Bandit's Roost, 59 1/2 Mulberry Street

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.

What the negative shows

A narrow, wet, refuse-strewn alley running back from Mulberry Street, walled in by a sagging wood-frame tenement on one side and a brick one on the other, closed at the far end by a plank fence. Roughly sixteen people are visible: men grouped on a flight of open wooden stairs at the left, figures leaning out of upper windows, two more emerging from a basement doorway, and, closest to the lens, two men who stop and look directly into the camera, one carrying a length of wood.

The composition is not candid in the modern sense. A dry-plate exposure lit by a single burst of flash powder required its subjects to hold still, and several of the figures are plainly posed for the instant of the flash rather than caught unaware. That tension, between a documentary claim and a staged apparatus, runs through nearly everything Riis's campaign produced.

Whose picture this actually is

Riis is not disputed as the campaign's organiser, its writer and its public face. What is disputed is whether he is the person who exposed this particular negative. In early 1887 he read about the German flash-powder process developed by Adolf Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke and set out, with the physician and amateur photographer Henry G. Piffard and the amateur Richard Hoe Lawrence, to photograph the tenements and alleys he had spent a decade covering as a police reporter. Their first published account of the work appeared in The Sun on 12 February 1888. Riis did not buy his own camera and become self-sufficient at the technical side of the work until January 1888, which places this negative close to, or before, the point at which he was operating equipment independently.

Several institutional and scholarly sources credit the image to all three men jointly rather than to Riis alone; a stereographic negative of the same view, cited in Yale University Art Gallery's own historic documentation, is captioned "Jacob A. Riis, Richard Hoe Lawrence, Henry G. Piffard." Bonnie Yochelson, the Museum of the City of New York's former curator of prints and photographs and the scholar who has done the most sustained archival work on this question, argues in Rediscovering Jacob Riis that authorship was simply not a category Riis cared about, and that a meaningful number of the photographs long presented as "his" were taken by Piffard or Lawrence while Riis directed the scene and, later, wrote the caption. No source consulted for this record states definitively which of the three released the shutter on this specific exposure. That is not a gap this record can close, and it is recorded as open rather than resolved in either direction.

How it was made: flash powder in a dark alley

Bandit's Roost and the rooms it led to were dark enough, day and night, that no photographic process before 1887 could have recorded them at all. Riis's team used a form of Blitzlichtpulver, magnesium powder mixed with potassium chlorate and a stabiliser, set off from a pistol-like device or simply ignited on a frying pan while the lens cap was removed and then replaced. The result was a controlled explosion at close range, indoors and outdoors, in front of people who in some documented cases had not agreed to be photographed and who were startled, sometimes badly, by the flash.

Riis himself later wrote about the physical risk of the method, and secondary accounts describe him setting fire to his own clothing and, on at least one occasion, his house, while perfecting it. The ethical dimension is inseparable from the technical one: this was photography of people in their own homes and alleys, at night, without meaningful consent, undertaken in the service of a reform campaign that Riis believed justified the intrusion. Modern writing on Riis treats both facts as true at once, and this record does the same rather than resolving them into a single verdict.

The alley itself, and a naming question

Bandit's Roost was one of several named passages inside Mulberry Bend, alongside Bottle Alley and Ragpickers' Row, and sat behind 59 1/2 Mulberry Street on a curve of the street that gave the district its name, "the Bend." It was, by Riis's own account and by contemporary press coverage, understood as a haunt of the neighbourhood's street gangs.

Independent research into period newspapers has raised a specific naming question worth recording rather than smoothing over: at least one 1884 source locates a place called "Bandits' Roost" beside a different address, roughly a third of a mile north on Crosby Street, several years before Riis's photograph. Whether that is the same name reused for two places, an error in one source, or evidence that the Mulberry Street alley only acquired the name after Riis's photograph made it famous, is not established in the sources consulted. It is flagged here as an unresolved point about the object's own naming, not dismissed.

Publication: lantern slides first, then the book

Riis began lecturing with lantern slides made from his photographs in 1888, two years before How the Other Half Lives appeared in book form in 1890. The book was one of the earliest uses of halftone reproduction to carry photographic evidence directly into a popular trade publication, at a moment when most illustrated books still relied on wood engravings redrawn from photographs. Bandit's Roost became, in the century since, probably the single most reproduced image the book contains, used repeatedly as visual shorthand for the whole tenement-reform movement it helped to launch.

Lost, then found: the Alland rediscovery

When Riis moved from Richmond Hill, Queens, to Massachusetts before his death in 1914, his photographic material, negatives, lantern slides and prints together, was left behind in the attic of the family house rather than brought with him. For roughly three decades it was neither exhibited nor, so far as the record shows, examined by anyone.

The photographer and preservationist Alexander Alland, who had already built a practice of locating and reprinting the negatives of earlier documentary photographers (he had done the same for Lewis Hine from 1939), located Riis's son Roger William Riis and spent several years pressing him to search the house before it was sold. According to the Alexander Alland Papers finding aid at the New-York Historical Society, Alland tracked down the glass negatives in 1946. Roger Riis had the box brought down from the attic; secondary sources differ on the precise count of what it held, one giving roughly 400 negatives, 300 lantern slides and almost 200 prints, another giving the more specific figures of 412 negatives, 161 lantern slides and 193 prints. This record cannot resolve which figure is correct and gives both rather than silently choosing one. Alland reprinted the negatives, and the resulting exhibition, The Battle With the Slum, 1887-1897, opened at the Museum of the City of New York in 1947, the show that is generally credited with re-establishing Riis's reputation as a photographer rather than only a reformer and writer.

How the museum came to hold it

The negatives, slides and prints that came out of the Richmond Hill attic were given to the Museum of the City of New York by Roger William Riis and are catalogued together as accession group 90.13, described in the museum's own online listing as the "Gift of Roger Williams Riis." A sibling negative from the same gift, Five Cents a Spot, carries the museum's own confirmed number 90.13.4.158; this record's own number for Bandit's Roost, 90.13.4.104, follows the same pattern but rests on secondary sourcing rather than a museum catalog page this desk could fetch directly, and should be checked against MCNY's collections portal before being treated as final. Separately, prints made from the same negative, not separate objects, entered other public collections through Alland himself: the International Center of Photography's gelatin silver print (accession 235.1982) is a direct gift of Alexander Alland Sr., and Yale University Art Gallery's print (accession 2008.205.1) is dated "circa 1888, printed after 1946," which is to say printed from the negative only after Alland's rediscovery. The Museum of Modern Art holds a further print, dated 1888 and printed 1958. Wikipedia additionally lists the Ackland Art Museum as a holder of a print of this image; that claim is tertiary and is flagged here for direct verification rather than treated as confirmed.

What happened to the actual place

The alley no longer exists. Mulberry Bend, the crescent of tenements and passages that Riis's photographs and writing turned into the most notorious address in the city's reform politics, was demolished by the city beginning in 1897, in substantial part because of the case Riis had made in print and in his lantern-slide lectures. A public park, laid out by Calvert Vaux, opened on the cleared ground the same year. It was renamed Columbus Park in 1911. A Wikipedia account attributes a 1911 redesign of the park jointly to Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux; both men were dead by then (Vaux since 1895, Olmsted since 1903), so that specific attribution is almost certainly a conflation with their successor firm rather than the two principals in person, and it is flagged here rather than repeated as fact. What is not in doubt is the sequence: photograph, campaign, demolition, park, rename. The alley Bandit's Roost depicts is gone; the ground it stood on is now part of Columbus Park, at the edge of Manhattan's Chinatown.

Afterlife of the image

The photograph has been reproduced continuously since 1890 and was included in Time's 100 Photographs project as one of the images judged most influential in photographic history. It has also been cited as an inspiration for a scene set decades earlier in Martin Scorsese's 2002 film Gangs of New York, an example of the image supplying the visual grammar for a period it does not itself depict. Its reach as an illustration has consistently outrun public knowledge of its own object history: most popular reproductions carry no more caption than "Jacob Riis, 1888," with neither the authorship question nor the three-decade disappearance of the negative mentioned at all.