Bandits' Roost

Bandits' Roost was an alley off the west side of Mulberry Street, in the block once called Mulberry Bend and now Columbus Park. It is remembered through a single photograph from 1888: a narrow, washing-hung passage with men in bowlers and slouch hats staring at the camera, published by Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives in 1890. It is credited to Riis, though it may have been taken by one of his companions, Richard Hoe Lawrence or Henry Piffard, and the original negative is at the Museum of the City of New York. Museum prints label it 59½ Mulberry Street, but by Riis's own text the alley was number 59 and 59½ was the tenement beside it. Riis made the Bend the centre of his campaign. He reported that nine dead were carried out of the alley in 1888, five of them in baby coffins, and that the Tenement House Commission had counted 155 child deaths in that single block in 1882, more than two thirds of all its deaths.

After years of argument the city paid about a million and a half dollars for the land, cleared the tenements, and opened Mulberry Bend Park in the summer of 1897, renamed Columbus Park in 1911. Riis, then secretary of the Small Parks Committee, was not invited to the opening ceremony, and wrote afterwards that the newspapers had puzzled over it. Nothing of the alley or its tenements survives.