A photo of a New York City tenement taken by Jacob Riis (1905)
The Henry Street Settlement:
How Lillian Wald Shaped Service and Society
Background
Tenements
The influx of immigrants who arrived in New York in the late 19th century faced harsh conditions such as discrimination, low wages, and child labor, leading to many seeking cheaper housing on the Lower East Side. The area’s overcrowded tenements, rented by immigrants and the working-class, exposed tenants to disease, crime, and violence, furthering their economic and social vulnerability.
“The pent-in sultry atmosphere was laden with nausea and pierced with a discordant and, as it were, plaintive buzz. Supper had been despatched in a hurry, and the teeming populations of the cyclopic tenement houses were out in full force ‘for fresh air,’ as even these people will say in mental quotation marks.”
- A depiction of tenement neighborhoods in Abraham Cahan’s Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896).
The Progressive Era
Jane Addams (center), a prominent Progressive Era figure, LOC (1930)
“Long ago, it was said that ‘one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.’ That was true then. It did not know because it did not care...Until some flagrant outrage on decency and the health of the community aroused it to noisy but ephemeral indignation.”
- Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890).
In 1890, Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives, which documented the situation faced by tenement residents, evoked a public reaction that inspired social reform and the creation of initiatives to assist impoverished communities, especially immigrants. One of the most significant events of the Progressive Era, sparked by Riis’ photojournalism, was the rise of the Settlement Movement, where other social reformers such as Jane Addams and Lillian Wald established settlement houses in poor urban neighborhoods in order to improve the quality of life for residents.
Thesis
Lillian Wald