How Both Halves Lived

The gap between the rich and poor documented in Jacob Riis’s best seller, How the Other Half Lives, is underscored here by juxtaposing the photographs of two women. Riis took the photograph of a “scrub” or washerwoman (left) in one of the notorious Police Station lodging houses, the shelters of last resort for the city’s poor. On the right is Alice Vanderbilt costumed as the “Spirit of Electricity” for her sister-in-law Alva Vanderbilt’s costume ball in 1883. Washerwoman: Museum of the City of New York; Vanderbilt: Collection of the New-York Historical Society.