Big Apple History . New York Living . The Battle with The Slum


	Theodore Roosevelt

The presentation was always the same. Reformer Jacob Riis turned off the lights and revealed his "magic lantern," or slide, show. Onto the white walls of a church or temple, the images of Riis's photographs would flash: children playing on crowded streets, backyard toilets overflowing with filth, and airless tenement rooms piled high with dirty mattresses.

Then the lights came on, and Riis spoke:
"The battle with the slum began the day civilization recognized in it her enemy . . . We need not wait for the millennium, to get rid of it. We can do it now. All that is required is that it shall not be left to itself."

In his quest for better housing and playgrounds, Riis talked to thousands of people. But the most important was his close friend Governor Theodore Roosevelt. Together with other reformers, they got the Tenement Law of 1901 passed.

Thanks to this law every new building had to have a toilet and running water, windows had to have twelve feet of space in front, and stairways and fire escapes had to be sturdy and kept clear. Two years after the tenement law, the city opened the first permanent playground on the Lower East Side.

Illustration: Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.