By Anne M. Filiaci, Ph.D.
Jacob Riis became Lillian Wald’s mentor and close friend soon after she moved to New York’s Lower East Side. The two worked together on a number of reform causes throughout the 1890s and into the twentieth century. Both became experts at using illustrative anecdotes that tugged at the emotions (and purse strings) of potential supporters. Wald acknowledged their shared propensity to appeal to the listener’s heart, noting “This story is not to be told impressively in charts and statistics. I cannot tell the story that way any more than could Jacob Riis.”
Riis, best known for his muckraking photojournalism, was born on May 3, 1849 in Ribe, Denmark, the third of fifteen children of Niels Edward Riis, a schoolteacher, and Caroline Bendsine Lundholme Riis. Young Jacob Riis worked as a carpenter before coming to the United States as an immigrant in 1870. He spent his first years in the States in abject poverty. Often homeless, he slept on the streets of New York City and sometimes even in cemeteries. When he was really desperate he used police station lodgings, which were widely known as unsafe and brutal places. Riis learned the bitter truth of this first hand one night when he and his adopted stray dog sought shelter at station lodgings. The naïve young immigrant was robbed and reported the theft, only to watch in horror as the policeman beat his dog to death in response. Devastated by this experience, Riis repeated the story throughout his life to illustrate the condition, treatment and vulnerability of the poor.
Riis soon left New York City to try to improve his lot. Restless, he moved from place to place working as a carpenter. Eventually he became a salesman. He wrote in his spare time, and when he returned to New York City in 1873 he was able to find work in the newspaper business. Riis married his childhood sweetheart, Elisabeth Gjørtz, in 1876, and by 1877 he’d gotten a job as police reporter for the New York Tribune. There he worked nights in some of the worst neighborhoods on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Copyright Anne M. Filiaci 2016