Long ago, it was said that one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.
A man stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue the other day, looking gloomily at the carriages
that rolled by, carrying the wealth and fashion of the avenues to and from the big stores
downtown.
He was poor and hungry and ragged.
This thought was in his mind.
They, behind their welfare teams, have no thought for the morrow.
They know hunger only by name, and ride down to spend in an hour's shopping, what would
keep me and my little ones from want a whole year.
The world forgets easily, too easily, what it does not like to remember.
What is it about Reese's message, about his images that are compelling?
I mean, Jacob Reese is somebody who gets mentioned by every generation.
Either his words or his images are deemed important and really have been enormously
influential in terms of the way we remember the poverty of the 1890s.
In a room not 13 feet either way slept 12 men and women, two or three in bunks and a
sort of alcove, the rest on the floor.
I counted Barrow's 19 murders in the one block in the Mulberry Bend.
Five men and women, two young girls and a boy are at the machines sewing Nicobias.
There would be trouble with the lodging rooms, and within 11 months the prophecy came true.
The typhus broke out there.
The night after the news had come, I took my camera and flash and made the rounds of
the dens, photographing them all with their crowds.
Jacob Reese was a journalist.
He came to America from Denmark, decided to go to work ultimately for newspapers in New
York City, and was appalled by what he saw.
And he realized that the power of the written word could have enormous impact in affecting
social change.
And he wrote newspaper articles, he wrote books, and what Jacob Reese did was create
another dimension to all of that.
He learned the power of photography, and he was the first to take a camera into tenements
and produce those images in a way that people could understand for the first time what the
conditions were all about.
What made Reese's work so popular was that he promised to show people how the other half
lives, and he would bring them in with the promise of a very exciting, titillating, voyeuristic
experience, and then he would turn that interest into a sense of responsibility, and then he
would end by directing them to do things, to change tenement laws, to change the way
that the economics work, to change the circumstances of the poor and thereby to improve their conditions.
Today we are far less affected by photographs, and that's partly because we see so many
of them.
And that makes the photographer's job very, very, very hard.
And it makes the few photographers who are doing really strong and convincing work, it
makes them that much more worthy of our attention.
These are extraordinary houses, they're extraordinary dwellings, and if you stop and take a look
at them and get to know the people, you'll have an entirely different perception of homeless
people living in vacant lots and public parks and under bridges, and you'll really see
that they care just as much about these places as you might your own home.
You're reaching out for, we're a part of the human condition, and you're trying to document
that, and a lot of people have difficulty with that.
This is not an uncomfortable thing, it's not comfortable to the poor, and it's not comfortable
for somebody who doesn't have to go through that to have to sit there and try to understand
what's going on.
Jacob Reiss arrived in the United States as a kind of rebellious adolescent.
His family was good middle class Danish stock.
Like many Europeans, he read about and heard about America and saw it as a place of freedom
and possibility.
As I looked over the rail at the miles of straight streets, my hopes rose high that
somewhere in this teeming hive, there would be a place for me.
When he first arrived in the United States, he faced a lot of hardship himself.
He experienced periods of homelessness, periods of trying to find work and not being able
to find work.
He lodged in police station lodging houses on the Lower East Side in New York and really
experienced firsthand the kinds of ways that people had to live every day.
The city was full of idle men and homeless and penniless.
I joined the great army of tramps, wandering about the streets in the daytime with one
aim of somehow stilling the hunger that gnawed at my vitals.
The poverty that Reiss would have experienced in the streets of New York was taking on dramatically
new forms in the 1870s.
Realize how compressed events were.
The first tenements as we know them only date back to the early 1840s.
Very quickly, within the space of 10 years, no more than that, they were the major form
of construction on the island and anywhere where the rich did not live or that small
section of the population known as the middle class where they did not live was completely
blanketed with tenements.
And when we think of tenements now, we're thinking of the buildings that were built
as the solution to the problem that Reiss was dealing with in the first place.
The buildings were built of wood.
They had no fire protection.
Most of the rooms were on the inside, did not have access to windows, did not have ventilation.
Disease was frequent and common and you'd have these small but devastating epidemics
of things like cholera and smallpox would sweep through neighborhoods and decimate the
neighborhood.
There were these minor depressions such as the one of 1874, large segments of the population
could suddenly find themselves out of work, unable to pay rent and out on the street.
He managed to drag himself back into the middle class writing for the New York Sun.
He got moved to night beat police beat work and he hooked up with a lot of policemen who
enjoyed his company and they started feeding him stories and once they fed him stories
then he became a kind of a byline, he became a well-known New York police beat writer.
Midnight roll call was over in the Elizabeth Street police station, a raid was on foot
to the bend.
I went along as a kind of war correspondent.
A kick of the sergeant's boot heel sent the door flying into the room, grouped around
a beer keg, a ragged host of men and women on boxes, benches and stools.
The 100th of this year's crop of outcast babies was picked up in the street this week and
to make a patron webs nursery at police headquarters.
In the coldest winter they are brought in naked or shivering, miserable in rags.
The response towards poverty was pretty ineffectual even at its most well-meaning.
There wasn't much government intervention of any sort.
The only manifestations you really had were church sponsored groups which in many cases
evinced more interest in bringing the objects of their concern into the fold of the church.
It was perceived widely that poverty was a sort of judgment of God.
These people are so degraded that they live in a place where the ceiling leaks and as
a result they contract typhoid or whatever.
The implication is that if they were more virtuous they would take up their pallets
and walk.
They would rise from the situation, a very simplistic way of course of quelling anybody's
second thoughts about their own lifestyles.
The dominant ethos of 19th century thought about the poor said basically, don't intervene
in the lives of the poor, you'll only do harm by a kind of charitable affirmative action.
You'll hurt those who could otherwise rise out of it and only temporarily stop the downward
spiral of these losers.
So Reese came out of that and in many ways believed it but his eyes told him differently
and he became increasingly aware just how horrifying the circumstances were.
It was on my midnight trips with the sanitary police that the wish kept cropping up in me
that there was some way of putting before the people what I saw there.
I wrote but it seemed to make no impression.
One morning scanning my newspaper, there it was, the thing I had been looking for all
these years, a way had been discovered to take pictures by flashlight.
The darkest corner might be photographed that way.
With their way illuminated by spasmodic flashes as bright and sharp and brief as those of
lightning itself, a mysterious party has lately been startling the town.
The object in the matter was the collection of a series of views for magic lantern slides,
showing as no mere description could, pictures of Gotham's crime and misery by night and
day.
Jacob Reese didn't begin taking pictures.
He began by asking someone to come along with him and make the pictures for him.
The problem was, as he says, the hours and the conditions that they were photographing
soon paled on them.
Reese decided to heck with this.
I can do this myself.
He went out and proceeded to start making pictures himself.
The first picture he made was really the last picture in the story that he meant to tell
in his lantern slide lectures and in the book that he planned to write about this.
His first picture was the picture of the end of the life of a poor person, which was at
the unmarked graves at Potter's Field.
This is the picture of the end of the life of a poor person, which was at the unmarked
graves at Potter's Field.
To me, as a journalist, Jacob Reese was something of a hero, and when I looked at his photographs
of a hundred years ago, I was deeply moved by them, and I was impressed by the amount
of impact that he could have on society, and looking at those photographs, I wanted to
see whether we would see the same kind of images a hundred years later.
I decided to use Reese as a benchmark, look back to the 1890s and see how in issues of
immigration, race, poverty, health, we compare in the 1990s.
Just like Reese, Fred Conrad, a photographer for The Times and I, started at Potter's
Field, started on Heart Island, where more than 700,000 poor New Yorkers have been buried
over the last century or more.
We learned very quickly that the other half dies very much the same as it did a hundred
years ago.
The challenge then was to find how the other half lives.
We went to a number of places to look at how the homeless were living.
We found one man in an armory in Fort Washington who had been living in this armory with 900
people in it for six years.
What was interesting was this was very much like the police lodging houses of a hundred
years ago, and society still had no sense of how to deal with homelessness.
We tried to find people who would be representative of the kind of things, the same conditions
that existed in the 19th century and today.
One of the hardest to replicate was children.
Police had those incredibly moving pictures of children sleeping under a stoop.
Today you don't find, for the most part, kids sleeping outdoors alone.
So what was the thing that would represent the plight of children today?
Well, Fred Conrad landed upon the body of a child caught in the crossfire of a drug
shooting.
What Reese said, and I think this was one of the most fundamental points he made in
how the other half lives, was that morality aside, it was in everyone's interest to make
sure that poverty was dealt with, that homelessness was dealt with, that the slums were dealt
with, because otherwise this was a problem that was going to eat away a road at the rest
of society and that generations, our children, our grandchildren, were going to wind up paying
for one way or another.
How the Other Half Lives was published in 1890, and it was immediately received as being
an incredibly important and influential work.
The kinds of reviews you see of it are sort of announcements about, you know, we never
realized this existed.
His main object was tenement reform.
The crowding is almost inconceivable to us now, because so many of those laws were passed.
It started as the tenant house, which provided working people cheap housing close to their
jobs.
But the great waves of immigration came overcrowding.
To increase profits, rear houses were built.
It was the rent the owner was after.
Nothing was said in the contract about either the safety or the comfort of the tenants.
One of the effects that Reese's book and his photographs had was to bring a whole new generation
of not just reformers, but politicians who were interested in hooking their star to this
new emotionally charged subject.
One of these was a man who was later to become President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt.
When Roosevelt was police commissioner, he and Jacob Reese would sort of take trips,
what they would call sort of excursions into the slums.
And Reese actually educated Roosevelt to these kinds of conditions.
Nothing is better understood than that the rescue of children is the key to the problem
of city poverty.
Where a character may be formed, where to reform it would be a hopeless task.
Children in the 19th century in the poor quarters of New York had a very rough lot indeed, because
their parents really could seldom support them past infancy, and certainly not after
the age of eight or nine.
And so they were cast out into the street and left to make their own way.
Reese placed the emphasis on children because it's different when you put a child out there
in the public, and they see a child and they see conditions that children have to live
in.
It reaches down to their subconscious, you can't grow if you have no ceiling over your
head.
You're only thinking about getting warm.
You're not thinking about what you may be reading.
Children need help.
And so he used that strategy and it worked.
In addition, Reese's book ended up much more anecdotal and much more of a tour of the various
social and racial and ethnic types that occupy the New York slums than his Hellfire and Brimstone
We've Got to Change Things lecture.
One thing you shall vainly ask for in the chief city of America is a distinctly American
community.
There is none.
Thrift is the watchword of Dewtown.
It has enslaved them.
The Italian is content to live in a pigsty, the Christian out of John Chinaman will remain
abortive.
The Negro loves fine clothes and a good living, a good deal more than naturally among the
hordes that bring the germs with them from across the sea.
It's really surprising, I think, to late 20th century readers to come upon this because
many of our prejudices are present in Reese's work, but they're often applied to different
people.
That is to say, for example, that lazy, shiftless people are Irish and clean, hardworking believers
in the American system are Negroes, as he called them, or African Americans.
There are certain things about Reese that are somewhat troubling.
One of them is his insistence on assimilation that led directly into his hostility towards
people who wouldn't assimilate.
And he was a lifelong enemy of the Chinese, for example, because they insisted on their
own language, their own customs, and Reese wanted everybody to become identical Americans
because this is something that he did himself.
You can say that Reese was profoundly not a hypocrite.
He really did not insist that anybody do things that he did not do himself.
And of course, he is his own exact model of the immigrant who moves through indigence
and homelessness, misery of all kinds, and then by gum, picks himself up and makes himself
into a solid citizen.
So he is really demanding of others what he demanded of himself.
Reese had mixed feelings about many of the people that he wrote about.
You could argue about the level of his empathy.
I think he has to be considered in the context of a century ago, and certainly his feelings
about immigrants was not all warm and ambivalent at best.
But I think he realized that society had a responsibility, and perhaps this was his Danish
upbringing, perhaps it was his coming here as an immigrant himself and working his way
out of poverty.
Today, journalists often operate on two levels.
One is the objective, dispassionate view.
These problems are out there, and it's our role to document them as best we can, warts
and all.
On another level, and these are things we constantly wrestle with, is the feeling of
compassion.
We're dealing with real human beings, their families, their passions, their one life to
live.
And what we're doing has an impact not only on them, but on the conditions that they represent.
And I think that's something that photographers are constantly torn between, between advocacy
and between simply picturing reality as we see it.
About 17 and a half years of my life has been spent in and out of prisons.
I'm what they call a violent, persistent felony offender.
The last thing I did, right, which I got six to life for, I got arrested with a pistol.
I'll tell you something, the really close friends that I had died and died of AIDS.
You have HIV yourself, right?
Yeah.
I'm HIV positive.
Are you going for treatments?
690.
No, not really.
The most I do in regards to HIV is that I go to support groups and stuff like that.
I always feel awkward when I first start because you're stepping into somebody else's life.
And you know, you don't want to do anything that's going to disrupt them from the normal
thing.
Yeah.
Okay, what does Tito do when things get tight?
He goes, shoots some drugs, you know?
At one point or another, all my brothers and sisters dipped in that, you know, with drugs
and stuff like that.
Trying to get into the rhythm, trying to walk in his footsteps, trying to listen in his
footsteps.
I don't care who we're walking, it's like, where does he want to walk, you know?
The only thing I care about is trying to understand his viewpoint.
So every place you go, when you run into his friends, it's interesting, you know, because
some people are real characters, some people are almost scary or leery, and you almost
can tell if you're connecting with his people by the way they forget you in the first minute.
I grew up in a Delaney Homes housing project.
It's like the Jacob Reese apartments on a smaller scale and per family.
You know, every time I go into a housing project, I feel like I just returned to Delaney Homes.
Some was lucky, I mean, my art got me out of it, and I made it to a certain extent out.
Every time I see a kid, I see potential of some wonderful things happening.
Now, a kid grows up in a situation where his parents are desperate, and the only places
that are flourishing are liquor stores or the drug dealers.
This is the best a kid's going to see.
If there is no hope at all, then you grab whatever straw is given to you.
There is very little to hold the boy who has never known anything but a home in the tenement.
Left alone to himself, he soon enough finds a place in the police books.
I think conceptions of criminality are central to Reese's argument, and that is that crime
can be caused by poverty.
And what he's doing, I think, is playing on the sort of fear of his audience of crime,
because this is an era of monumental change.
I mean, there's rioting, there's depression, and people are really afraid that their way
of life is sort of collapsing and falling apart.
Reese's image of bandit's roost is a sort of classic image of that kind, threatening
men lurking in an alleyway.
Reese, you could argue, was something of an environmentalist, he figured that people in
nice houses wouldn't throw stones, that if you eliminated what were then the worst slums,
if you gave people light and air and cleanliness, they would be able to lead productive lives.
And to some extent, of course, that was true.
Today, a hundred years later, the biggest slum lord in New York City is New York City
itself.
If Reese had looked at public housing today, he would have said, wow, this is a great improvement.
I think even he would not have realized the social context, the pathology that many of
those projects have bred all over the country, and that we didn't spend enough time addressing
that poverty of the spirit, even if we were able, in many cases, to provide a better physical
surrounding, not necessarily a more secure one, but at least a better physical surrounding.
What does it mean to look at a Jacob Reese project?
I mean, most people see trouble, you know, I think.
But the fact of the matter is, people struggle and live there.
I mean, and they're like, just like you and me, except they don't have much money.
Also, you see Tito's father, in his apartment, which is like, you're going to another country,
and you're going to his house, with all the kind of things he has, and find a picture
every two seconds.
A lot of times, I work in very close, because I want to take myself and the viewer inside
this other person's world.
I want them to have access to that spirit of the person.
Can you put your heads close to each other, I want you to put your heads right next to
each other.
On this side?
Yeah, I think so.
I think so.
Will he stay there?
No.
Will he stay?
What?
Okay.
Yeah, but...
Oh, yeah?
Just giddy, giddy, giddy.
Let me get your heads real close to you, right next to each other.
I don't know if that...
Yeah, that's good.
That's good.
Don't...
Okay.
Oh, good grief.
Oh, that's great.
That's...
Don't move.
Whatever you do.
Oh, God.
I wanted to do a portrait of the sun, the father, and the bird together.
The light was beautiful.
My heart decided to stop.
It stood still.
Not for the bird, but for the father and son.
They came together, the 37-year-old bad boy, laying his head on his father's chest.
And he became the good boy that he had always been for the beating of all time.
After a while, I thought, the bird is going to fly away from the spot.
Immediately, the bird actually flew into the next room.
I told you that was the one.
Time to stop.
Then we went to hell later.
Hell was located on the roof.
That is, the doorway is opening to the roof.
So remember what I told you, Eli, if anything happens, I'm just going to throw that shit in the air
and play it off like we're simulating.
You want to say it?
Tito was needing his fix.
He was drug sick.
First, we drove to a couple of places on the street where we got out to make his connections.
If anything happens, right, make sure you walk me around.
Keep me up.
Dig?
Fuck.
Tito shoots up a speedball, coke and heroin.
I feel hurt and mechanical.
Why?
Where is his spirit going?
I ask myself at this moment, do I cry?
Can I cry?
I am supposed to make pictures.
If I don't shoot, then why am I here?
Reed shares something with Reece in that he's trying to create some kind of emotionally charged imagery
that will then have an emotional impact on its audience.
And I think that some of the problems with that approach,
I think that some of the problems with that approach,
or at least with the way that that kind of imagery gets interpreted,
is that by focusing on these kind of images of people who are living in poverty,
and I'm thinking specifically of the shots of a person shooting up,
the opportunity exists for people to look at behaviors as being sort of causal factors in conditions of poverty,
and that the poor are somehow responsible for their own condition.
When Reece went into the slums to photograph,
he was not a sensitive, careful, deferential sort of individual.
Imagine that you are a poor Italian person who is an illegal immigrant,
who is not supposed to be in the United States in the first place,
who is living in an illegal tenement where probably you are also working,
and you are asleep when two policemen and Reece and a couple of other people
burst into your apartment, knocking down the door perhaps,
and they shove a large piece of photographic apparatus in your face,
aim a gun at the ceiling, pull a trigger, a giant explosion of light bursts forth,
and the story he tells, almost as an amusing anecdote,
is about lighting a tenement full of blind people on fire.
How were they able to get out?
It made my blood run cold as I saw the flame 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, and I did.
I think the best description of how Reece saw his subjects is the title of his book,
How the Other Half Lives, and the subtitle was Studies Among the Tenements.
It was very clear that there was this half, there was us,
and there was that half, and there was an absolute divide between them.
It's interesting to consider whether any of the people shown as subjects in his photographs
ever saw the photographs he made of them.
Reece decided the important thing was to get this story out,
and if it inconvenienced even perhaps endangered individual subjects of his photographs, so be it.
It was also a convenient way of avoiding the really painful difficulties that all of us have
when we develop a human relationship with our subjects,
which is we're going to leave and go home, and they're not.
Music
Jacob Reece didn't see himself as a photographer.
Ironically, he turns out to be a founding spirit of modern photojournalism.
He donated his papers to the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library,
his glass slides, his negatives, almost lost to history.
Luckily, today the Museum of the City of New York has preserved them and exhibited them,
and what it tried to do in its exhibit is look at Jacob Reece a hundred years ago
and look at modern representations of those images in a way that provides the perspective
that as much as things have changed in the past hundred years, too many things are still the same.
Music
One of the ways that people have distorted what the legacy of documentary photography has been for us
is that we have tended to see the photographs as standing alone,
to read them solely as visual objects on the museum wall,
and Reece wasn't just making images to stand by themselves.
He was making a text that went with them, he was speaking it, he was writing it,
he was incorporating music, he was incorporating all sorts of special effects,
and if we want to think about what kind of call to action they really were,
we need to go back and recover that material that was there when they were put forward to the public.
Music
Landard slide lectures were a very popular form of middle class entertainment at the time of the late 1880s.
They afforded middle class viewers a chance to get out of the house, a chance to learn.
There was a lot of Victorian emphasis on self-education.
They were often tied to churches and to church events,
and Reece used his photographs in that venue.
The show was really quite spectacular. The images were ten feet by ten feet.
They took up a huge area of the stage.
He would start often by saying, I'm going to take you down into the darkness,
down on this tour, and he would show a slide, say,
of police rowing their way into a darkened underside of a tunnel searching for thieves,
and then he would say, and I'm going to show you what the life is really like,
and then he would build upon that.
Let us see how Sunday passes in a Ludlow Street tenement,
up two flights of dark stairs with their smells of cabbage, of onions,
whirring sewing machines behind closed doors betraying what goes on within.
The door opens to admit the bundle and the man.
The floor is littered ankle deep with half-sewn garments.
The faces, hands, and arms to the elbows of everyone in the room
are black with the color of the cloth.
The basic focus of many Victorians was a kind of obsession on light, air,
cleanliness, sanitation, space, and privacy.
These were the basic elements that were essential to a good life.
And his photographs, time and again, are designed to show that these things aren't there.
The pictures are grimy, the pictures are dirty, they are dark, they are contrasty.
People are crowded, packed into them.
And Reese would say, they don't get any air, they don't get any light.
These are cesspools of disease. These people are too crowded together.
They don't have an opportunity to learn or to experience any of the things we experience.
There would come a point where people would jump up and say,
what do we do about this? Or just talk back to the images.
And Reese would come to this point where he would answer, I'll tell you what to do about it.
And then he would direct all of this awakened energy towards specific goals.
Reese was telling people to join him in lobbying for government regulation
that would just change the face of slum housing in New York and cities around the country.
He succeeded in that. He got parks built.
He got public health care provided in a much greater extent than it ever had been.
He got labor laws passed that reduced child labor and improved working conditions.
The settlement house, another thing that he really pushed as a tool to alleviate poverty,
he realized that this was a perfect partnership between the public government on the one hand
and the private philanthropy on the other.
And I think this is something that could be equally effective today
in many of the settlement houses that still exist in this city and elsewhere.
There is a direct connection between the settlement houses then and the settlement houses now
because I think the main focus is still children.
Working with children and trying to set the conditions in which children have to grow.
Flowers, children cannot grow if there's weeds that are constantly choking them off.
I think it's the job of the settlement houses to clear these weeds so that kids can be nurtured and grow.
Those that you see become self-sufficient, productive citizens, they've been afforded opportunities and options.
I confess that I still haven't picked apart all the strands of Reese.
He's such a mass of contradictions.
He never really gets down to addressing the economic causes, for one thing.
Well, for one thing, Reese always did trouble to distinguish himself from the people he saw as agitators, the Reds.
He was complimented by Kropotkin for his work and he rebuffed the compliment
because he didn't want to be associated with those anarchist troublemakers.
He was preaching to an audience that didn't want necessarily to give up a great deal.
And he wanted them to give up as much as he could get them to give up.
And he wanted them to vote for laws that would eventually tie their hands.
He wanted them to vote for regulations that would limit their ability to make profits.
All of those things did represent the significant redistribution of money toward the poor, but not in any revolutionary way.
And I think he was very savvy in realizing that you don't preach revolution to a middle-class audience
and you don't preach revolution in a nation which has shown every evidence of destroying rather than tolerating revolutionary moments.
We do have to ask to what extent social documentary was about provoking change, about bringing about action.
Aren't there other better ways to make it happen than taking pictures
and having them circulated in ways that people can, by and large, enjoy in privacy?
Also, a part of what we've come to expect is a person of a fairly privileged class
aiming the camera at people in a more impoverished situation.
So our idea of the poor has become rooted as people who are passive, who need to be helped by other more powerful people.
I think Margaret Morton's work has countered that tradition by focusing on the creations of homeless people.
When you first walk by some of these vacant lots you just see a bunch of trash and debris
and then when you walk in you realize how much care has gone into the creation of the structures.
And I really wanted to document that.
In every place I photograph I always become particularly fond of one person
and in a sense they become my guide to that community and they take me deeper than I'd ever be able to go on my own.
And in Bushville, Pepe was my guide, he was my friend that I became very close to.
Good in it. Thank you.
So how's your garden doing? All right.
You're talking how beautiful it looks now?
Pepe is a Puerto Rican immigrant and had been trained in Puerto Rico as a typesetter and a book finder
and was very surprised that he couldn't find work here and the only work he could find paid much less than Puerto Rico
and it was a big, big surprise to him.
I don't know.
Why don't I take some pictures of your garden?
Let me through the five corners here, my favorite corner.
I have to say that is pretty much the story of the other people too, that they came here with a lot of hopes and a lot of dreams
and when they got here they had a big surprise.
How can a man not cry? How can he not cry if they took him to La Señora? How can he not cry?
Pepe moved to Bushville from Tompkins Square Park where he'd actually just been sleeping on a park bench with a piece of plastic over him
and he took over this one room shack and he's an extraordinary carpenter and electrician
and he started working and adding rooms and he first added a little room onto the front, kind of a porch
and then he added a bedroom and then he added a kitchen onto the back.
He decided to connect his house to the garden with a canopy roof.
When I first met Pepe and asked him what his name was, he said, Otero. My name is Otero.
That means watchman and that's what I am. I watch out for everybody but nobody watches out for me
and as the years went by I realized that is the role that he played in Bushville.
He really kept his eye on everything and everybody and he was the most stable person living there and people would turn to him for help.
It's interesting that none of these people had prior construction experience.
They had had a variety of jobs in their lives but none of them had been carpenters
and this was the first experience for them to actually build their own house and I think that they were very, very proud of them.
Where Mulberry Street crooks like an elbow is the Bend, foul core of New York's slums.
It was not fit for Christian men and women, let alone innocent children and therefore it had to go.
Mulberry Bend was this district of interlocking tenement houses.
It was a mass of buildings that became one building. That's why it's confusing when we sometimes read references to Reese's activities in Mulberry Bend
and there are all these parts to it that are named. There's Ragpicker's Row and Bottle Alley and Bandit's Roost.
Well these were separate courtyards or alleys within this mass octopus-like building.
At 59 Baxter Street is an alley with tenements on either side, crowding so close as to almost shut out the light of day.
The bags of rags and bones are gathered by these people despite the laws and ordinances.
Well in the streets of course you have the market, which is to say a pushcart market, people selling everything from eyeglasses to cabbages.
The smell must have been incredible because the sanitary conditions must have been even worse than in the average slum.
One thing we forget about in thinking of slums from our modern context is that these places would have had goats and pigs running around
leaving droppings everywhere.
Inside the tenements are people engaged in all sorts of piecework, sewing on buttons, making things out of feathers, rolling cigars.
And of course there's a proportion of thieves and pirates and people making a living outside of legality.
Bottle Alley, the Wyo Gang's headquarters. This picture was evidence in a murder trial.
The X marks the place where the murderer stood when he shot his victim on the stairs.
Something that needed me in Mulberry Street had come. I was in a death grapple with my two enemies, the Bend and the police lodging rooms.
The police station lodging houses were basically the basements and unused back rooms of the municipal police stations.
They were a place where you could go if you were really desperate and you could sleep and you could stay warm and you might even get fed.
I warned them that there would be trouble with the lodging rooms and within 11 months the prophecy came true. The typhus broke out there.
It is a paradox that Reese wanted to close down these lodging houses, but I think he did out of a number of very deeply personally felt experiences.
One was it was there that he fully experienced the degradation of poverty personally.
Also, he saw the lodging houses as dangerously filled with disease. He has a photograph called the Tubercular Lodger.
He had written that this person laid on the floor for a period of days and no one really noticed him or realized that he was dying of tuberculosis.
And this image of the man dying alone is a sentimental image, but at the same time it's an image of the man coughing disease postures out into the air, which the police then breathe in and take out on their rounds.
Roosevelt had the police lodging houses closed.
There's an issue that we today ask about and that is that there were no provisions made for the people who were lodging there.
It was sort of this approach to those kinds of conditions that revolved around just doing away with it rather than trying to come up with solutions or alternatives.
You've already been told that this is going to be bulldozed and that the city is going to clear this lot and you're not going to be allowed to live here anymore.
But yet you still tend your garden every day.
I've got to take care of it for the last minute. I'm not going to let it die if somebody kills it. Somebody kills it, but I won't. I won't even kill a cockroach.
There was this incredible grinding sound, juxtaposed with the fragility of the structures.
I was thinking how fast it was happening.
It was happening so quickly and I'd seen people work so hard and so painstakingly over the years, pounding every nail, finding every board along the street.
We don't want you guys on the lot.
The day of the demolition, I didn't sleep at all the night before and I really dreaded going there.
It was something I knew I had to do because I had become the documentarian of this particular homeless community.
Can I take a final picture of you?
The sense of helplessness is pretty profound. It wasn't certainly the first demolition I've seen or a place that I've been photographing extensively, but it was the most painful.
Somehow people think that the homeless people are very simple and leading a simple existence on the street and that their own lives are very complex.
It's really not true. Everyone's life is complex.
I think showing the gardens that homeless people create and showing the dwellings they create point up the fact that that's a common ground in a sense.
How can you dismiss someone who creates a garden? How can you dismiss someone who builds their own dwelling? How can you not look at them in a different way?
There's a fundamental difference between the end of the 19th century and Reese's moment and the end of the 20th century and our moment.
Reese was right at the moment when there was about to come into being a great outpouring of hope and optimism, a sense that if we paid attention, if we gave some money, if we changed some regulations and laws, we could fundamentally change the way the world was.
It was a remarkably naive and wonderfully naive moment at the same time because it made possible things which we in our late 20th century cynicism might never imagine.
That is, it made possible reforms in the way that houses were built and in the form of sanitation and education for all children.
All of these sorts of things that we take for granted now that were really invented into regulation and law as a result of Reese's and his followers' arguments.
The world moves on, the bend is gone, and the day of the rear tenement is past. The dark, unventilated bedroom is going with them. We have at last got in front of our problem.
Presently you see there is an assault on the poor that the poor are being blamed for all the ills of society. And it's easier to scapegoat than to say, well, what is the real problem?
Because it puts it back on the individual and takes it away from the society's obligation to make sure that everybody can live in a good environment.
What we've learned from Reese is that we have to continually look after our young people and that they will be better off than their parents.
And I think that's a dream of every parent. That was a dream of Reese. That's a dream of the settlement now that we can do our part to provide an environment in which they can grow.
Reese understood, perhaps better than almost anyone, that society could not exist with two halves, that we could not have one half ignoring how the other half lives.
I think that's something that's equally true, perhaps in many respects more true today.
Today they have tended to exploit the picture of the poor less to make us feel sorry for them than to make us feel our difference from them.
And one of the things that Reese learned when he was working was that when you know somebody by name, when you know them personally, when you have been with them for a while, they stop being pictures of people.
They stop being characters and they start being just plain people.
Long ago it was said that one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.
And I think that's something that's equally true.
I think that's something that's equally true.
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