The busty ladies on a Henry Street tenement

There is something rather unsettling about these two women, fronting a tenement entrance on a stretch of Chinatown’s Henry Street.

It’s not the fact that they are thrusting their chests out—it’s the facial expressions, like demented dolls. They and the bearded man in the middle have been creeping out residents and passersby for at least a hundred years.

The cloth cutters of Ludlow Street

Jacob Riis took this photo inside a Ludlow Street tenement apartment circa 1905. Looks like the entire extended family was running its own mini sweatshop.

Notice the little pup under the chair at left. I’d never seen a pet dog in a Lower East Side tenement interior photo before.

He looks pretty content there, with all his people around him.