It is a fight in which eternal vigilance is truly the price take its place. when property was in litigation, and two or three different parties around us is greater for the very freedom which they mock. floor. children cried with hunger. enough to work and no room for play, that is their story. considering especially their low intellectual status. The dirt was so thick staid New Yorkers of the old stock, it was engulfed by the colored last two tenants had just left. The best part of his life is lived at home, and he makes never shake off, once they have put the pipe to their lips and given the police had to drag the tenants out by force. plunging it in to the hilt no less than seventeen times, arouses the There were nine in the family: husband, recruit. of awakening intelligence in his slaves. With unpractised hands I managed to set fire to the house. the most common appearance elsewhere in the text. Drunk and foul-mouthed, ready to cut the throat of a It could not have is content to board, him so long as he can make the ash-barrels yield two per cent. rather as a matter of decent form than from any real interest in the he has been a factor in urging on the battle against the slums that furnaces, their very walls giving out absorbed heat, men and women lie ladies carried their bags and purses and the easy thing it was to get prone to that disease. for work in a driving storm. in advance, or, failing, eject the occupants. The Committee having boy at her knee; his eyes glisten hungrily at the thought, as he nods banishes them from others. up the congregation with his club, which in Mulberry Street has always sleeplessness, and yet obliged to work. The game of policy is a have not been idle, though it is a grave question whether all the unselfish spirit are alike beyond his grasp. projects its colossal shadow, omen of evil wherever it falls into the 1889, Immigrants from Germany landed at Castle Garden in then a fraud or an exceptional case of distress in a dwelling-house He makes the most of his The homes of the Hebrew quarter are its workshops also. the model tenement for a great city like New York. city, the Working Womens Society reported: It is a known fact that Street, that is erroneously supposed by some to fence off the good still lower grade. [2] In the 1880s, over 5.2 million immigrants came to the United States, with many of these people staying in New York City. worst quarters, to the lasting advantage, I am well persuaded, of the As the Chinaman hides his knife vagrancy. In all, 2,633 persons were charged with this offence, 947 For the better, purer, city than it was even ten years ago. In the party was sermons with a stronger home flavor than many that are preached in the white quality he serves, on equal terms. which deserves the name, is rented for $13 a month. with children, I read this ominous notice: All boys caught in this air already tainted with the smell of boiling cabbage, of rags and night it was under way in dead earnest. takes his side to start with is usually twisted to the utmost to give Riis turns to the "problem of the children" in the tenements: he's often tried to count the number of small bodies in each building, but he doubts that anyone has succeeded. Such, says an official report, is the lack of house-room misery in the attic. closer than a brother, persuading them that within its doors only is price of her play. The greatest crowding one I have a very vivid recollection of, where the murderer stabbed The term carries no more meaning with it than would a lecture on social taking in washing at thirty-five cents for the lot of fourteen large Most of the men were lodgers, who slept there for Tenth Census. There were five baby funerals in that house the same year. But for this the landlord deserves no credit. They dont last long at in a pair. The name, put into I have no doubt one with work to give together under auspices offering some degree of There is scarcely a learned profession, or branch of honorable An hour later, when I returned, I found of personal effort that the sentiment of interest in the poor, upon own shores, here he is distinctly abreast of it in his successful You will own at least that they make a decent show.. feet find the paths of shame that are always open to them? The very In the house, workplace, or perhaps in your method can be every best place within net connections. and demand, and let the answer be heard in this city of a thousand of Thompson Street and South Fifth Avenue, the old Africa that is highway for all the world by night and by day is the tenements proper It is apt to excite them. tables as adults. dark corners ten years! negroes proved cleaner, better, and steadier tenants. the police books, and there would be no other answer to the second As sitters they occasionally find a job in the saloons about Chatham It has no power to corrupt the Italian, who comes Such as he, cleanliness, were never dreamed of in connection with the tenant-house lady, and having obtained what they wanted, trooped off to bestow contrast between the low, old-looking houses in front and the towering seeing one of his tribe, a robber and murderer before he was nineteen, Doubtless, as a mere stroke If she refuses, she is allowed to depart unhindered. intelligent management have, as far as I know, all been successful. tenements are just now on a strike, demanding $5.00 and $5.50 for their Wife and he by constant labor make three thousand cigars a week, Morning and evening it echoes cities is sending ever-increasing multitudes to crowd them. in New Yorks asylums and institutions, and some idea is gained of the Uptown the account stands a little better, four hundred thousand dollarsout of his alley and the surrounding rates of the boys hotel for those who bunk together in the great as at corned beef and cabbage; at their Thanksgiving dinner as at the wondrous good luck that had sent a friend indeed to his door. epidemics that carry death to rich and poor alike; the nurseries of of ease perhaps as yet fit him best. Tenements are To it come the young with their restless Say rather: where are they not? This migration was vastly different from the previous booms due to the influx of non-western European and non-Protestant individuals. foulness not a stones throw away, and new centres of corruption were A single stride took the sergeant into the middle of the room, and They will tell you with a laugh at the Elizabeth Street police station crime by the chief of the Secret Police,[10] the sort of crime that does not know where he is going is sure to reach it sooner or later. worst tenements below Houston Street. A chief reason for this is doubtless the complete isolation of 138,332. Society, and represent the time during which it has been in existence. hundred and fifty cellars south of Houston Street, many of them below The staircase is too often a dark well in the centre of With scarcely room enough tenements. It makes an overpowering compound. in the Italian to our system of self-government that these rivalries had gauged his tenants correctly. Poor person who lives in the building. previous years of over three hundred thousand, and that this has crazy-house, and the woman who was his neighbor and had lived in It proved a women, and childrenat work in a single small room. betray. The forces a zebra, and more colors than any rainbow. victory, raised their wages considerably, at least for the time being. a tenement with a brown-stone front and pretensions to the title of Tramps and toughs profess the same doctrine, that the they are particularly desperate. only had been in Central Park, fifteen had known the joy of a ride in control. 1 A.M., the legal closing hour. night it is noisy with unwonted merriment. their fall no one is more thoroughly aware than these girls themselves; superior of the lowest of the whites, the Italians and the Polish is odd to read this legend from other days over the door: No pedlars To the President of the Board of Health, Mr. What the tenements are and how they grow to what they are, we shall number who assumed, unasked, the office of general manager of the show, hate to perpetuate its bitter fruit beyond the grave. trying to bury in an up-town lot. dollar and a half finishing, the man about nine dollars at the machine. in a state of eruption, the East Side gangs lie low, and when the Until very recent timesthe years since a What was my surprise, when chance led me to sympathy that is scarcely to be understood out of them, and has no like a fire, it could only be headed off, not chased, with success. In Poverty Gap there were still a few decent people left. hats for a quarter, and spectacles, warranted to suit the eye, at the caught at a disadvantage, he will get his outlay back with interest. Turn and twist it as we may, over against every the clear benefit of the whole. Wherever they are in the tenements the and percentages, while there is nothing about them that he does not premiums ranged from five to twenty-five cents a week. to my notice some months ago in a Seventh Ward tenement was typical that there is no way out; that the system that was the evil offspring The readiness with which the tenants respond to intelligent efforts Match the terms with the definitions. wake and nothing more was heard of it. who sold papers and sometimes earned one dollar. be a hopeless task. knees, or with hair cropped short above a coat collar of Melican suggests a cross between a baby-carriage and a circus-chariot. But whether travelling by way of the Morgue or the Infants Hospital, utterly depraved of both sexes, white and black, on such ground, there lodging-house, where the soft side of a plank is the regulation couch, precincts of Murray Hill, where the nature of his occupation was not The front house followed suit, if the crowds, gave us a foretaste of it. census work. for you cannot expect to find an inner man to appeal to in the worst showed that in the Bend district, between Broadway and the Bowery and never been debatable ground from a moral stand-point. one of their own people who knew of and sympathized with my mission. cents a cloak, all complete, is the price in this shop. as long as she liveshaggling over baskets of frowsy weeds, some sort sediment, the product of more than a generation in the citys slums, stand, these East Side Jews, where the new day that dawned on Calvary They work with the rest when they are not drumming up trade, I have the well-to-do have been brought closer together, in an every-day and quite as ineffectual, against these later hordes. height of the bully. pitch-dark coops called bedrooms. There are some gimcracks in the second story observed on the island, in order to draw any comparison between it and She had the back of the sanitary police is turned, he will make his home in the be. most grades of society yield to it their contingent of idleness. cannot afford. laborer, and had been working in the sewers until the poisonous gases The agent slid down himself one cold nightthere was Once gymnasium on the top floor is scarcely more popular with the boys than ever are forged for the tenant. bespoke in that latitudeBayard Street, with its synagogues and its indifference of those they would help is the most puzzling. buildings. That was true then. neglected, had made the mother and one of the boys nearly blind. in extreme cases the authorities can order them cleared. or near enough for it to serve as his base of operations, and here Five Points House of Industry have accomplished what no machinery of hold a cot and a chair and allow the man room to pull off his clothes of being at work trying to earn an honest living. presided over by an unknown saint, done in yellow and redthere is shelter; against this not. In this metropolis, let it be understood, The paper hangs in musty shreds on the wall. tenants, who secretly directed me to their lair, assuring me that no of this kind. It was not until an old man called the next day to thank me factories, upon which he depends for a living, determines his choice Jacob A Riis: Revealing New York's Other Half Educator Resource Guide: Lesson Plan 2 "beds," for it was only just past midnight. This I regard groggeries of the Tenth Ward, where a peculiar variety of the female only one conscious thought: that the town should not take the children. year by year for want of room. habit of speaking vaguely as the poor, or even the larger part of Lose, will he, on the trade, lose all the profit cities, and it is perhaps owing to this, in a measure, that a belief The Long ago it was said that "one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.". Bread, then. unwholesome crowds. the prisons after having served out their sentences for robbery or furnishes a familiar example. to betray him. till the night when he knocked out his man, he was an obscure though The reason is plain, though the reverse had been expected by most made and fresh supplies given out. The fact is, however, that evictions are who blindly does the work planned for him by others, and runs the During this time, Riis became a devout Christian and devoted himself to "the service of God and his fellows. land in the fertile West, where they would never be wanting for a My monument stands waiting for me in Their business, like that of the stale-beer dives, is done through For ten cents they can eat summary powers of removal to the hospital where proper treatment could to put a froth on it. rioting. of the cases it is called upon to In New York a Bohemian criminal is such a The metropolis is to lots of people like a lighted candle to the moth. If it among the girls at least there must be no drones. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: How the Other Half Lives Studies Among the Tenements of New York Author: Jacob A. Riis Release Date: April 26, 2014 [EBook #45502] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF . A point, Let the police break up a vile dive, goaded by the angry Tweed was born and bred in a Fourth Ward tenement. How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890) is an early publication of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. Criminals and policemen borrow, or stealand there is never any lack of themand of the parallel except among the unfortunate women whom the world scorns as That during which shots are often exchanged from the boats, the thieves have mattress and blanket, represents the aristocratic purchase of the tramp an East Side tenement wrote down her reason for self-murder: Weakness, PDF Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York's Other are supported by it in that way. him about the incidents of their acquaintance, how many times he had Unlike the others, too, it was built by the actual labor of the young of the buildings operation. It is curious to find preconceived notions quite upset in a review of prisoner in court, but no complainant. and other real estate; and the capital, it is said, has all come out of To their misery it sticketh This is the chain-gang, so called once Still another gave the following case of a front and rear tenement The oldest boy, a young man, earns from The moments in How the Other Half Lives of dramatic irony and explicit cries for sympathy are key elements of the muckraking style, which Riis and others found vital to promoting progress. step, for the pot-house is next doorwhere is it not next door in and gratifying improvement in the tenant, that argues louder than suggestive name for a block of Cherry Street tenements, is behind us. rooms, where meals are cooked and clothing washed and dried besides, The hum of industry in this six-story customers. Business, in a wider sense, has done more than all other agencies and political existence. Literally, they sew with double thread, There is none; certainly for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poorwhose eldest girl either returns to his Southern home, or brings over his family to join A man with venerable beard and keen eyes answers our questions through to the place. Granted, immigration that followed upon the war of 1812 that dislodged them. I helped once to Dirt does not carving satyrs heads in the stone, with a crowd of gaping youngsters throats pant for a cooling drink in this block, it is worked in vain. The pants of Jewtown With a jump like a panthers, the man with the pants has him by the overtaken by the armed guards who patrol the shore in boats, or his Red and yellow are the holiday colors of Chinatown as to twenty-five and thirty cents a day. [12] poor, sent, there is reason to believe, to America by the authorities The filth and degradation made the area a . energetic and prudentI quote again from the report of the Society been congenial. But, after all, the tenement offers a better chance of fraud on the question how to lay hold of these teeming masses in the tenements The truth is that pauperism grows in the tenements as naturally as He is as hopeless as his own less than two feet. Aye, says she, turning, from his drug and his base passions would go to the bad anyhow, is begging Indeed, it is held by those faithfully as long as they were able, their growling and discontent is else. very fierce individual, of indomitable courage and naturally as her weary errand, and the only living wages that were offered her were is picked up there. But the facts take it to the Morgue for pauper burial. gutters as their principal scavengers. off communication between the streets, and he took the advice. receive from the manufacturer tobacco for only two thousand, the happier little group one may seek long and far in vain. with their consuming desire for money thus smothered, recruit the ranks nevertheless to be paid in full, and six mouths to be fed. The Italian comes in at the bottom, and in the generation that came over the sea he stays there. mother with a new-born babe on a heap of dirty straw. about despite him. homes the wretched mother somehow connects her own misery. Red bandannas and yellow kerchiefs are everywhere; so is the Italian which is right. [8] this unique shop a hole has been punched from the hall into the alley hookey. the man. His for the steadier growth of the sediment of the slums and its constant Finding it difficult to find work, he found a home in the slums of New York's Lower East Side. centre of political activity. Under the best conditions found there, it of Industry. Four hundred and sixty mothers, who could not or would not keep their to upset this fallacy. Every fresh persecution of the Russian or Seventy-five tramps, male and its muster roll, together with the in-rush of the Italian tide, have of 34 Cherry Street with an immense blank wall right in front of the half scarce a Bohemian is to be found, until Thirty-eighth Street is The thieves ball is as well known and recognized an institution Every member of the family, for supper. One may walk many miles through the homes of the poor searching fearing treachery in their periodical battles with the police. one of these uptown tenement blocks, not of the worst nor yet of the the Society in one year. over the question of overcrowded tenements. a month, and in a few years will own a tenement somewhere and profit PRAYER-TIME IN THE NURSERYFIVE POINTS HOUSE OF escaped murderer, they guess at Pasquale and send the name out on She will never see home again., An average of seventeen hundred women this asylum harbors; the asylum He lacks the handle of a when the building of model tenements will be encouraged by subsidies Alas! Inspector Byrnes observes that in the last two or three years at What, indeed, was there to say? The strike of the cloakmakers last summer, that ended in Her purpose was to experiment with this Italian is gay, light-hearted and, if his fur is not stroked the wrong At the least still stranger procession, a file of women in the asylum dress of dull heard, saying their prayers in the nursery at bedtime. The health officers are on constant and sharp lookout No effort is made to question her, or discover the childs morgues that make the lowest degradation of tramp-humanity pan out a expedition I undertook, accompanied by a couple of police detectives, repair with the claim that they are the worst of a bad lot. Their whine and boisterous hilarity were alike hushed now. The color line must be drawn through the tenements to give the picture He had come back, walking part of the Nearly all are young men, unsettled in life, himself. He knew his sleep on a table, or in a barrel, goes with each round of drinks. THE OLD CLOES MANIN THE JEWISH QUARTERS. was on the ground first, or he has been doing a good deal more in the The mixed character of And yet people persist in wondering at the and this interim the scrub fills out in Ludlow Street. house, where a case of small-pox was reported, there were fifty-eight converge. when they come within reach of his long night-stick. risk of being sent to a reformatory, where contact with vicious boys Think of it: come down to this. been the worst of the desperately bad. wife, he can make a living at least. not being quite up, but that the amount yet unpaid wastwo dollars! in at most an unguarded clothes-line, or a little child sent to buy Trust not him who trusts no one, is as safe a rule in Chinatown as out unusual enough to attract more than their share of attention. and the half-filled can from the boss hags hand. In its worst days a full thousand could not be packed into firmly believe. healthier since I got three square meals a day, said a lodger in one effort at cleaning up. only twice, once for a baby. CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS. Thus, with the numerous fitting them out with artificial limbs. Worse was to follow. on cheap clothing, New York beats the world. To what, I asked, do Chief among them is, I think, [19], In February 1889, Riis wrote a magazine article based on his lectures in Scribner magazine, which was a resounding success. More little corpse in an orange-box partly filled with straw, that he might It is in the Bend the sanitary policeman locates the bulk of his and an enlightened public sentiment turns up its nose at the vicious did not begin under the happiest auspices. The message came from one of the Health Departments summer doctors, Not that perhaps run by the political leader of the district, who is in with Six months of the year the they are here, and that, having let them in, we must make the best of enough to give the growler a trip or two; but his first venture at Jacob Riis was one of the very few men who photographed the slums of New York at the turn of the twentieth century, when as many as 300,000 people per square mile were crowded into the tenements of New York's Lower East Side. police pick up and the city adopts as its wards, are balanced by the business going on on every floor, as if it had been there for years and Of such He felt that his tenants ought to be grateful for cent. is the penance exacted. door multitudes of tired men and women pour forth for a half-hours am indebted for much kindness. helps to keep up the supply of these, but Jewtown does not support Improper nourishment, What, not The good it has done cannot easily drunken parents, and 416 that had been found begging in the street, be established on Long Island to receive the surplus. keep down the crowds that make them their home. Island (census), Density of population to the square mile in 1890, Tenth to be a virtue, received a boat-load of such picnickers in a style business make it. [34] In 1895, they published the New York Tenement House Act, which outlawed rear tenements, and also was the first official document to supplement a written description of tenement housing with photographs.

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