New York City in 1900 - What Life on Mulberry Street Really Looked Like

In 1900, more than 500 people could be found on a single New York street at any given moment. That street was Mulberry Street, in Lower Manhattan - the heart of Little Italy, and one of the most crowded places on Earth. In this episode we walk through Mulberry Street using real photographs taken between 1888 and 1910. We look at the tenements people lived in, the open-air markets they shopped at, the children who worked instead of going to school, and the photographer whose images helped change American housing law forever. Every photograph in this video is a genuine historical image from public archives. Nothing here is generated or recreated. CHAPTERS 00:00 A street that made history 00:55 Life inside the tenements 02:41 The market that never closed 06:04 Laundry lines and rooftops 07:54 Bandit's Roost and Jacob Riis 09:12 Law and order on Mulberry Street 10:04 The children who looked into the camera WHAT YOU WILL LEARN Why roughly four million Italians left for the United States between 1880 and 1920 What a tenement apartment actually looked like from the inside Why tuberculosis was known as "the tenement disease" How Jacob Riis and his book "How the Other Half Lives" reached Theodore Roosevelt What happened to Mulberry Bend, the worst slum in the city IMAGE SOURCES All photographs are in the public domain, from the Library of Congress, the Detroit Publishing Company collection, the Bain News Service and Wikimedia Commons. MUSIC "Hopeless" by Jimena Contreras, from the YouTube Audio Library. If you enjoy forgotten streets brought back from the archives, subscribe - new episodes regularly. #history #newyork #1900s #oldphotos #documentary