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1 | Author | Source | Year Published | Place | Approx. Address | Latitude | Longitude | Supporting Text | Notes | Additional Links | Additional Links (2) | ||||||||||||||
2 | Edith Wharton | The House of Mirth | 1905 | Restaurant where Lily stops to get in from the rain when she lives at the boarding house. | 59th St. and 5th Ave. | 40.7643 | -73.97282 | "Lily walked up Fifth Avenue toward the Park, hoping to find a sheltered nook where she might sit; but the wind chilled her, and after an hour’s wandering under the tossing boughs she yielded to her increasing weariness, and took refuge in a little restaurant in Fifty-ninth Street. She was not hungry, and had meant to go without luncheon; but she was too tired to return home, and the long perspective of white tables showed alluringly through the windows. The room was full of women and girls, all too much engaged in the rapid absorption of tea and pie to remark her entrance. A hum of shrill voices reverberated against the low ceiling, leaving Lily shut out in a little circle of silence. She felt a sudden pang of profound loneliness. She had lost the sense of time, and it seemed to her as though she had not spoken to any one for days. Her eyes sought the faces about her, craving a responsive glance, some sign of an intuition of her trouble. But the sallow preoccupied women, with their bags and note-books and rolls of music, were all engrossed in their own affairs, and even those who sat by themselves were busy running over proof-sheets or devouring magazines between their hurried gulps of tea. Lily alone was stranded in a great waste of disoccupation." | This scene takes place toward the end of the novel. Lily's social and economic status is at its lowest, and this visit to a restaurant is a splurge for her. It's unclear to me how this restaurant compares to the restaurants she would have visited earlier in the novel, when she had access to more money (or at least, more credit). The white tablecloths (and the location) suggest that it seems luxurious to her in comparison to her boarding house. However, the detail that the women are hurrying through their tea might indicate that they are still working women (or at the very least, not women of extreme leisure like Lily's old friends). Reading more into the history of this neighborhood, as well as the lives of Gilded Age working women of various social positions would help me answer this question. | ||||||||||||||||
3 | Edith Wharton | The House of Mirth | 1905 | Bertha Dorset's House | 58th St. and 5th Ave. | 40.764554 | -73.972724 | "She was sufficiently familiar with Mrs. Dorset’s habits to know that she could always be found at home after five. She might not, indeed, be accessible to visitors, especially to a visitor so unwelcome, and against whom it was quite possible that she had guarded herself by special orders; but Lily had written a note which she meant to send up with her name, and which she thought would secure her admission. She had allowed herself time to walk to Mrs. Dorset’s, thinking that the quick movement through the cold evening air would help to steady her nerves; but she really felt no need of being tranquillized. Her survey of the situation remained calm and unwavering. As she reached Fiftieth Street the clouds broke abruptly, and a rush of cold rain slanted into her face. She had no umbrella and the moisture quickly penetrated her thin spring dress. She was still half a mile from her destination, and she decided to walk across to Madison Avenue and take the electric car." | Bertha Dorset, who spreads the rumors and gossip that contribute to Lily's downfall, is meant to be quite wealthy. "Half a mile" from 50th and 5th would place her just a block north of the little restaurant where Lily stops only a few pages before. Wharton's geography is likely very loose here -- my guess is that the Dorsets would have lived further north. | ||||||||||||||||
4 | Edith Wharton | The House of Mirth | 1905 | Lawrence Selden's apartment at the Benedick | 50th St. between 5th Ave. and Madison Ave. | 40.75817415 | -73.9764452 | "As she turned into the side street, a vague memory stirred in her. The row of budding trees, the new brick and limestone house-fronts, the Georgian flat-house with flower-boxes on its balconies, were merged together into the setting of a familiar scene. It was down this street that she had walked with Selden, that September day two years ago; a few yards ahead was the doorway they had entered together." | Lily's would-be beau, Lawrence Selden, lives in the Benedick on 50th Street. The Benedick was not a real building (though it represents a typical type of building where a bachelor of Selden's status would live), and if it had been real, it likely would have been located elsewhere. This address is right across the street from St. Patrick's Cathedral, which Lily would likely have noted. Another reminder that Wharton was living in Lenox, Massachuttsetts at the time she wrote this novel. | ||||||||||||||||
5 | Edith Wharton | The House of Mirth | 1905 | Nettie Struther's Apartment | "Three blocks off" Bryant Park. See notes for how I placed her here. | 40.75725422 | -73.99183555 | "“Yes—yes; I must go home,” Lily murmured, rising. Her eyes rested wonderingly on the thin shabby figure at her side. She had known Nettie Crane as one of the discouraged victims of over-work and anaemic parentage: one of the superfluous fragments of life destined to be swept prematurely into that social refuse-heap of which Lily had so lately expressed her dread. But Nettie Struther’s frail envelope was now alive with hope and energy: whatever fate the future reserved for her, she would not be cast into the refuse-heap without a struggle. “I am very glad to have seen you,” Lily continued, summoning a smile to her unsteady lips. “It’ll be my turn to think of you as happy—and the world will seem a less unjust place to me too.” “Oh, but I can’t leave you like this—you’re not fit to go home alone. And I can’t go with you either!” Nettie Struther wailed with a start of recollection. “You see, it’s my husband’s night-shift—he’s a motor-man—and the friend I leave the baby with has to step upstairs to get HER husband’s supper at seven. I didn’t tell you I had a baby, did I? She’ll be four months old day after tomorrow, and to look at her you wouldn’t think I’d ever had a sick day. I’d give anything to show you the baby, Miss Bart, and we live right down the street here—it’s only three blocks off.” She lifted her eyes tentatively to Lily’s face, and then added with a burst of courage: “Why won’t you get right into the cars and come home with me while I get baby’s supper? It’s real warm in our kitchen, and you can rest there, and I’ll take YOU home as soon as ever she drops off to sleep.”" | As part of her charitable work when Lily was wealthy, she paid Nettie to recover from disease at a sanitorium upstate. Toward the end of the novel, it is Nettie who offers Lily charity, even though Nettie is working class herself. Nettie lives "three blocks" from Bryant Park. to place her, I consulted Mapping Historical New York, a project sponsored by Columbia Univesity. I looked at the map based on the 1880 census and found the most densely populated block that fit Wharton's description. People with a variety of working-class professions (garment workers, laborers, etc.) lived on the block at the time. | Mapping Historical New York | |||||||||||||||
6 | Edith Wharton | The House of Mirth | 1905 | Simon Rosedale's House | Wharton locates this on 5th Avenue. I've chosen to place him at the location of the Warburg Mansion at 1105 5th Avenue. (See notes for justification and details.) | 40.785843 | -73.957266 | Simon Rosedale is the only Jewish character in The House of Mirth; most of Wharton's other characters regard him with implicit antisemitism (as does, arguably, Wharton herself). His rise in society contrasts with Lily's fall, and the welcome he eventually receives from the people who mocked him before demonstrates how focused on wealth and status Lily's former friends are. (Notably, he is one of the only people from her "old" life to show courtesy toward her at the end of the novel -- when she is unwell, he walks her home to her boarding house and offers financial help.) When he "makes it," he builds a grand house. While I think it's more likely that it would be further south, I chose to place him at the site of the Warburg mansion, which was (I believe) the first 5th Avenue mansion built for a Jewish owner. This is a bit of an anachronism -- Felix Warburg built his mansion in 1908, three years after the novel was published -- but Warburg likely faced the same prejudices in real life as the fictional Mr. Rosedale did in novel. | https://www.nypap.org/preservation-history/warburg-mansion/ | If These Walls Could Talk: The Warburg Mansion https://stories.thejewishmuseum.org › if-these-walls-cou... | |||||||||||||||
7 | Edith Wharton | The House of Mirth | 1905 | Lily's Boarding House | West of 6th Avenue - 42nd between 10th and 9th | 40.75903873 | -73.99429442 | "Lily uttered no protest, and when he had paused to make sure of his change they emerged from the hotel and crossed Sixth Avenue again. As she led the way westward past a long line of areas which, through the distortion of their paintless rails, revealed with increasing candour the DISJECTA MEMBRA of bygone dinners, Lily felt that Rosedale was taking contemptuous note of the neighbourhood; and before the doorstep at which she finally paused he looked up with an air of incredulous disgust. “This isn’t the place? Some one told me you were living with Miss Farish.” “No: I am boarding here. I have lived too long on my friends.” He continued to scan the blistered brown stone front, the windows draped with discoloured lace, and the Pompeian decoration of the muddy vestibule; then he looked back at her face and said with a visible effort: “You’ll let me come and see you some day?”" | I was able to make an educated guess about the location of Lily's apartment (as well as her chemist -- see other note) based on the face that she walks there with Rosedale after meeting him as he descends from the 6th Avenue train. Based on other context, the only el stops that fit are 23rd St., 33rd St., 42nd St., or 50th. (Others opened after the novel was written.) Knowing that Wharton was born on 23rd and chooses to make far West 23rd the home of Madame Olenska's artistic neighborhood in "The Age of Innocence," I believe we can eliminate the possibility of Lily living on or near 23rd. like it can only be 50th, 42nd, or 33rd (other 6th Avenue line stations opened after the novel was written). Demographics maps show that 50th was less densely populated further to the west, which makes it an unlikely location for a shabby boarding house. 42nd and 33rd were both dense -- but given the landmarks near 42nd, and the fact that it's closer to Bryant Park, which has been mentioned before as a place where Lily stops at this point in her life, I believe that 42nd is the most likely spot for her to run into Rosedale. According to "Mapping Historical New York," this block is the first one on 42nd west of 6th that has a significant number of garment workers living there in 1880; it and the blocks directly South are very densely populated, compared to the blocks to the east. 42nd St. has a large population of immigrants at that time, but from various backgrounds, whereas the strets to the south are predominantly German -- something I think would have been noted if Wharton had intended it to be the case about Lily's street. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Sixth_Avenue_Line | https://mappinghny.com/ | ||||||||||||||
8 | Edith Wharton | The House of Mirth | 1905 | Lily's Chemist | 42nd and 6th | 40.75479689 | -73.98442391 | "But what she dreaded most of all was having to pass the chemist’s at the corner of Sixth Avenue. She had meant to take another street: she had usually done so of late. But today her steps were irresistibly drawn toward the flaring plate-glass corner; she tried to take the lower crossing, but a laden dray crowded her back, and she struck across the street obliquely, reaching the sidewalk just opposite the chemist’s door. ...In her confusion she stumbled against a man who was hurrying down the last steps of the elevated station. He drew back, and she heard her name uttered with surprise. It was Rosedale, fur-coated, glossy and prosperous—but why did she seem to see him so far off, and as if through a mist of splintered crystals? Before she could account for the phenomenon she found herself shaking hands with him. They had parted with scorn on her side and anger upon his; but all trace of these emotions seemed to vanish as their hands met, and she was only aware of a confused wish that she might continue to hold fast to him." | As her financial and social situation gets worse, Lily visits the chemist to buy sleeping medication -- including her fatal dose. I was able to make an educated guess about the location of Lily's chemist (as well as her apartment -- see other note) based on the fact that she meets Rosedale as she's leaving it. Rosedale is descending from the 6th Avenue train. Lily passes the chemist on the way to her apartment, which I've located on West 42nd -- see that marker for my reasoning. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Sixth_Avenue_Line | |||||||||||||||
9 | Edith Wharton | Edith Wharton's birthplace | 14 W. 23rd St. | 40.74170886 | -73.99026326 | ||||||||||||||||||||
10 | Edith Wharton | The Age of Innocence | published 1920, set in 1870s | Grace Church | 802 Broadway at 10th St. | 40.73199697 | -73.99082061 | Newland and May Archer are married here; Wharton herself was bapitzed here. | https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/travel/1993/11/07/edith-whartons-new-york/f0a7a812-2462-4e74-8b70-6e0b8fa53149/ | ||||||||||||||||
11 | Edith Wharton | The Age of Innocence | published 1920, set in 1870s | Academy of Music | NE corner of 14th St. and Irving Place | 40.7338391 | -73.9880307 | The old Academy of Music predates the Metropolitan Opera; the Age of Innocence, which Wharton set in the 1870s, opens here. | https://www.loc.gov/item/2017659446/ | https://www.wqxr.org/story/opera-house-starbucks-brief-history-nycs-bygone-opera-houses/ | |||||||||||||||
12 | Edith Wharton | Edith Wharton's one-time home | 7 Washington Square North | 40.73114923 | -73.99614191 | A Walking Tour of Edith Wharton's Old New York - From Inwood Out | |||||||||||||||||||
13 | Edith Wharton | The Custom of the Country | 1913 | Marvell/Dagonet Home | Washington Square - Possibly 19-26 North | 40.7319222 | -73.99771806 | ""Why, do you know the Marvells? Are THEY stylish?" she asked. Mrs. Heeny gave the discouraged gesture of a pedagogue who has vainly striven to implant the rudiments of knowledge in a rebellious mind. "Why, Undine Spragg, I've told you all about them time and again! His mother was a Dagonet. They live with old Urban Dagonet down in Washington Square." | The Marvells are "old money." They live in a house that, to the social climbing Undine Spragg's eyes, is unfashionable and austere. Wharton located their home on the same square where she once lived. | https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/edith-whartons-houses | https://nyc-architecture.com/GV/GV044-19-26WashingtonSquareNorth.htm | ||||||||||||||
14 | Edith Wharton | The Custom of the Country | 1913 | The Stentorian - Undine's Hotel | 72nd St. & Central Park West - South of The Dakota. Possibly the Hotel Majestic in real life. | 40.77621997 | -73.97640222 | "Undine's white and gold bedroom, with sea-green panels and old rose carpet, looked along Seventy-second Street toward the leafless tree-tops of the Central Park. She went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace gazed eastward down the long brownstone perspective. Beyond the Park lay Fifth Avenue—and Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be!" | When they move to New York to pursue Undine's social future, her father buys a home for the family. However, Undine insists on living at a hotel, as that's what the "fashionable" people do. Wharton gives a fairly precise address -- the location of the fictional Stentorian matches a real-life hotel called the Majestic. In keeping with Undine's status as an outsider not yet attuned to the nuances of society life, the Majestic was not the most fashionable hotel at the time. | https://mahlerfoundation.org/mahler/locations/america/new-york-city/majestic-hotel/ | https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-f150-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99 | ||||||||||||||
15 | Edith Wharton | The Custom of the Country | 1913 | Metropolitan Opera House | Broadway and 39th Street - 1411 Broadway | 40.75408571 | -73.98731868 | The original location of the Metropolitan Opera House, built to rival (and soon, replace) the Academy of Music which plays a prominent role in the Age of Innocence. | “Old” Metropolitan Opera House | NYPAP | ||||||||||||||||
16 | Edith Wharton | The Custom of the Country | 1913 | Mrs. Fairford's House | 38th St. beyond Park Avenue | 40.74909984 | -73.97824634 | ""Present where? At their dinners? Of course—Mrs. Fairford gives the smartest little dinners in town. There was an account of one she gave last week in this morning's TOWN TALK: I guess it's right here among my clippings." Mrs. Heeny, swooping down on her bag, drew from it a handful of newspaper cuttings, which she spread on her ample lap and proceeded to sort with a moistened forefinger. "Here," she said, holding one of the slips at arm's length; and throwing back her head she read, in a slow unpunctuated chant: '"Mrs. Henley Fairford gave another of her natty little dinners last Wednesday as usual it was smart small and exclusive and there was much gnashing of teeth among the left-outs as Madame Olga Loukowska gave some of her new steppe dances after dinner'—that's the French for new dance steps," Mrs. Heeny concluded, thrusting the documents back into her bag. "Do you know Mrs. Fairford too?" Undine asked eagerly; while Mrs. Spragg, impressed, but anxious for facts, pursued: "Does she reside on Fifth Avenue?" "No, she has a little house in Thirty-eighth Street, down beyond Park Avenue."" | Wharton uses the location of Mrs. Fairford's house as a character detail -- both about Mrs. Fairford, and about Undine and her mother, who are both convinced that the only people worth knowing live on Fifth Avenue. | ||||||||||||||||
17 | Edith Wharton | The Age of Innocence | published 1920, set in 1870s | Mrs. Manson Mingott's House | North Fifth Avenue | 40.78496813 | -73.95768829 | "A visit to Mrs. Manson Mingott was always an amusing episode to the young man. The house in itself was already an historic document, though not, of course, as venerable as certain other old family houses in University Place and lower Fifth Avenue. Those were of the purest 1830, with a grim harmony of cabbage-rose-garlanded carpets, rosewood consoles, round-arched fire-places with black marble mantels, and immense glazed book-cases of mahogany; whereas old Mrs. Mingott, who had built her house later, had bodily cast out the massive furniture of her prime, and mingled with the Mingott heirlooms the frivolous upholstery of the Second Empire. It was her habit to sit in a window of her sitting-room on the ground floor, as if watching calmly for life and fashion to flow northward to her solitary doors. She seemed in no hurry to have them come, for her patience was equalled by her confidence. She was sure that presently the hoardings, the quarries, the one-story saloons, the wooden green-houses in ragged gardens, and the rocks from which goats surveyed the scene, would vanish before the advance of residences as stately as her own—perhaps (for she was an impartial woman) even statelier; and that the cobble-stones over which the old clattering omnibuses bumped would be replaced by smooth asphalt, such as people reported having seen in Paris. Meanwhile, as every one she cared to see came to HER (and she could fill her rooms as easily as the Beauforts, and without adding a single item to the menu of her suppers), she did not suffer from her geographic isolation. Mrs. Manson Mingott screwed up her little mouth into a grimace of mimic prudery and twinkled at him through malicious lids. "'Ask Mamma,' I suppose—the usual story. Ah, these Mingotts—all alike! Born in a rut, and you can't root 'em out of it. When I built this house you'd have thought I was moving to California! Nobody ever HAD built above Fortieth Street—no, says I, nor above the Battery either, before Christopher Columbus discovered America. No, no; not one of them wants to be different; they're as scared of it as the small-pox." | The Age of Innocence is set in the 1870s, earlier than Wharton's other novels. Part of Mrs. Mingott's eccentricity is that she chooses to live so far north, and it's telling of her high social status that people still make the journey to visit her. However, the neighborhood would no longer be considered remote by the turn of the century. I placed her on this block largely because of something I noticed when I was reading a blog post from the Jewish Museum about the Warburg Mansion (see Simon Rosedale's home). The writer notes that the area had once been remote and, by New York City standards, bucolic -- and to illustrate, they share a passage about Mrs. Mingott's home! It felt appropriate to situate her next door to Mr. Rosedale, albeit 30 years earlier. The change this represents -- the transition from "old" to "new" money, Rosedale's ability to enter "high society" as a Jewish man -- seems fitting, given the novel's theme of changing mores and values over time. | If These Walls Could Talk: The Warburg Mansion | by The Jewish Museum | The Jewish Museum | |||||||||||||||
18 | Edith Wharton | The Age of Innocence | published 1920, set in 1870s | Ned Winsett's House | Near Madame Olenska's flat | 40.74611281 | -74.00063944 | "Archer, he could not have said why, was slightly annoyed. What the devil did Ned Winsett want with Ellen Olenska's name? And above all, why did he couple it with Lefferts's? It was unlike Winsett to manifest such curiosity; but after all, Archer remembered, he was a journalist. "It's not for an interview, I hope?" he laughed. "Well—not for the press; just for myself," Winsett rejoined. "The fact is she's a neighbour of mine—queer quarter for such a beauty to settle in—and she's been awfully kind to my little boy, who fell down her area chasing his kitten, and gave himself a nasty cut. She rushed in bareheaded, carrying him in her arms, with his knee all beautifully bandaged, and was so sympathetic and beautiful that my wife was too dazzled to ask her name."" | I placed Ned Winsett here in proximity to Madame Olenska -- see the note at her location. | ||||||||||||||||
19 | Edith Wharton | The Age of Innocence | published 1920, set in 1870s | Madame Olenska's Home | Far down W. 23rd St. | 40.74611936 | -74.00025508 | "The Countess Olenska had said "after five"; and at half after the hour Newland Archer rang the bell of the peeling stucco house with a giant wisteria throttling its feeble cast-iron balcony, which she had hired, far down West Twenty-third Street, from the vagabond Medora. It was certainly a strange quarter to have settled in. Small dress-makers, bird-stuffers and "people who wrote" were her nearest neighbours; and further down the dishevelled street Archer recognised a dilapidated wooden house, at the end of a paved path, in which a writer and journalist called Winsett, whom he used to come across now and then, had mentioned that he lived. Winsett did not invite people to his house; but he had once pointed it out to Archer in the course of a nocturnal stroll, and the latter had asked himself, with a little shiver, if the humanities were so meanly housed in other capitals." | Countess Olenska lives in a part of 23rd Street that we might now consider "gentrifying," with its mix of workers and artists. It's worth noting that Wharton herself was born on 23rd Street, though she places Madame Olenska much further west. I guessed about the location of Madame Olenska's apartment based on historical details and Galt and Hoy's "Map of the City of New York," published in 1879. I chose a block with a mix of buildings, including one with a garden, for Mme. Olenska's flat -- it seems like the type of place she'd find charming, despite her dislike (echoing Wharton's own) for the "ugliness" of New York. | 23rd Street: A New York Songline (nysonglines.com) | https://www.loc.gov/item/75694818/. | ||||||||||||||
20 | Edith Wharton | The Age of Innocence | published 1920, set in 1870s | Archer and May's Married Home | E. 39th St. - 101 E. 39th St. | 40.75019114 | -73.9787598 | "His mind wandered away to the question of what May's drawing-room would look like. He knew that Mr. Welland, who was behaving "very handsomely," already had his eye on a newly built house in East Thirty-ninth Street. The neighbourhood was thought remote, and the house was built in a ghastly greenish-yellow stone that the younger architects were beginning to employ as a protest against the brownstone of which the uniform hue coated New York like a cold chocolate sauce; but the plumbing was perfect. Archer would have liked to travel, to put off the housing question; but, though the Wellands approved of an extended European honeymoon (perhaps even a winter in Egypt), they were firm as to the need of a house for the returning couple. The young man felt that his fate was sealed: for the rest of his life he would go up every evening between the cast-iron railings of that greenish-yellow doorstep, and pass through a Pompeian vestibule into a hall with a wainscoting of varnished yellow wood. But beyond that his imagination could not travel. He knew the drawing-room above had a bay window, but he could not fancy how May would deal with it. She submitted cheerfully to the purple satin and yellow tuftings of the Welland drawing-room, to its sham Buhl tables and gilt vitrines full of modern Saxe. He saw no reason to suppose that she would want anything different in her own house; and his only comfort was to reflect that she would probably let him arrange his library as he pleased—which would be, of course, with "sincere" Eastlake furniture, and the plain new bookcases without glass doors." | Newland Archer and his wife May live here after they marry. Her father chooses it; we learn at the end of the novel that Archer stays here for the rest of his life. Wharton placed it on East 39th, where today there are no traces of "ghastly greenish-yellow stone" townhouses, if they ever existed at all. I consulted "Mapping Historical New York" to find a block that fit. The further east you go, the more working class the neighborhood got, so I placed them close to Park, though I would need to learn a lot more about the history of New York to know if that would be "remote" enough to match Wharton's description. In 1880, there's at least one lawyer living on this block, so I gave Archer -- a lawyer himself -- his house. | https://mappinghny.com/ | |||||||||||||||
21 | Jacob Riis | How the Other Half Lives | Flat in Hell's Kitchen "Ruin" (1887-1889) | W. 38th St. between 10th and 9th | 40.75652802 | -73.99603137 | "Riis wrote in his 1889 article for Scribner’s Magazine, “How the Other Half Lives:” “Not that all the tenements above Fourteenth Street are good, or even better than those we have seen. There is Hell’s Kitchen and Murderers’ Row in the region of West-side slaughter-houses and three-cent whiskey. . . . ” The couple in this photograph taken by Riis lived on New York City’s West 38th Street in a barracks that covered an entire city block and lacked interior windows, ventilation, and indoor plumbing." - From Library of Congress' Jacob Riis: Revealing “How the Other Half Lives” | According to "Mapping Historical New York," this is the most German block in the densest area of 39th street in 1880. If they didn't live on this block, it's likely they lived on the next one. | https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jacob-riis/ | https://mappinghny.com/ | https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jacob-riis/riis-and-reform.html | ||||||||||||||
22 | Jacob Riis | How the Other Half Lives | Children’s Playground, Poverty Gap (1892) | W. 28th between 11th and 12th | 40.75256024 | -74.00604945 | "Riis photographed a privately funded, experimental playground at West 28th Street between 11th and 12th Avenues, the block pictured in the map above, where equipment was installed, and a janitor and two teachers were hired to watch the children. Riis described the park: “It was not exactly an attractive place. . . . But the children thought it lovely, and lovely it was for Poverty Gap, if not for Fifth Avenue.” Riis helped establish several small public parks in tenement neighborhoods including a park on Rivington Street. This petition, signed by 300 school girls “to make the corporation yard at the foot of Rivington St. into a public play-ground,” succeeded. Hamilton Fish Park opened in 1900." - From Library of Congress' Jacob Riis: Revealing “How the Other Half Lives” | https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jacob-riis/riis-and-reform.html#obj015 | |||||||||||||||||
23 | Jacob Riis | How the Other Half Lives | Bandits’ Roost (1887–1888) | Mulberry St. past Park St. | 40.71514102 | -73.99964911 | "Bandits’ Roost was an alley on Mulberry Street on New York’s Lower East Side, where Italian immigrants paid excessive rent to live in “rear tenements,” ramshackle structures that were added onto old houses. Riis, working with amateur photographers Richard Hoe Lawrence and Henry G. Piffard, took this photograph with a stereoscopic camera, which produced two side-by-side images: on the left is a woman with two small children; on the right, young “toughs” look warily at the camera. Riis led a ten-year crusade to clean up the area in which this photograph was taken; called “Mulberry Bend,” it was notorious as a haven for gangs and criminal activity." - From Library of Congress' Jacob Riis: Revealing “How the Other Half Lives” Riis and Reform "Where Mulberry Street crooks like an elbow within hail of the old depravity of the Five Points, is “the Bend,” foul core of New York’s slums. Long years ago the cows coming home from the pasture trod a path over this hill. Echoes of tinkling bells linger there still, but they do not call up memories of green meadows and summer fields; they proclaim the home-coming of the rag-picker’s cart. In the memory of man the old cow-path has never been other than a vast human pig-sty. There is but one “Bend” in the world, and it is enough. The city authorities, moved by the angry protests of ten years of sanitary reform effort, have decided that it is too much and must come down. Another Paradise Park will take its place and let in sunlight and air to work such transformation as at the Five Points, around the corner of the next block. Never was change more urgently needed. Around “the Bend” cluster the bulk of the tenements that are stamped as altogether bad, even by the optimists of the Health Department. Incessant raids cannot keep down the crowds that make them their home. In the scores of back alleys, of stable lanes and hidden byways, of which the rent collector alone can keep track, they share such shelter as the ramshackle structures afford with every kind of abomination rifled from the dumps and ash barrels of the city. Here, too, shunning the light, skulks the unclean beast of dishonest idleness. “The Bend” is the home of the tramp as well as the rag-picker. It is not much more than twenty years since a census of “the Bend” district returned only twenty-four of the six hundred and nine tenements as in decent condition. Three-fourths of the population of the “Bloody Sixth” Ward were then Irish. The army of tramps that grew up after the disbandment of the armies in the field, and has kept up its muster roll, together with the in-rush of the Italian tide, have ever since opposed a stubborn barrier to all efforts at permanent improvement. The more that has been done, the less it has seemed to accomplish in the way of real relief, until it has at last become clear that nothing short of entire demolition will ever prove of radical benefit. Corruption could not have chosen ground for its stand with better promise of success. The whole district is a maze of narrow, often unsuspected passage-ways—necessarily, for there is scarce a lot that has not two, three, or four tenements upon it, swarming with unwholesome crowds. What a birds-eye view of “the Bend” would be like is a matter of bewildering conjecture. Its everyday appearance, as seen from the corner of Bayard Street on a sunny day, is one of the sights of New York." - From "How the Other Half Lives" | https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45502/45502-h/images/i059.jpg | https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jacob-riis/ | https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jacob-riis/riis-and-reform.html#obj018 | |||||||||||||||
24 | Jacob Riis | How the Other Half Lives | Jacob Riis. The Single Typhus Lodger in Eldridge Street, 1893. | 87-89 Eldridge St. | 40.717442 | -73.99245615 | "In 1892 and 1893, Riis took photographs of the deplorable conditions of the police lodging houses, which served as the city’s homeless shelters. These images illustrated his articles and a lecture at the Academy of Medicine in February 1893—a lecture Riis gave to garner support for closing the houses and replacing them with a municipal wayfarer’s lodge. The police station lodging rooms at 87/89 Eldridge Street, located on the lower right portion of the map above, sheltered only women. When a sick man asked to stay for the night, he was placed in an empty room and laid down on the bare plank floor. It was soon discovered that he had typhus. Riis wrote: It was a piece of good luck that it was this [station] the typhus lodger found his way, or there is no telling where the trail of contagion he would have started might have ended" - From Library of Congress' Jacob Riis: Revealing “How the Other Half Lives” Riis and Reform | https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jacob-riis/riis-and-reform.html#obj036 | https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jacob-riis/ | https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jacob-riis/riis-and-reform.html#obj020 | |||||||||||||||
25 | Jacob Riis | How the Other Half Lives | Jacob Riis. Italian Mother and Her Baby in Jersey Street, 1888–1889. | Jersey St. | 40.72431669 | -73.99572167 | "An Italian family lived in this one-room, windowless home on Jersey Street, a few blocks from Riis’s Mulberry Street office. Jersey Street in the map above is sandwiched between Prince and East Houston Streets and is crammed with the back-to-back tenements that Riis railed against. In Riis’s photograph the family’s possessions and furnishings, which includes a rolled mattress, barrel, and piles of clothes; a dustpan, a basin, a wooden pallet that may have served as a bed, and a cast iron stove and various containers, fill the frame. Riis commented on the Italian custom of swaddling: “You can see how they wrap [their babies] around and around until you can almost stand them on either end and they won’t bend, so tightly are they bound.” - From Library of Congress' Jacob Riis: Revealing “How the Other Half Lives” | https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jacob-riis/riis-and-reform.html#obj040 | https://www1.nyc.gov/site/mopd/events/our-history.page?slide=1 | https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45502/45502-h/images/i034.jpg | |||||||||||||||
26 | Jacob Riis | How the Other Half Lives | 1890 | "Upstairs in Blindman's Alley" | 26 Cherry Street | 40.72400077 | -73.99657212 | "Some idea of what is meant by a sanitary “cleaning up” in these slums may be gained from the account of a mishap I met with once, in taking a flash-light picture of a group of blind beggars in one of the tenements down here. With unpractised hands I managed to set fire to the house. When the blinding effect of the flash had passed away and I could see once more, I discovered that a lot of paper and rags that hung on the wall were ablaze. There were six of us, five blind men and women who knew nothing of their danger, and myself, in an attic room with a dozen crooked, rickety stairs between us and the street, and as many households as helpless as the one whose guest I was all about us. The thought: how were they ever to be got out? made my blood run cold as I saw the flames creeping up the wall, and my first impulse was to bolt for the street and shout for help. The next was to smother the fire myself, and I did, with a vast deal of trouble. Afterward, when I came down to the street I told a friendly policeman of my trouble. For some reason he thought it rather a good joke, and laughed immoderately at my concern lest even then sparks should be burrowing in the rotten wall that might yet break out in flame and destroy the house with all that were in it. He told me why, when he found time to draw breath. “Why, don’t you know,” he said, “that house is the Dirty Spoon? It caught fire six times last winter, but it wouldn’t burn. The dirt was so thick on the walls, it smothered the fire!” Which, if true, shows that water and dirt, not usually held to be harmonious elements, work together for the good of those who insure houses. Sunless and joyless though it be, Blind Man’s Alley has that which its compeers of the slums vainly yearn for. It has a pay-day. Once a year sunlight shines into the lives of its forlorn crew, past and present. In June, when the Superintendent of Out-door Poor distributes the twenty thousand dollars annually allowed the poor blind by the city, in half-hearted recognition of its failure to otherwise provide for them, Blindman’s Alley takes a day off and goes to “see” Mr. Blake. That night it is noisy with unwonted merriment. There is scraping of squeaky fiddles in the dark rooms, and cracked old voices sing long-forgotten songs. Even the blind landlord rejoices, for much of the money goes into his coffers." | MoMA | Jacob August Riis, Lodgers in Bayard Street Tenement, Five Cents a Spot. 1889 | ||||||||||||||||
27 | Jacob Riis | How the Other Half Lives | 1890 | "LODGERS IN A CROWDED BAYARD STREET TENEMENT—“FIVE CENTS A SPOT.” | Bayard and Mulberry | 40.71580194 | -73.9989817 | It is in “the Bend” the sanitary policeman locates the bulk of his four hundred, and the sanitary reformer gives up the task in despair. Of its vast homeless crowds the census takes no account. It is their instinct to shun the light, and they cannot be corralled in one place long enough to be counted. But the houses can, and the last count showed that in “the Bend” district, between Broadway and the Bowery and Canal and Chatham Streets, in a total of four thousand three hundred and sixty-seven “apartments” only nine were for the moment vacant, while in the old “Africa,” west of Broadway, that receives the overflow from Mulberry Street and is rapidly changing its character, the notice “standing room only” is up. Not a single vacant room was found there. Nearly a hundred and fifty “lodgers” were driven out of two adjoining Mulberry Street tenements, one of them aptly named “the House of Blazes,” during that census. What squalor and degradation inhabit these dens the health officers know. Through the long summer days their carts patrol “the Bend,” scattering disinfectants in streets and lanes, in sinks and cellars, and hidden hovels where the tramp burrows. From midnight till far into the small hours of the morning the policeman’s thundering rap on closed doors is heard, with his stern command, “Apri port’!” on his rounds gathering evidence of illegal overcrowding. The doors are opened unwillingly enough—but the order means business, and the tenant knows it even if he understands no word of English—upon such scenes as the one presented in the picture. It was photographed by flash-light on just such a visit. In a room not thirteen feet either way slept twelve men and women, two or three in bunks set in a sort of alcove, the rest on the floor. A kerosene lamp burned dimly in the fearful atmosphere, probably to guide other and later arrivals to their “beds,” for it was only just past midnight. A baby’s fretful wail came from an adjoining hall-room, where, in the semi-darkness, three recumbent figures could be made out. The “apartment” was one of three in two adjoining buildings we had found, within half an hour, similarly crowded. Most of the men were lodgers, who slept there for five cents a spot. | https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jacob-riis/photographer.html#obj052 | ||||||||||||||||
28 | Jacob Riis | How the Other Half Lives | 1890 | "The Tram" - in the Bend | Mulberry Street Bend | 40.71514102 | -73.99964911 | "On one of my visits to “the Bend” I came across a particularly ragged and disreputable tramp, who sat smoking his pipe on the rung of a ladder with such evident philosophic contentment in the busy labor of a score of rag-pickers all about him, that I bade him sit for a picture, offering him ten cents for the job. He accepted the offer with hardly a nod, and sat patiently watching me from his perch until I got ready for work. Then he took the pipe out of his mouth and put it in his pocket, calmly declaring that it was not included in the contract, and that it was worth a quarter to have it go in the picture. The pipe, by the way, was of clay, and of the two-for-a-cent kind. But I had to give in. The man, scarce ten seconds employed at honest labor, even at sitting down, at which he was an undoubted expert, had gone on strike. He knew his rights and the value of “work,” and was not to be cheated out of either." | File:Bunks in a Seven-Cent Lodging-House, Pell Street.jpeg - Wikipedia | ||||||||||||||||
29 | Jacob Riis | How the Other Half Lives | 1890 | BUNKS IN A SEVEN-CENT LODGING-HOUSE, PELL STREET. | Pell Street | 40.7148861 | -73.99836509 | "The twenty-five cent lodging-house keeps up the pretence of a bedroom, though the head-high partition enclosing a space just large enough to hold a cot and a chair and allow the man room to pull off his clothes is the shallowest of all pretences. The fifteen-cent bed stands boldly forth without screen in a room full of bunks with sheets as yellow and blankets as foul. At the ten-cent level the locker for the sleeper’s clothes disappears. There is no longer need of it. The tramp limit is reached, and there is nothing to lock up save, on general principles, the lodger. Usually the ten- and seven-cent lodgings are different grades of the same abomination. Some sort of an apology for a bed, with mattress and blanket, represents the aristocratic purchase of the tramp who, by a lucky stroke of beggary, has exchanged the chance of an empty box or ash-barrel for shelter on the quality floor of one of these “hotels.” A strip of canvas, strung between rough timbers, without covering of any kind, does for the couch of the seven-cent lodger who prefers the questionable comfort of a red-hot stove close to his elbow to the revelry of the stale-beer dive. It is not the most secure perch in the world. Uneasy sleepers roll off at intervals, but they have not far to fall to the next tier of bunks, and the commotion that ensues is speedily quieted by the boss and his club. On cold winter nights, when every bunk had its tenant, I have stood in such a lodging-room more than once, and listening to the snoring of the sleepers like the regular strokes of an engine, and the slow creaking of the beams under their restless weight, imagined myself on shipboard and experienced the very real nausea of sea-sickness. The one thing that did not favor the deception was the air; its character could not be mistaken. The proprietor of one of these seven-cent houses was known to me as a man of reputed wealth and respectability. He “ran” three such establishments and made, it was said, $8,000 a year clear profit on his investment. He lived in a handsome house quite near to the stylish precincts of Murray Hill, where the nature of his occupation was not suspected. A notice that was posted on the wall of the lodgers’ room suggested at least an effort to maintain his up-town standing in the slums. It read: “No swearing or loud talking after nine o’clock.” Before nine no exceptions were taken to the natural vulgarity of the place; but that was the limit." | Riis' text places this on Ludlow Street -- to get an approximate location, I consulted "Mapping Historical New York" and selected one of two blocks that was populated densely with garment workers at the time. | Jacob Riis, “Knee-Pants” at Forty-Five Cents a Dozen—A Ludlow Street Sweater’s Shop, from How the Other Half Lives – Smarthistory | |||||||||||||||
30 | Jacob Riis | How the Other Half Lives | 1890 | "Knee-Pants" At Forty-Five Cents a Dozen -- A Ludlow Street Sweater's Shop | Ludlow Street | 40.71606621 | -73.99044362 | "Up two flights of dark stairs, three, four, with new smells of cabbage, of onions, of frying fish, on every landing, whirring sewing machines behind closed doors betraying what goes on within, to the door that opens to admit the bundle and the man. A sweater, this, in a small way. Five men and a woman, two young girls, not fifteen, and a boy who says unasked that he is fifteen, and lies in saying it, are at the machines sewing knickerbockers, “knee-pants” in the Ludlow Street dialect. The floor is littered ankle-deep with half-sewn garments. In the alcove, on a couch of many dozens of “pants” ready for the finisher, a bare-legged baby with pinched face is asleep. A fence of piled-up clothing keeps him from rolling off on the floor. The faces, hands, and arms to the elbows of everyone in the room are black with the color of the cloth on which they are working. The boy and the woman alone look up at our entrance. The girls shoot sidelong glances, but at a warning look from the man with the bundle they tread their machines more energetically than ever. The men do not appear to be aware even of the presence of a stranger. They are “learners,” all of them, says the woman, who proves to be the wife of the boss, and have “come over” only a few weeks ago. She is disinclined to talk at first, but a few words in her own tongue from our guide[15] set her fears, whatever they are, at rest, and she grows almost talkative. The learners work for week’s wages, she says. How much do they earn? She shrugs her shoulders with an expressive gesture. The workers themselves, asked in their own tongue, say indifferently, as though the question were of no interest: from two to five dollars. The children—there are four of them—are not old enough to work. The oldest is only six. They turn out one hundred and twenty dozen “knee-pants” a week, for which the manufacturer pays seventy cents a dozen. Five cents a dozen is the clear profit, but her own and her husband’s work brings the family earnings up to twenty-five dollars a week, when they have work all the time. But often half the time is put in looking for it. They work no longer than to nine o’clock at night, from daybreak. There are ten machines in the room; six are hired at two dollars a month. For the two shabby, smoke-begrimed rooms, one somewhat larger than ordinary, they pay twenty dollars a month. She does not complain, though “times are not what they were, and it costs a good deal to live.” Eight dollars a week for the family of six and two boarders. How do they do it? She laughs, as she goes over the bill of fare, at the silly question: Bread, fifteen cents a day, of milk two quarts a day at four cents a quart, one pound of meat for dinner at twelve cents, butter one pound a week at “eight cents a quarter of a pound.” Coffee, potatoes, and pickles complete the list." | Jacob August Riis. In Poverty Gap, West 28th Street: An English Coal-heaver's Home. 1889 | MoMA | ||||||||||||||||
31 | Jacob Riis | How the Other Half Lives | 1890 | In Poverty Gap, West Twenty-Eighth St. An English Coal Heaver's Home | West 28th Street btween 10th and 11th | 40.75137356 | -74.00314678 | This text doesn't match exactly with the location of the image, but presents a similar scene: "That ignorance plays its part, as well as poverty and bad hygienic surroundings, in the sacrifice of life is of course inevitable. They go usually hand in hand. A message came one day last spring summoning me to a Mott Street tenement in which lay a child dying from some unknown disease. With the “charity doctor” I found the patient on the top floor, stretched upon two chairs in a dreadfully stifling room. She was gasping in the agony of peritonitis that had already written its death-sentence on her wan and pinched face. The whole family, father, mother, and four ragged children, sat around looking on with the stony resignation of helpless despair that had long since given up the fight against fate as useless. A glance around the wretched room left no doubt as to the cause of the child’s condition. “Improper nourishment,” said the doctor, which, translated to suit the place, meant starvation. The father’s hands were crippled from lead poisoning. He had not been able to work for a year. A contagious disease of the eyes, too long neglected, had made the mother and one of the boys nearly blind. The children cried with hunger. They had not broken their fast that day, and it was then near noon. For months the family had subsisted on two dollars a week from the priest, and a few loaves and a piece of corned beef which the sisters sent them on Saturday. The doctor gave direction for the treatment of the child, knowing that it was possible only to alleviate its sufferings until death should end them, and left some money for food for the rest. An hour later, when I returned, I found them feeding the dying child with ginger ale, bought for two cents a bottle at the pedlar’s cart down the street. A pitying neighbor had proposed it as the one thing she could think of as likely to make the child forget its misery. There was enough in the bottle to go round to the rest of the family. In fact, the wake had already begun; before night it was under way in dead earnest." | Jacob Riis Poverty Gap | Ephemeral New York (wordpress.com) | ||||||||||||||||
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