CLEANING UP THE CITY

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 151, 27 June 1914, Page 5

CLEANING UP THE CITY

' A REPORTER'S SOCIAL WORK, Jacob Riis, a New York journalist, is just dead. H© was bom in Ribe^ Denmark, in 1849/ .As a carpenter's apprentice he fell 'in. love with the daughter of the Mayor of Ribe, and his suit -for her hand was contemptuously refused by her father. He went to America and for several years worked in the coal mines 'of Pennsylvania. Finally ho driited to New iork and, through the sale of a xiewcjaper in Brooklyn which he bought cheap, he secured enough to return home and get married to the girl who had formerly refused him. As a reporter on the New York Tribune, and later on the New Yoik Sun, Rii* todk up his reai work in Blum lighting. While attending to routine duty as a police reporter ho worked day and night to arouse the people to the need ol improved living conditions. One of the first of ' his campaigns was against the impurity of the city water, and it was his fight which finally led to tho purchase of the Croton watershed to as#ure *afo drinking water for New York. He brought sunlight to the tenememt districts by forcing the destruction of rear tenements. He entirely cleared Mulberry Bend, one ol tlie worst tenement sections in tho city, and replaced the squalid homes by shady parks. Ex-President Roosevelt was l Police Commissioner ol New York whefc Riis attacked itho evils of police station lodginghouses. He woh his point and, incidentally, a strong ally in Roosevelt. Riis drove bakeshops out of tenement basements; he fought for laws abolishing child labour, and was largely instrumental in getting the passage of "the . briefest, wisest, and best statute on the books of New York, laying down the principle that hereafter 'no school -shall bp built without an adequate playground. ' " After twenty-seven years as a reporter Rii& resigned to continue his fight by writing and lecturing. Among the produces of his pen are : "How the Other Half Lives," "Tho Children of the Poor," "The Making of an Amoricaai" (his autobiography), "The Bat* tie With the Slum," "Children ol the Tenements," "The Old Town," "Theodore " Roosevelt, the Citizen," and , "Hero Tales From the Far North."