The Alienist

Jacob Riis, the famous muckraking journalist and social reformer from the late 19th century, appears as a minor character in The Alienist. John Schuyler Moore, the story’s narrator, works as a police reporter who, like Riis, spends a good deal of time at New York City’s police headquarters on Mulberry Street. Moore, therefore, knows Riis well enough to call him “Jake.” As one of the novel’s supporting characters, Riis joins other real-life historical figures such as Paul Kelly, James T. “Biff” Ellison, Thomas Byrnes, Anthony Comstock, J. P. Morgan, and fellow muckraking journalist Lincoln (“Link”) Steffens.

There is irony in Riis’s fictional role as a character in the novel. On one hand, Riis has no significant influence on the story’s action. His appearances are few and brief. Moore refers to Riis for only two reasons: first, to point out that Riis was something of a bigot, and second, to lament Riis’s ostrich-like refusal to acknowledge the existence of the commercial sexual exploitation of children in the city. On the other hand, there is no question that Caleb Carr, while researching The Alienist, made extensive use of Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), a landmark achievement in photojournalism that captured the squalor and degradation of the tenements in much the same way that Mathew Brady’s photographs first exposed the public to the horrors of the Civil War.

For readers of The Alienist who might be unfamiliar with the New York City of 1896, Riis’s How the Other Half Lives could serve as both map and guide. Riis focused much of his work on the city’s Lower East Side, where the tenements bred poverty, crime, and every conceivable vice. In one of the opening scenes of The Alienist, Moore and Stevie Taggert race toward the Williamsburg Bridge in Kreizler’s carriage, passing through “one of the worst of the Lower East Side’s tenement- and shanty-strewn ghettos” (11). Riis devotes an entire chapter of How the Other Half Lives to “The Bend,” contemporary shorthand for Mulberry Bend, which was part of the notorious Five Points neighborhood, one of the most densely populated and disease-ridden slums in the Western world. When Moore, Sara, and the Isaacsons enter Five Points in search of John Beecham, Moore notes the “deep sense of mortal threat” that prevails in this “entirely different breed of neighborhood” (421).

Riis’s influence also appears in the novel’s descriptions of the tenements themselves. In How the Other Half Lives, Riis exposes living conditions inside tenement buildings, where landlords had no scruples about cramming tenants into the smallest possible spaces to maximize profits from rent. Some of Riis’s most memorable passages describe dark hallways and nonexistent ventilation. When Moore and Sara visit the Santorellis’ tenement flat, they stumble through darkness only to discover a crying baby lying unattended on the hallway floor. To satisfy the city’s minimal requirements for sunlight, some landlords cut narrow slits in walls and passed them off as windows. The investigators find that, in Beecham’s dark and tiny flat, the only sunlight comes from these narrow slits.

How the Other Half Lives also describes the people of the tenement district and how they lived. Riis photographs a group of gang members called “toughs,” observes children carrying large beer steins called “growlers,” and notes the deplorable condition of both drink and patrons in the “stale-beer dives.” On his way to Paresis Hall, Moore interrupts a group of four Italian “toughs” about to beat up two gay men (110). A group of Germans outside the Santorelli flat drink from “growlers” (79). At the stale-beer dive on Baxter Street, Moore speculates that “the average Five Points dive cannot have represented any great advancement” from prehistoric caves (422).

In short, readers of The Alienist will not find a sympathetic portrait of Riis himself, but they will find an urban setting made vivid by Riis’s famous work.