URBANIZATION 101
This is the term for the growth and expansion of cities, driven by people moving from rural areas to urban centers.
What is urbanization?
The 1847 image in the Do Now shows this famous Lower Manhattan street, known today as a center of American finance.
What is Wall Street?
This is the title of Jacob Riis's famous 1890 book exposing tenement conditions in New York City.
What is How the Other Half Lives?
This is the term for the cramped, multi-family apartment buildings that housed poor and immigrant families in cities like New York.
What is a tenement?
This Danish-American journalist and social reformer authored How the Other Half Lives.
Who is Jacob Riis?
This economic transformation of the Gilded Age — involving factories and mass production — is the main reason so many people moved to cities for work.
What is industrialization?
This is the name of the street pictured around 1900, which was dominated by Italian immigrants and is known by this nickname today.
What is Mulberry Street (a.k.a. Little Italy)?
This is the profession Jacob Riis used to document and expose tenement conditions, rather than relying on words alone.
What is photography/photojournalism?
According to Document 1, even the "new" tenements built more recently were badly planned, featuring dark, unhealthy rooms and often being built over this damp structure.
What are wet cellars?
This term describes the practice of using photography and reporting to expose social problems, as Riis did with tenement housing.
What is photojournalism?
According to the Nash reading, this term describes the pre-industrial city where people had to travel on foot to get to work, since houses, businesses, and shops stood side by side.
What is the "walking city"?
Comparing the 1847 and 1900 images, this is the general change you'd see in population density and crowding on city streets.
What is a large increase in crowding/density (streets became far more crowded)?
According to the physician quoted in Document 1, if people could see this, it would appear "fouler than the mud of the gutters."
What is the air breathed by tenement residents?
This is the word Document 1 uses to describe the extreme condition that was "permitted" in these badly planned new tenements.
What is overcrowding?
This is the historical era — spanning roughly the 1870s to 1900 — during which rapid industrialization and urbanization discussed in this lesson took place.
What is the Gilded Age?
According to the Nash excerpt, better versions of THIS allowed middle- and upper-class residents to live away from their jobs and from the dirty industrial districts.
What is (public) transportation?
This is the general term for the wave of newcomers — many from Southern and Eastern Europe — who filled neighborhoods like Mulberry Street by 1900.
What are immigrants?
This is the reason many students give for why Riis chose photography instead of just writing about tenement life — it does THIS to readers that words alone might not.
What is provide undeniable visual proof / shock and move readers emotionally (accept reasoned answers)?
Based on Documents 2 and 3, this is one condition of tenement life you can observe in the photographs (e.g., people sleeping in crowded rooms, cluttered/cramped living spaces, makeshift bedding).
What is severe overcrowding / cramped and cluttered living conditions (accept any reasonable observation)?
This term describes the historians (Nash, et al.) whose 1998 text, The American People, is quoted in Activity 2.
Who are Nash, et al.?
In the "walking city" model described by Nash, this is the term for the areas that emerged around the central business district, made up of light manufacturing, wholesale activity, and worker housing.
What are working-class neighborhoods (surrounding the business center)?
Based on the two images, this is one likely prediction about daily life in an urban center like Manhattan around 1900 (crowded streets, street vendors, close living quarters).
What is life was crowded, bustling, and filled with immigrant street commerce (accept reasonable predictions grounded in the images)?
This is the general public reaction to Riis's photographs, which helped spark reform movements and new housing laws.
What is shock, outrage, and a push for tenement reform?
This is the main reason cities like New York rushed to build tenements in the first place, according to the worksheet's framing.
What is the enormous influx of immigration created a huge demand for cheap, quickly-built housing?
This is the general term for reforms — such as new building codes and housing laws — that resulted from public reaction to exposés like Riis's.
What is tenement/housing reform?