# Bandit's Roost, 59 1/2 Mulberry Street > Jacob A. Riis - 1888 (some secondary research argues for autumn 1887; see open questions) > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/jacob-a-riis/riis-bandits-roost-mulberry-street/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-27 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Jacob A. Riis - **Date:** 1888 (some secondary research argues for autumn 1887; see open questions) - **Medium:** Gelatin silver print from a dry-plate glass negative, made with magnesium flash powder - **Dimensions:** Varies by print, since no source consulted publishes the negative's own dimensions. Documented prints: International Center of Photography, image 13 9/16 x 10 1/2 in (34.4 x 26.6 cm); Museum of Modern Art, 1958 print, 19 3/16 x 15 1/2 in (48.7 x 39.4 cm); Yale University Art Gallery, sheet 9 13/16 x 8 1/8 in (25 x 20.6 cm) - **Object type:** Photograph - **Period:** American, nineteenth century - Progressive Era documentary and reform photography - **Current location:** Museum of the City of New York, New York (the original glass negative, in the Jacob A. Riis Collection) - **Attribution:** disputed ## Summary A single dry-plate glass negative made in a slum alley off Mulberry Street in 1888, using magnesium flash powder to light a space that had almost never been photographed because it had almost never been lit. It became the best-known image in Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890) and one of the most reproduced photographs in American history, yet for roughly three decades after Riis's death in 1914 nobody could find the negative at all.It survived by accident. Riis's son Roger William Riis kept a box of his father's negatives, lantern slides and prints in the attic of the family's house in Richmond Hill, Queens, and did nothing with it until the photographer and preservationist Alexander Alland tracked him down and, over several years, persuaded him to look. What Alland found in the mid-1940s became the basis of the Museum of the City of New York's 1947 exhibition The Battle With the Slum and of the museum's entire Jacob A. Riis Collection, including this negative.Who actually took the picture is not settled. Riis ran the 1887-88 campaign with two amateur photographers, Henry G. Piffard and Richard Hoe Lawrence, and the scholarly consensus built by the Riis biographer Bonnie Yochelson is that a real share of the images now shown under Riis's name were physically exposed by one of the other two men while Riis directed and later wrote. This record treats that as an open, live question rather than a settled one, exactly as the museum record itself does not resolve it. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1888-1912** Jacob A. Riis `[documented]` (creation and retention) The negative was made during Riis's 1887-88 flash-powder campaign with Henry G. Piffard and Richard Hoe Lawrence and remained in Riis's own possession, along with the rest of his photographic material, at the family home in Richmond Hill, Queens. - **1912-c. 1946** Left in the Richmond Hill, Queens attic; passed to Riis's son Roger William Riis on Jacob Riis's death in 1914 `[unknown]` (gap) Riis moved to Massachusetts before his death in 1914 and left his negatives, lantern slides and prints behind. The material sat unexamined in the attic for roughly three decades; no source consulted documents anyone looking at it in this period. - **c. 1946-1947** Roger William Riis, working with the photographer Alexander Alland `[documented]` (rediscovery and reprinting) Alland tracked down the negatives in 1946, per the Alexander Alland Papers finding aid at the New-York Historical Society, after several years pressing Roger Riis to search the house. Alland reprinted the material, leading to the 1947 exhibition The Battle With the Slum, 1887-1897 at the Museum of the City of New York. - **1947-present** Museum of the City of New York `[documented]` (gift) The negative entered MCNY as part of accession group 90.13, the gift of Roger William Riis, alongside the rest of the recovered negatives, lantern slides and prints. The museum's own site confirms the 90.13.4.xxx numbering for a sibling negative from the same gift (Five Cents a Spot, 90.13.4.158); this record's specific number for Bandit's Roost (90.13.4.104) rests on secondary aggregation and needs direct confirmation. - **1946-1982-present** Prints (not the negative) distributed to other public collections `[documented]` (print distribution) Separately from the negative's path into MCNY, prints made from it entered other collections at different dates: Yale University Art Gallery holds a print catalogued 'printed after 1946'; the Museum of Modern Art holds a print dated 1888, printed 1958; the International Center of Photography holds a print given directly by Alexander Alland Sr. in 1982 (accession 235.1982). These are prints of the same negative, not separate objects. ## Open questions - Who physically exposed this negative: Riis, Piffard, or Lawrence? No source consulted names an individual; the joint credit and Yochelson's general argument about the campaign are the closest anything comes to an answer. - Is the negative's date 1888, as institutions consistently catalogue it, or autumn 1887, as one piece of independent research argues from the subjects' clothing? This record follows the institutional date but records the dispute. - Did the name "Bandit's Roost" already belong to a different alley, on Crosby Street, in 1884, before Riis's photograph made the Mulberry Street name famous? Not resolved in the sources consulted. - What is MCNY's own confirmed catalog number for this specific negative? This record uses 90.13.4.104 from secondary aggregation; the museum's own collections portal could not be fetched directly and the number needs direct confirmation. - How many negatives, slides and prints did Alexander Alland actually recover from the Richmond Hill attic? Secondary sources give two different counts (roughly 400/300/200 versus 412/161/193) and neither could be traced to a single primary tally in the sources consulted. - Does the Ackland Art Museum genuinely hold a print of this image, as Wikipedia states? Not independently verified by this desk. - Was the 1911 redesign of the park on this site (renamed Columbus Park) actually the work of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux personally, as one source states, given that both men were dead by 1911? Very likely a conflation with their successor firm; not resolved here. ## Sources - [1] Wikipedia, "Bandits' Roost, 59 1/2 Mulberry Street." Tertiary; flagged for replacement with the MCNY catalogue entry once it can be fetched directly. - [2] Wikimedia Commons, File:Bandit's Roost by Jacob Riis.jpeg, file description and extmetadata (LicenseShortName, ImageDescription, DateTimeOriginal). - [3] Museum of Modern Art, collection object page for Bandits' Roost, 59 1/2 Mulberry Street (accessed via Wikimedia Commons file metadata for the corresponding Commons file, since a direct fetch of moma.org returned a 403 error). - [4] International Center of Photography, object record for Bandits' Roost (accession 235.1982, Gift of Alexander Alland Sr.). - [5] Yale University Art Gallery, object record for Bandit's Roost, Mulberry Bend (accession 2008.205.1). - [6] Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom, Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York (University of Chicago Press). Cited in secondary form via search-derived summaries of the book's argument on authorship; flagged for a primary read. - [7] New York University Special Collections, Alexander Alland photograph collection finding aid (New-York Historical Society), for the 1946 date of Alland's rediscovery of the negatives and the 1947 exhibition. - [8] Wikipedia, "Jacob Riis," for biographical dates, the 1887 start of the flash campaign, the 12 February 1888 Sun report, and the January 1888 camera purchase. Tertiary; flagged for replacement with a scholarly biography. - [9] Museum of the City of New York, Prints & Photographs collection page, confirming the 90.13.4.xxx accession numbering for the Roger Williams Riis gift via the sibling negative Five Cents a Spot (90.13.4.158). - [10] Wikipedia, "Mulberry Bend," for the 1897 demolition, Calvert Vaux's park design, and the 1911 renaming to Columbus Park. Tertiary; flagged for replacement with NYC Parks' own history record. - [11] Wikipedia, "Columbus Park (Manhattan)," for the 1911 redesign and renaming claim (including the Olmsted/Vaux attribution flagged as chronologically doubtful in this record). Tertiary. - [12] Tom Hunt, "About 'Bandits' Roost' in Manhattan," independent research substack citing period newspapers on the alley's location, dating and the 1884 Crosby Street naming question. Secondary/self-published; flagged for verification against the primary newspaper sources it cites. - [13] Hyperallergic, "Jacob Riis's Photographic Battle with New York's 19th-Century Slums," for the 1912 relocation to Massachusetts, the attic archive, and Alland's reprinting. - [14] International Center of Photography, artist page for Jacob Riis, for the size of ICP's Riis holdings and the general rediscovery narrative. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. 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