed by culture,” often at the expense of real opportunities to create improved living spaces and conditions for residents who suffered most.
Combatting the Penn Legacy
As mentioned in the Tenement House Committee Report, poor living conditions were a product of “narrow” streets, cramped spaces, and few open areas for wellness. These issues were all characteristics of the “grid-system,” the popular urban design of most major cities, and, in the eyes of architects, city planners, and reformers alike, a major contributor to urban poverty.
Throughout the mid-19th century, William Penn’s Philadelphia 1682 grid system served as the standard for urban layout. While initially designed by Penn to accommodate green spaces, shrubs, and lawns, the grid system had also inadvertently promoted — and accommodated — unhealthy population and infrastructural growth in America’s major cities. By creating streets and residential neighborhoods that required little physical space to construct, cities began to adopt this method of urban design as the cheapest and expeditious way to create housing to accommodate the mass migration to urban centers, often at the expense of parks and open spaces thought to be required for health and wellness. As H.W. Brands notes in his book American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism 1865-1900, cities exploded in population as more individuals flocked to America’s urban centers in search of better wages and job opportunities than had been available in America’s countryside. This explosion of urban centers occurred not only because of migration within the United States, but also because of the massive influx of “new immigrants” coming from Europe who arrived in American urban centers in hopes of finding steady work and prosperity otherwise unavailable to them in their native countries.
It was these poorer “new immigrants” who were the primary subjects of Riis’s work, and for those who espoused the merits of the City Beautiful Movement, these urban poor were only able to live in the cities because of a blind adoption to a grid system and the ease to which — as the Tenement House Committee explained — landlords and developers could build more using less space, thus creating the “narrow,” “uncovered” living spaces. Furthermore, it was the grid system itself that was causing and perpetuating their pain and suffering. The grid system virtually imprisoned the urban poor into cramped streets and neighborhoods, and the conditions of poor sanitation, limited natural ventilation, and crumbling facades were all pieces of evidence that pointed to a dire need to revamp grid system layouts. Thus, to reverse the “evils” of such a design, the City Beautiful Movement focused on a new form of arrangement, one that would take the convenience of a grid system but refashion it in a way that allowed for grand vistas and open spaces.
The World’s Columbian Exposition
The first and perhaps most famous attempt to show the merits (and subsequent limitations) of such a concept was the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the world’s fair commemorating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World. In addition to the symbolic nod to American exceptionalism and a city reborn from the ashes of the devastating 1871 fire, a consortium of the nation’s foremost architects, including Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, Richard Morris Hunt, Frederick Law Olmsted, and McKim’s partners William Mead and Stanford White, presented to the nation the possibilities of a new American city, one that would leave behind the overcrowding, disease, crime, and social inequity of Riis’s tenements. The strategically designed “city from scratch,” however, showed more than just an urban space of beautiful buildings; it also displayed an active desire to transform America’s “ugly cities” into places where a well-organized environment with careful considerations of public spaces and structures that could promote civic and urban prosperity.
Figure 6: “World’s Columbian Exposition: exterior view, Chicago, United States, 1893”, 1893. Lantern slide 3.25x4in, 3.25 x 4 in. Brooklyn Museum, Goodyear. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, S03i2183l01_SL1.jpg)
Figure 8: “World’s Columbian Exposition: Horticultural Building; Illinois State Building, Chicago, United States, 1893”, 1893. Lantern slide 3.25x4in, 3.25 x 4 in. Brooklyn Museum, Goodyear. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, S03i2213l01_SL1.jpg)
Figure 11: Plan of 1901 for City of Washington D.C. from the Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia, Report of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia. Cornell University. Department of City and Regional Planning.
Figure 12: Plan of 1901 for City of Washington D.C. from the Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia, Report of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia. Cornell University. Department of City and Regional Planning
Figure 13: Plan of 1901 for City of Washington D.C. from the Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia, Report of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia. Cornell University. Department of City and Regional Planning
The McMillan Commission Report provided a picture for a Capitol City that was “restored, and developed,” a city where the “wretched slums” and incoherent public buildings had destroyed the great potential of the city, but now was to be renewed with scientific buildings and “parterres of green forming an organic connection” within the city. The results of the city’s construction were staggering in comparison to its state before the project’s undertaking. The plan of creating a well-ordered, well-designed city was successful in the eyes of architects and city planners. Not only was the new national Mall successful in its adoption of classical Roman and Greek architecture for government and cultural buildings that adorned the new public space, but the smaller neighborhood parks were soon ornamented with trees and statues that emphasized a more “humanistic” and “high culture” expression made popular in Europe. The European Classicism that the commission observed in the great European cities and that had dazzled the country at the Columbian Exposition had finally come to life. Not only was this project created with the betterment of the city’s citizens in mind, but it was almost entirely propelled and funded by the federal government. The City Beautiful Movement not only showed the nation the possibilities of a new grand urban space, but also emphasized that the government was playing a critical role in providing a better quality of life for its citizens. In a moment in history when President Theodore Roosevelt was calling for a “square-deal” for the nation, this instance of the government helping to create a truly “humane” cityscape did not go unnoticed.
However, despite the relative success of revamping the nation’s capital, those architects who contributed to the city’s redesign did not consider the other social conditions that were plaguing the city. The great consistent flaw in the City Beautiful Movement creed was that it focused too greatly on the city’s overall physical layout, the ultimate value of cultural institutions, and the overall aesthetics of a city. While the City Beautiful Movement aimed to achieve social improvement through such transformations in the physical surroundings of a city, on a practical level, the movement never thought to take into consideration areas that would more immediately address the poverty within the city. In the example of Washington, D.C., the Senate Commission repeatedly emphasized a city of magnificence, splendor, and dignity akin to what they had observed in Europe. Yet, at no point in the Commission report was there any mention about creating a city where new living accommodations would be built or how stricken areas of the city would be aided through new planning design and construction. There was additionally no mention or consideration as to what would happen to those mostly non-white city residents who were subsequently dispossessed by the demolition of their neighborhoods in order to accommodate the now open space around the mall. With the destruction of slums with dehumanizing titles such as “Murder Bay,” “Louse Alley,” and “Rum Row,” thousands of African Americans, along with Irish and Italian immigrants, were forcibly removed from their neighborhoods. While the city was designed to create an area of harmony and enjoyment, it became very clear through the destruction of immigrant and black neighborhoods that race and ethnicity were qualifying criteria as to who was “worthy” of not only enjoying, but of being in the urban space. The City Beautiful Movement, despite all of its philosophical merits in “humanizing the urban sprawl” and providing “wellness” to its citizens, declined to take the opportunity to go beyond the public space and address the needs of the most vulnerable and consider the well-being of those most affected by the redesign. What instead occurred was a city in which carefully crafted open spaces were intended for all, but in reality were mostly enjoyed by those who had been less, if never, afflicted by poverty.
Conclusion
When looking at the urban design crafted under the City Beautiful banner, it is easy to stay narrowly and pragmatically focused on whether this movement actually addressed the social and economic issues that spurred its existence. Despite the impact this movement had in cities all over the country, it could not adequately address the rise and expansion of industrialization and laissez-faire capitalism, racial tensions, and machine politics corrupting city offices that contributed heavily to the conditions of city slums made famous by Riis’s camera. As the movement reached all corners of America’s urban centers, those for whom the movement was most designed to help found very little in the way of practical change to their social conditions. The benefit of this new urban design was predominantly enjoyed by the middle, and upper (mostly white) classes unaffected by poverty. The movement, despite the creation of popular public areas and institutions, did not on a practical level solve the poverty problems in America’s city as it intended to do.
This is not to say that what the City Beautiful Movement did improve over time –the cultural experience of the nation’s cities– is not of import. Washington, D.C.’s renaissance, for example, had a great impact on other cities, becoming the framework by which more expansive and handsome designs would be created. The openness of the National Mall and the construction of the Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, Smithsonian Museums, Union Station, the Library of Congress, et cetera, allowed for an increase in public activity and a renewed emphasis on an “American Culture” that was thought to be significantly lacking by reformers and architects alike; it was this “lack of culture” that was as much to blame for urban poverty and poor urban planning. This tradition of promoting cultural structures and institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, New York Public Library, Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Hall, has long-enduring impacts on the arts, music, and literature today. Not only have these institutions and spaces been beneficial to America’s cultural fabric, but they have provided millions of dollars in economic impact in some cases within the cities in which they rest. In 2015, the Metropolitan Museum of Art — a City Beautiful project — estimated that the museum generated nearly one billion dollars in economic impact to the city of New York. In the example of the National Mall, the National Park Service in 2016 estimated that the National Mall and Memorials contributed over half of the estimated $1.6 billion in economic impact to the D.C. area. With the current Covid-19 crisis threatening the health of these same City Beautiful projects, this cultural and economic impact on America’s cities cannot be ignored.
But while these are impressive economic contributions, these same City Beautiful spaces and institutions provide no evidence that the communities of the cities most in need of economic generation are reaping the benefits of this impact. This issue is not too dissimilar to the issues plaguing this movement at its inception. Additionally, a majority of those “residents” enjoying these City Beautiful projects are not the local populations for whom these projects were designed. The same 2015 survey by the Metropolitan Museum of Art estimated that only twenty-eight percent of those visitors contributing the nearly one billion dollars in economic impact were actually from the five boroughs of New York City. While there was no evidence in the 2015 survey to certify it, it is not also unreasonable to hypothesize that of those New York residents who did visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a majority of the visitors were not residents that the City Beautiful Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were aiming to help. After over 100 years, the City Beautiful Movement only partially fulfills its promise of creating a city for the people, or perhaps better put, for all its people.
In the modern context of city planning, urban construction and design today try to mimic much of the mission of what the City Beautiful Movement hoped to accomplish at the turn of the century. New spaces and structures are often conceived as being for the public good, allowing for an opportunity for city dwellers to increase their health, wellness, and quality of life. As Richard Klein suggests:
Prior to [the City Beautiful Movement] planning was based almost exclusively on the needs of individual patrons who often responded to local economic, political and social pressures. Perhaps the greatest contribution…of the City Beautiful Movement was to get architects and planners to reconsider what constituted good design and think of the long-term ramifications of their efforts. Modern urban development is an outgrowth of this earlier planning form…and how rational design…can be successfully incorporated into…contemporary urban settings.
This tradition established by the City Beautiful Movement has left a permanent mark on architecture and urban planning. Although the City Beautiful Movement remains the blueprint for future urban construction, what cannot be forgotten is the impact that civic design possesses for the fabric of the city. Despite its positive impact on the urban space today in the form of public spaces and grand cultural institutions, the City Beautiful Movement was born out of an idea that urban squalor could be resolved through a vision of a city where the physical structures, parks, and spaces could help lift society out of the impoverished conditions they experienced. In many ways, it failed; in some, it succeeded. But what future architects and city planners must ask is: why do they build, and for whom do they build? Careful city planning and design cannot be rigid and for specific citizens. As the climate crisis, emphasis on “sustainability,” and the nation’s economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic become critical to city planning, the City Beautiful Movement can give some practical insight into how public spaces can be configured to last and prosper. Planners and architects today must still consider however the city at large and ways to which that city in its entirety can thrive, prosper, and, in the true memory of the City Beautiful Movement, be grand.
