Article 8

The Conscience of Place MULBERRY BEND Where the Other Half Lived The photographs of confronted New Yorkers with the misery of Mulberry Bend--and helped to tear it down.

By Verlyn Klinkenborg

A BLOCK BELOW ill an equidistant rtunble that seetus to begin density with2n the binh-up areas of Man- lower , just a few hundred yards a few blocks away, hattan was about 115 per acre,) If Man- from City Hail. there is a sn~dl urban oasis I watch all of this, the tal chi, the hattan were peopled as thickly today as c.alled Columbus Park. Early on a spring stretching, the old men who have come to the Bend was in 1888, it would have more morning, the sun rises over an irregular sit in the cool spring sunshine, the rein- than 30 million inhabitants, an incompre- threshold of rooftops to the east of the forced police vans delivering suspects to hensible figare, the equivalem of nearly park--a southern spur of Chinatown-- the cotu’t buildings just beyond it al!, and the whole of California jammed onto a and picks out details on the courthouses as 1 wash I u3, to remember that Culum- single island. To put it another way, if the and state office buildings looming over bus Park was once Mulberry Bend. Mul- people who live in Manhattan today were the west side 6f the park. Carved eagles berry S~’eet still crool~ to the southeast packed as llghily as the immigrants in stare impassively into the suntight, hi- here, but the Bend proper is long gone. It Mulberry Bend were, they could all live cised over a doorway on the Criminal was the most infamous slum in 19th-cen- in Central Park with room to spare. But Courts Building is a strangely senseless tury New York, an immeasurable quantity these are suppositions, imaginary num- quotation from Justiulan. "’Justice is the of suffering compacted into 2.76 acres. bers. The truly astoinsbdng figure, of firm and continuous desire to render to On a bright April morinng, it’s hard to be- course, is 5,650 persons--actual human every man his due," it says, as thoughjus- lieve the Bend ever existed. But then such beings, every one of them living in rice were mairdy a matter of desire. misery always thSlf~res disbollefi Mulberry Ben_d, among the highest popu- Beneath the sun’s level rays high The Bend was ultimately tom down lation density ever recorded anywhere. overhead, Columbus Park seems almost and a park btftlt on its site in 1897 after Now consider a fittal set of numbers: l’iollow somehow, and since it is open unrelenting pressure from Jacob Riis, the According to Riis and the city statistic?inn, ground---open playground, to be accu- Danish-born journalist and social re- the death rate of children under five in rate-it exposes the local topography. former. In How the Other Half Lives, an Mulberry Bend was 140 per 1,000, The land slopes downward from Bayard early landmark in reforming literature roughly 1 out of 7. This is likely to be an Street to Park Street. and downward from whose rifle became a catchphrase, Riis undereslLmate. (Citywide, the number was Mulberry to Baxter. At the north end of provides some numbers for Mulberry just under 100 per 1,000 and falling fast.) the park, temporary fencing surrounds an Bend, which he obtained from the city’s Today, Mulberry Bend would rank be- ornate shelter, the sole rerunant of the Registxar of Vital Statistics. Lq 1888. he tween L~sotho and Tanzama in under-five park’s original constmctinn in 1897, now wrote; 5,650 people lived on Baxter and mortality and worse than Haiti, Efitrea. given over to pigeons. Plane trees lean Mulberry streets between Park and Ba- Congo, and Bangladesh. Last year, the un- inward around the perimeter of the as- yard. If Pdis means strictly the buildings der-five mortality rate for the United phalt ball field, where a tidy squadron of within the Bend, as he almost certainly States was 8 per 1,000, or I out of 125. middie-aged and elderly Asian women does, then the population density there Numbers, even numbers as striking as stretches in unison, some clinging to the was 2,047 persons per acre, nearly all of these, do not do a good job of conveying chain-link fence for balance, One man them recent immigrants. horror. But when the horror is literally wields a tai chi sword to the sound of By itself, that’s an almost meainngiess fleshed out, it begins to make an impres- Chinese flutes from a boom box. A gull figure, But think of it this way: In Man- sion, as it did on Riis kim~lf. After com- spirals down out of the sky, screeching hattan today, 1,537,195 persons live on ing to America in 1870, at age 21, and the whole way, All around [ can heal 14,720 acres, a deag~ty of slightly more enduring a vagrant existence for a few what this city calls early morning silence, than 104 per acre. (In 1890, the average years, he found work at the New York Tri- Article 8. Where the Other Ha~l L|ved bune as a police n~poffer and was sent to lugs. Looking at that map is like looking at might have been, as photographs suggest, the orifice at 303 Mullx~y Street, a few an old-fashioned diagram of a ceti, a hiero- a bustling streetfront crowded with people blocks north of the Bend and across ~om glyphic of dark and light. It’s hard to know going rather shabbily about the ordinary police headquarters. Night after night, Riis what to call the spaces depicted by the sorts of business, much as they might in visited the Bend, sometimes in police com- white areas on Riis’s map. Yard is ton pas- other neighborhoods. Such a New pany, often not, and he mlxa’ted what he toral and air sha~ too hygienic. Rlis calls Yorker~disincimed to push through to saw--especially the extreme overcrowd- them "courts" and "alleys," but even those the dark inner rooms a few flights up or to ing..--to the Board of Health. "It did not words are ton generous. What the white the dismal courts and alleys behind or to make much of an impression," Riis wrote spaces renily portray are outdoor places the dank beer dives below--might con- in The Making of an American. "Thnse where only a single layer of humarts could elude that l~thaps Riis had exaggerated things rarely do, put in mere words." live, many of them homeless children who and that perhaps all there was to see here So Riis put them in pictures. With a clustered in external stallwells and on was a people, immigrants nearly all of flashgun and a handbeld camera, in- basement steps. In the of the them, who were insufficiently virtuous or vented just a few years earlier, Pdis be- Beu~ce, four, and five stories each-- cleanly or hardworking or American. It gan to take photographs of what he found families and solitary lodgers, who paid five would be possible for such a person to in the Bend. "From them," he wrote, cents apiece for floor space, crowded to- blame Mulberry Bend on the very "there was no appeal." They made mis- gether in airless cubicles. "In a room not people who were its victims. But when ery demonstrable in a way that nothing thirteen feet either way," Riis wrote of one the tenements were condemned and their else had. No political or economic or cul- midnight encounter, "slept twelve men and inhabitants moved into decent housing, taral theory could justify the crowding women, two or three in bunks set in a sort particularly in Harlem. they blended im- kis photographs documen_[. There was no of alcove, the rest on the floor." perceptibly into the fabric of the city. explaining away the sense of oppression For reformers, Rtis included, the U’ou- Pdis has been faulted for his glib ’de- and cortfinement they reveal. In picture ble with the Bend wasn’t merely the prof- scriptive use of racial and ethnic stereo- after picture you see not only the poverty its it returned to slumJords and city types, a convention of his time that and the congestion of the Bend--the politicians, nor was it just the high rents sounds raw and coarse to us now. In his stale sweatshops and beer dives and five- that forced tenants to sublet floor space to defense, he came to understand that the cent lodging hnuses--hnt the emotional strangers. The problem was also bow to power of a place like Mulberry Bend was and psychological consequences of peo- portray the Bend in a way that conveyed enough to corrupt its residents, no matter ple living on top of each other. its contagious force, the absence of basic who they were, as it had the Irish, and Since the mid-20Lh century, Pdis has sanitation, of clean water and fresh air, then the Italians who were their succes- been considered one of the founders of the presence of disease, corruption, and sors in the Bend. No iniquity within the documentary photography. Over the crime, the enervation and despair. It was, Bend was as great, to Riis, as the politi- years, his photographs of Mulberry Bend for Riis, the problem of representing an cal and f-mancial iniquity that sustained and other New York slums have become unrepresentable level of defilement. The a part of the city’s conscience. But his ap- power of his silhouette map, for instance, proach to photography was flatly utiJitar- is flawed by its white margins, which But the tragedy of Mulberry Bend tan. ’q had use for it," Riis wrote of the falsely imply that conditions improved isn’t only that it came to exist and, once camera, "and beyond that I never went." across the s~eet, when, in fact, the entire in existence, to be tolerated. It was also Printing technology at the time meant that Sixth Ward was cramped and impover- that when the city finally tore down the in books and articles his pictures had to be ished. Even the grimmest of RiJs’s photo- Bend and at last built the park that Cal- redrawn as wood engravings, consider- graphs show oaly a few people, at most, vert Vaux had designed for the site, a ably reducing their impact. The actual in the back alleys and basement dives. kind of forgetfulness descended. A New photographs were seen only in lantern PowerStl as they are, these pictures fall to Yorker coming to the newly built Mul- slides accompanying his lectures. What convey the simple tonnage of human berry Bend Park in 1897, or to its renam- mattered was not aesthetics but what the flesh in those dead-end blocks. ing in 1911, or merely to watch the stm pictures showed. Riis had a similar use for But the problem of Mulberry Bend was rise on a bright spring morning in 2001, words and statistics. They were merely also how to interpret it. On a bright spring might never know that there had been tools to persuade New Y, orkers to witness morning in the 1880s or early 1890s, a such a place as the Bend. The park that what was fight in front of their eyes. New Yorker~mriosity arousexi, perhaps, stands in its place is some ldnd of r~- In one of his many articles on by one of Riis’s articles--might have demption, but without memory no re- housing, Riis printed a map of the Bend strolled over to Mulberry or demption is ever complete. And without drawn from overhead, a silhouette show- to see for himself. What he found there action of the kind that Riis undertook, ing the proportion of open space to build- would depend on his frame of mind. It justice remains only a matter of desire.

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