Can't Live in a Tenement Yard

"He pursued his campaign with evangelical zeal. Riis believed that defective character led to poverty and that conscience-driven capitalism was the best solution. Although he pitied them, his reform crusade 'ascribed little or no role at all to tenement dwellers themselves,' Czitrom writes. This brand of noblesse oblige perhaps anticipated the public housing failures of Riis’s 20th-century admirer Robert Moses."

Matthew Power in The New York Times reviews Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom's Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York.