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| "Bandit's Roost" by Jacob Riis |
Jacob Riis explored the warrens of the Manhattan's Lower East Side, documenting the tenements filled with recent immigrants in the late 19th Century. He became famous from his photographs, which served as the basis for his book How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. If you have some notion to use your time machine to return to live in the Gilded Age, a few minutes perusing the photographs will probably cool your ardor; you can practically smell some of them.
Bandit's Roost was among the blocks demolished to make way for Columbus Park. It would have been just ahead on the left in this street view.
Flash photography was in its infancy at the time. Flash powder, developed by Germans Adolf Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke, was used by loading a scoop of it into a bowl attached to what was essentially a percussion revolver frame and pulling the trigger. The cap would ignite the charge and, presumably, startle the bejeezus out of the subject. Not wanting to crawl through the most violent corners of the Big Apple pointing a gunlike object at people, Riis would instead heap the magnesium powder in a pan and pop it off manually.
He's simultaneously considered one of the forefathers of photojournalism and flash photography.
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