By Anne M. Filiaci, Ph.D.
Riis made friends with many settlement leaders, and Wald was no exception. The two reached out to each other soon after Wald moved to the Lower East Side, joining forces early on, working together on a wide spectrum of reform issues. Both were members of the Social Reform Club, organized in 1894 and boasting the city’s most influential reformers among its membership. The club met on Tuesday evenings. While some observers quipped that it was a place where reformers “talked interminably and occasionally dined,” Wald insisted that its aims were pragmatic, looking toward “the immediate future” and working “solely for measures that had a fair promise of early success.”
Along with many other members of the Social Reform Club, Riis and Wald were active in local politics, and worked together to elect reform candidates to municipal government. As early as 1894, both supported the successful campaign of William L. Strong, reform candidate in New York City’s mayoral race. Once elected, Strong selected Riis’s close friend Theodore Roosevelt to serve on New York City’s Board of Police Commissioners as Superintendent (1895-1997). Riis, by then a frequent visitor at the Henry Street Settlement, brought the young politician to at least one of the Settlement’s well-known, popular and stimulating dinners.
When Theodore Roosevelt became Governor of New York in 1898, Riis, at the request of Wald and others, lobbied him (unsuccessfully) to appoint Florence Kelley as the state’s factory inspector. Riis continued to act as liaison for Wald and other progressives when Roosevelt subsequently became Vice President and then President of the United States.
Wald and Riis also collaborated on housing and neighborhood reform issues. The young nurse visited the tenements daily, and was happy to comply when, in November of 1896, Riis wrote her a letter soliciting her help reporting tenement hallway lighting violations. When Wald sent Riis a copy of her talk entitled “Crowded Districts in Large Cities” during the same period, Riis, in turn, read it, noted that it was “a fine speech,” and commented extensively. While Riis served on the Committee that sponsored the The New York Charity Organization Society’s famous 1900 Tenement House Exhibit, Wald acted as a judge for the Exhibit on a panel that selected the best of model tenement plans submitted by architects. Riis also served as a speaker, along with then-Governor Theodore Roosevelt. The Exhibit attracted over 10,000 visitors.
On November 24 of the same year, both Wald and Riis testified as witnesses at the second hearing of the New York State Tenement House Commission of 1900. The hearing was “devoted to the subject of the General Evils of the Tenement House System.”
Riis and Wald also worked together to create both indoor and outdoor recreation and gathering spaces for New York City’s working class families. During Strong’s tenure in office, Riis served as the secretary of the mayor’s Advisory Committee on Small Parks. He and Wald later joined forces in the Outdoor Recreation League, formed in 1898 to promote the establishment of parks and playgrounds. The League raised money from private donations, bought and cleaned up abandoned and/or condemned urban spaces, built playing fields, and installed playground equipment, benches, picnic tables, etc. Within a few years, members of the League were successful in convincing New York’s municipal government to take over ownership and maintenance of these popular public spaces.
Wald and Riis also helped create recreational indoor spaces that would serve as alternatives to saloons for union meetings as well as weddings and other social occasions. They were members of the Social Halls Association, which raised $100,000 to construct Clinton Hall in 1904. The five-story building, located on Clinton Street near the entrance to the “East River” (Brooklyn) Bridge, contained meeting rooms, a dance hall, restaurants, bowling alleys and billiard rooms.
The next year, 1905, Riis’s wife Elisabeth died. Two years later he married Mary Phillips, and the two soon moved to a farm in Barre, Massachusetts. Jacob Riis died at his home in Barre on May 26, 1914. He was buried in the nearby Riverside Cemetery. An unmarked boulder marks his grave.
Copyright Anne M. Filiaci 2016