Jacob Riis, in his famous book about the underbelly of New York, How the Other Half Lives (1890), wrote of entering a Chinatown fan-tan parlor: "At the first foot-fall of leather soles on the steps the hum of talk ceases, and the group of celestials, crouching over their game of fan tan, stop playing and watch the comer with ugly looks. Fan tan is their ruling passion."
Public concern about New York tenements was stirred by the publication in 1890 of Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives.
Jacob Riis and other reformers fought for parks in urban areas, but the resulting parks, while a vast improvement, were formalized, rectilinear arrangements of artificially orderly lawns, bushes, and walkways.
Rauschenbusch is honored together with Washington Gladden and Jacob Riis with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on July 2.
Jacob | John Jacob Astor | Jacob M. Appel | Jacob Epstein | Jacob Zuma | Jacob Obrecht | Jacob Lawrence | Jacob Appel | John Jacob Astor IV | Irène Jacob | Jacob Jordaens | Paul Jacob | Meshullam ben Jacob | Jacob Riis | Jacob Grimm | Jacob Christian Schäffer | Jacob Appelbaum | Jacob Truedson Demitz | Jacob ter Veldhuis | Jacob's Ladder | Jacob's biscuits | Jacob's Award | Jacob Rothschild | Jacob L. Devers | Jacob Latimore | Jacob Kirkegaard | Jacob Kielland | Jacob J. Shubert | Jacob Hackenburg Griffiths-Randolph | Jacob Bronowski |
Reformer Jacob Riis had visited The Flats in the early 1910s and declared them worse than anything in New York; a survey conducted by the city in the 1937 deemed 20% of the city's dwellings "unfit for human habitation," including most of The Flats.