"I loved him from the day I saw him; nor ever in all the years that passed has he failed of the promise made then. No one ever helped as he did. For two years we were brothers on Mulberry Street. (Theodore Roosevelt www.richmondhillhistory.org) Jacob Riis was a helpful kind of guy and was always there when you needed him. He was also a great man in the history of the U.S.
In the year 1849 a great man was born who had a great impact on the United States of America. His name was Jacob Riis. He was born in Ribe, Denmark in 1849. Jacob Riis was the 3rd of 13 children in his family. .
As a young child going into his teens he was noticed for many things he did. When he was around 9 or 10 years old he would give his pocket money to the residents of his hometown. He reported about the slums in the city where immigrants stayed and it was not clean and the streets were full of garbage. Therefore in his articles Riis tried to tell everything and allow his audiences to see through his stories and pictures the fact that poverty is present everywhere in the cities.
As a young adult he immigrated to America in 1870. He got on a to the U.S. and later settled in Iowa and became a police reporter and then wrote a book called "How The Other Half Lives". Eventually Jacob Riis was the photographer and on the NY board about commissions. He was a Danish American journalist and a social reformer. To get his story of the slums in the papers he got a job at The New York Tribune. .
In older adult years Riis began to use his photo's to backup his arguments. He was a journalist a lecturer and a photographer for the board of commission in 1891-1892. His pictures of the Brooklyn tenements brought about wide spread horror because it reported about how awful the cities were and how poor and run down the were. He also went to inspect the tenements in the city himself instead of having people go inspect them.