“Mulberry Bend” shows Mulberry Street looking north to Bayard Street. (From Jacob A. Riis’s “How the Other Half Lives.”)
Watching people enjoy mah-jongg in Chinatown’s Columbus Park, it’s hard to imagine the site was a dangerous, decrepit slum in the late 1800s. Photojournalist and social reformer Jacob A. Riis dedicated a chapter in his 1890 book How the Other Half Lives to the squalid conditions in the area then known as Mulberry Bend.