Cosmopolitan and Candid Stories, 1877–1915

George Bellows (American, 1882–1925)
Cliff Dwellers, 1913
Oil on canvas; 40 1/4 x 42 1/8 in. (102.1 x 106.8 cm)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Fund (16.4)
Photograph © 2009 Museum Associates / LACMA

Between 1880 and 1910 many immigrants—including thousands of Eastern European Jews—found temporary or permanent shelter on the Lower East Side, along streets such as East Broadway, the setting for Cliff Dwellers. Bellows acknowledges that much life in the neighborhood was lived in the street or on stoops and fire escapes, as residents sought respite from dark, poorly ventilated, overcrowded apartments. Yet he minimizes hardship, using bright colors and showing children at play, laundry snapping in a passing breeze, and other cheerful details. While Jacob Riis made a disquieting photographic record of New York's slums about 1890 and social commentators urged tenement reform, Bellows offers a genial narrative. Like Basil March, a character in William Dean Howells's novel A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) who visited a tenement neighborhood, he seems to proclaim: "I haven't seen a jollier crowd anywhere in New York."