Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Historical Image of the Day


Mother and children making fake flowers as piecework laborers in a New York City tenement house. I don't have a date on this, but it's almost certainly from the 1900s or early 1910s, when such conditions attracted the attention of muckrakers. They did as early as the 1890s, but at that early date, the lack of light in tenement housing meant that you couldn't take photographs. Technological innovation made photos possible after 1900, not improved housing.