On 7 February 1910, men waited in a breadline in New York’s Bowery. The Bain News Service photograph, preserved by the Library of Congress, states the action directly in its title: “Bowery men waiting for bread in bread line.”
Breadlines later became an emblematic image of the Great Depression, but this photograph predates that crisis by twenty years. Separate records from the same district document a Bowery Mission line at 2 a.m. in 1907 and another at midnight in 1908, showing that night-time food relief there was not a single isolated scene.
The 1910 record does not supply an hour, headcount, provider or waiting time, and details from the other photographs are not transferred into it. Its value lies in its date and location. Long before the breadline became a standard visual shorthand for the 1930s, an order for receiving bread already existed in the city and was considered worth photographing.