The prospect of employment in a rapidly expanding industrial economy brought millions of immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Latin America to the brink of America in the period 1891 to 1930. This was also a period of intense social, economic, and political anxiety in the United States. Growing social and economic pressures posed by industrialization, sprawling urban cities, violent labor uprisings, economic depression, fears of middle-class “race suicide,” the changing structure of American authority, and a fractured sense of American unity all fueled growing nativist sentiment in the United States.
The nation was gripped in the beginnings of an effort to contain a growing sense of disorder, a sense that immigrants, garbage, unionism, corruption, and vice were all exceeding the bounds of their containment and that those bounds must be reestablished. In New York City, in 1890, Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives-a photo documentary of ghetto conditions that would have national impact. The following year, Josiah Strong pointed out that “a mighty emergency is upon us.”
Here is an amazing collection of rare vintage photos capturing street scenes in New York City during the 1890s.
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| The Bowery, New York Times, 1896 |
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| Union Square in 1893 |
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| The Harlem River Speedway and High Bridge in 1898 |
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| Tony Pastor’s 14th Street Theatre, 1895 |
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| Union Square West and 17th Street, September 25, 1891 |
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| Wall Street in 1898 |
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| Westchester Avenue, The Bronx, 1895 |
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| Billboards in Times Square, ca. 1890s |
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| Billboards on 42nd Street at Broadway, Times Square, 1898 |
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| Bowling Green Park in 1896 |
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| Broadway and 23rd Street (before the Flatiron Building), 1899 |
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| Brooklyn Bridge (from the Manhattan side), 1894 |
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| Construction at Columbus Circle, 1895 |
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| Cutting ice in the Bronx, ca. late 1890s |
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| Duane Street in 1891 |
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| Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, 1899 |
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| Girls settling with the cabby, 1895 |
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| Greeley Square in 1898 |
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| Herald Square, 6th Avenue, Broadway, and 35th Street, NYC, 1898 |
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| High Bridge, from Washington Heights with The Bronx to the left, 1892 |
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| New York City El on The Bowery, 1895 |
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| New York in winter, 1895 |
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| On Westchester Avenue, the Bronx, 1898 |
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| Policeman on a New York street, 1896 |
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| Steeplechase Park, Coney Island, Brooklyn, 1899 |
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| Surf Avenue, Coney Island, 1896 |