"In the dull content of lives that have never looked higher than the repairs of the daily wants, that have found little pleasure in the tedious round of toil save in the saloon, there is neither the power nor the will to rise. The power of the alley to make and unmake men is seen all around us, if we will see; but there are none so blind as those who will not see. It is the children of the alley of whom I speak, and of the environment that smothers the ambition of those who might achieve something better. The poverty of the tenement is not a simple poverty of dollars. It is the poverty of prospect, of hope, of any outlook beyond the alley."

Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, published 1890. Riis was a Danish-American journalist and social reformer who used photography as well as prose to document conditions in New York's Lower East Side tenements.