The massive lot at the beach-side Jacob Riis Park was piled high with storm detritus.
But an un-Riis-like consensus has formed about how best to address the new slums' problems.
For Riis, the slum's biggest problem wasn't population density, lack of sunlight or even disease.
Former Telekom team captain Riis, who won the 1996 Tour de France, wants to hire his former sidekick.
Though today Riis is almost universally celebrated, he helped set housing policy on a course that would prove tragically misguided.
But Riis must first find a new sponsor after the departure of CSC's main backer, Italian Internet and telecoms firm Tiscali.
They took the yellow jersey two years in a row courtesy of first Bjarne Riis (1996) and Ullrich the second year.
Close to 120 years have passed since Riis published How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York.
But Riis' environmental determinism led, gradually but inexorably, to the advent of large-scale public housing, which would have destructive unintended consequences.
Today, the scale of slum life dwarfs that of Riis-era New York.
That so many Americans could rise from slums into the middle class shows, moreover, that Riis' Lower East Side was filled with such virtues.
Riis himself promoted the "model tenement": privately built apartments for the poor, constructed to higher standards made possible by investors' willingness to forgo normal profits.
The cast is rounded out by Tom Riis Farrell, pleasantly authoritative yet also contemplative as Dexter, the Episcopal minister who's been running the school for 30 years.
In Riis' view, "the tendency of the tenements and of their tenants is all the time, and rapidly, downward, " as he wrote in How the Other Half Lives.
Riis' Manhattan, even at its roughest, was never this squalid.
Defending champion Sastre and Riis have gone their separate ways since last year's victory but both men will have high hopes of being top of the podium again in Paris.
"To me, it's obvious that Astana should have one leader and to me, that leader is Contador, " Riis -- whose CSC team won the race last year with Carlos Sastre -- told reporters.
To understand what a departure this is from past views of slum life one must go back to the late 19th century's most famous chronicler of the poor sides of town, Jacob Riis.
Contador has kept quiet in the lead up to the race, although he has been strongly linked with a possible move to the Caisse d'Epargne team but 1996 Tour winner Bjarne Riis is under no illusions about Contador's chances.
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