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But crime isn't the only problem plaguing urban streets.

In many cities, slums are reaching epidemic proportions.

Multiple families crammed into one small room.

Human waste pours into the streets, alleys and open courtyards.

People were crowded in, there were windowless tenements.

sometimes you had no internal plumbing, just privies in the basement, in the backyard,and the Lower East Side during these years, was the single most crowded place in the entire world.

Jacob Riis, Danish immigrant, crime reporter, photographer.

He gets leads for stories from Chief Inspector Byrnes.

Now he's about to expose the hell of tenements.

Jacob Riis knows what it's like to be poor.

15 years ago, he lost his job in a stock-market crash.

It's midnight, but Riis has a new technology that will change the public perception of poverty forever.

An explosive powder that produces enough light to photograph in the dark.

This is one of the first-ever photographs of slum life.

Go. It shocks millions.

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Jacob A.Riis and this is how the other half live and die in New York City.

Magazines refuse to print his work,so Riis puts on his own"Magic lantern" Shows.

His mission: to show the nation's wealthy something they've never seen before, filth and desperation on their doorstep.

In this block, nine dead were carried out this year alone.Five in baby coffins.

What he demonstrated was that there is another reality, that all that prosperity didn't trickle down all the way to the bottom,

and there was some deplorable living conditions and this country was not just forced to confront those conditions but then was moved to begin to deal with them.