ABSTRACT
When opening the Tenement House Exhibition in New York in February 1900, Governor Theodore Roosevelt urged the public to study the material on display since it so strikingly showed the effects of the degrading living conditions of the poor in the city, “which eat at the body social and the body politic.”1 The exhibition, with its display of more than 1,000 photographs, models of city blocks, series of distribution maps, statistical charts, and a great deal more was open for only two weeks before it was taken on tour to Chicago-and later to the social economy section of the world’s fair in Paris-but was nonetheless a great success. It was soon understood by the organizers as a defi ning moment in their efforts to bring about reform in building regulations and advocate model tenement houses in New York, an impact both they and commentators attributed to the new and thoroughly ambitious ways of representing the problems that the issue involved. As a campaign vehicle, the exhibition’s mediation of the city was considered to triumph all other means of communication as it “told more in fi ve minutes than could be obtained in a library in fi ve weeks” and provided a comprehensive understanding of the problem “that could not have been given in any other way.”2
