Jacob A. Riis

Jacob August Riis (1849-1914) emigrated from Ribe, Denmark, to New York in 1870 and spent several years in poverty before finding work as a police reporter, first for the Tribune and later for the Evening Sun. How the Other Half Lives (1890), with its flash photographs of lodging houses and back alleys, pushed tenement reform onto the city's agenda and brought him an admirer in Theodore Roosevelt, then a federal civil service commissioner, who later ran the New York police board and remained his ally. He kept writing about the Lower East Side for the rest of his life.