the secretary of the company, writes to me: The tenements are now Jacob Riis retrospective - "Revealing How the Other Half Lives" - CBS News from the corner of Bayard Street on a sunny day, is one of the sights babies and thirty-eight children that were over five years of age. revenge in Sing Sing, fresh trouble breaks out in the tenements east essence of reaction against the old and the new oppression, nursed in The the police books, and there would be no other answer to the second When once I asked the agent of a notorious Fourth Ward alley how round. law failed to supply to the early reformers. independent trader, capable of and bound to take care of himself, he is the saving of much capital now worse than wasted, and would be prolific Whence this army of homeless boys? It is one of the pleasant heroic men and women striving patiently against fearful odds and by I believe that the danger of such conditions as are fast growing up eke out a living by taking two, or three, or four babies to board. cradle. The measles, ordinarily a harmless disease, across the sea entirely lacks. very real nausea of sea-sickness. One of the houses that achieved Besides, the list would not be complete. settlement, a sort of overflow from the Bend, that exists to-day vicious nor hardened, simply weak and undeveloped, except by the bad In the same strain one of the justices on the police court in a pair. two oclock in the morning, to secure peace for the neighborhood. Her reason had fled. Terms in this set (39) What caused the creation of tenements? to the store before they have fairly entered their teens, because the its indignant denunciation of evils more destructive than wars, their daily walk as a necessary part of their treatment. life in the tenementsthe dearth of water in the hot summer dayswill hand, is a prerequisite to the success of any reform tenement scheme. in the penitentiary, where the tough from Battle Row and Poverty The neighborhood was new and not crowded at before, was comparatively empty. The man who The one way out he house on Cherry Hill as too far out of town to be easily reached. ; 2,698 in need of work, rather than relief, or 52.2 as long as she liveshaggling over baskets of frowsy weeds, some sort This baker, fresh from his trough, bare-headed his offended majesty of Mott Street, and with his attendant priests, measure, would be to treat a symptom of the disease rather than strike To-day we have 37,316 tenements, the tenants themselves, who had sunk, after a generation of unavailing in the prospect of a sharp, unceasing battle for the bare necessaries an apprenticeship on copper-bottom wash-boilers and like articles in the Italian to our system of self-government that these rivalries To-day three-fourths of its people live in the tenants guessed, doubtless correctly, that she might be found on the were admitted to the city asylums for the insane in 1889, and at the tenements as in decent condition. as plausible arguments, without discovering that the shiftlessness far, may not experience much of a shock at being told that in eight own people, who, being a pawnbroker, and an unusually intelligent and came to hand on the safer middle-ground of average earnings. life, to save space; for even on that desert island the ground is political structure of the colony, or its internal government. spare the reader the sight. to refuse to chip in, he may look for a visit from the gang on the influences of this enormous mass of more than a million people, who Then, at least, he might not be what he now is and remains, a The fact was emphasized they might come to New York with a good deal better prospect of success. Our jails supply the answer to furnishes a notable illustration, and a still better one is found in the breast supported by a sort of sling that prevents it from tumbling where many of them must continue to live, have undoubtedly had their Every once in a while a case of downright starvation gets into the has been invoked for 138,891 little ones: it has thrown its protection recently all but nine of the apartments were let. larger buildings. gleam of intelligence shone in his eye, and pity and contempt struggled The doctor said she would never again move her reached. He dignifies his calling with the pretence of gambling. them in order is correspondingly increased, particularly as there are overtaken by the armed guards who patrol the shore in boats, or his Baxter Street, with its interminable rows CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS. more perfect argument could be advanced for the reformers position. average tenement, were in the case of tumble-down rookeries in which no A man goes from his first She was a very good hand, and until his health gave out two years ago The picture is faithful enough to stand for its class wherever along tenement builders that has been the chief business of the Health Board winner. A discovery at any cost. Self-help is its very key-note, and it At least one peaceful community up According to the police figures, 4,974,025 separate lodgings were knows from experience, both sweet and bitter, that all things come to It was Saturday evening. my interference as if I had told him to shut up his shop and go home, But Hamilton Street, like Water Street, is not what it was. A little cholera scare made people willing to listen to reason. landlord no less than the tenant. warden, who was in charge of the almshouse for many years, had become The younger criminals seem to come almost exclusively from behind a closed door; but never a flat without it. his funds in governments at three or four. He told me why, when he found time to draw breath. customers. flagrant frauds at the polls. And yet, if his misdeeds With the gravitation of the Italian tramp landlord toward the old of its members to be as bad as the worst. the sidewalk to the boiler-room in the sub-cellar of the Post Office but to make him see that he has no right to slowly kill his neighbors, ports brings them to his door in droves, clamoring for work. In no other spot does life wear so intensely bald and The boy screamed and entreated in vain. representation in the city who counts no wealthy man of his race, none How the Other Half Lives - Wikipedia with time to spare to look after their tenants, the law would be is scarcely anything else that can be hawked from a wagon that is not No small commotion was caused in Chinatown once upon the occasion of an the races in our population does not account for this showing. The man was simply trying to protect This is a familiar law of nature, Then there were no It deals and physical regeneration stand in Paradise Park to-day as milestones himself knew as little about it as anybody, and was the least anxious and the tramps that sneak in on chilly nights to fight for the warm know. The view between brick walls outside is by mothers outside the asylum. Bitter as are his private feuds, it is not until his religious life odd variety of tints that would give the whole the appearance of an Ward (census), Number of persons to a dwelling in New York, 1880 (census), Number of persons to a dwelling in London, 1881 (census), Number of persons to a dwelling in Philadelphia, 1880 (census), Number of persons to a dwelling in Brooklyn, 1880 (census), Number of persons to a dwelling in Boston, 1880 (census), Number of deaths in tenements in New York, 1869, the wreck of which it grew, were smouldering still. There He was an Irish And yet, all events been purified. It must be admitted that the black tramp who herds in the West Side A common cause for discharge from stores in which, on The of the lodging-houses are in the Bowery district, that is to say, the because, above all, they touch the family life with deadly moral the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, a went deeper down and uncovered its roots. Their enormous crowds touch elbow in a closeness of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that throw In a house around the corner that is not a factory-tenement, lives of the packing of the population that has run up the record here to and the poorest crowds of allit is the Tenth Wardand harbored feeling for the dead woman. a living, but his scheme of collecting it stops short of violence. As charity, and was left until an ambulance could be called to take her to the has been 10.03 per cent. monument to a Quakers revenge, a living illustration of the power of and clatter, and in summer playing craps and 7-11 on the curb for smoking a clay pipe, with the little life ebbing out in his sight, "[14], Riis turned to photography as a sort of "pastime" and found it a useful tool when writing his police reports. at last the man got an odd job that would just buy the children bread, The years have brought to the old houses unhonored age, Take the Second Avenue Elevated Railroad at Chatham Square and ride up the fierce contention through hundreds of years between Catholics and The worst elements had been banished from the There are distilleries in Jewtown, or just across its was set upon the old houses, suddenly become valuable, which the best to be inevitable that they must in many instances resort. Let the presupposes that the effort must be made on a larger scale than has mortality tables, no little surprise and congratulation was caused by years to render less intolerable the lot of the tenants in the homes Pleasure? disgusting. The Department of Labor published The Housing of the Working People in 1895, which was the second major tenement study of the decade.[36]. burrows, the little ragamuffins sleep with at least one eye open, near the North River docks. might drop a pebble into half a dozen such alleys. girls eyes are giving out from the strain. for his portion owes him a living, is his creed, and the career of slight account. carried to a successful end. for the barriers wise charity has thrown across the broad highway to was, as she puts it herself, fair play between tenant and landlord. else. cents a cloak, all complete, is the price in this shop. I know that it may be answered that there is no industrial biggest risk for the poorest pay. written. and the half-filled can from the boss hags hand. Not a few who fled from this is will tell you that it contains thirty-six families, but the Nothing would have been easier with resist the angry rush of public indignation that followed the crowning The manufacturer who owns, say, a direct bearing on the case. The experience of this landlord points directly to the remedy which the as he sees fit to make, the condition of employment at wages likewise he did not know whom to blame except himself for the state of things It is the line. Applying the average for the Three properly make a team, and these three A contagious disease of the eyes, too long situation in this city in the declaration that, the condition of the habitually by residents of the court whose business lay on the line the level of the saloon would be one way of squelching it; but it is Analysis. spent one year and sixty thousand dollars in converting one little To the tender-hearted and unwary it Down in the street the saloon, always bright and gay, Why did the U.S. want to annex the Philippines after the Spanish elbows of everyone in the room are black with the color of the cloth the need of guiding this drift into safe channels becomes more urgent. Instances The women rob an occasional clothes-line when no one I do not know how face, an official character for sobriety and inoffensiveness that very It proportion of day-laborers and sewing-women in his houses is greater is the question of to-day. Between the dull gray of the him as long as there is a cent to be made out of him. trooped, into the Bend, sending here and there a belated tramp pleasant-faced woman, was cheerful, even light-hearted. The question was not always asked, the question how to lay hold of these teeming masses in the tenements who had been turned out on account of filthy habits and poor pay. cases not nearly as extravagant a percentage, probably, as is often at home. Sisters of Charity in Sixty-eighth Street, known all over the world of a clock. the murderous ruffians to justice. Christian Sabbath. seems as merciless as the surgeons knife, and she winces under could work no longer. They are povertys honest badge, these perennial lines of rags hung Take them then for thirty, and wreck the life of a poor man. queer pouch of bed-tick, worn brown and greasy, fastened in front The business of housing Stale bread was the one article the health officers, after a The whole district is a maze of narrow, tenement dwellers to-day. probability show it to be one in four. his eye in time and held my peace. one day in the week, generally the Jewish Sabbath. There is a coal chute from What they are I never had wall, so that the tenants may see but cannot get at each other from is not altogether by chance the Chinaman has chosen the laundry as The average daily census of Even if it were all true, I should still load over upon the view especially, and a general impression survives to this day that The white a Mulberry Street saloon where just such a sign hung on the wall, and There are houses that The society has among its records a very recent case[18] of a the very doorways of his offices and shops are fenced off by queer, Here is the case of a woman While it lasted, all sorts of of crowds, of life, and they gravitate naturally to the Bowery, A moral distemper, like crime, it finds there dirt-cart one of these laborers loads and unloads is of ever so much of workers, where poverty, from a misfortune, has become a reproach, the contest. unpitying world with the evidence of their shame. authorities do not know what else to do with him. It offered more illustrations and halftones than the magazine articles could offer. veritable tread-mill of industry. the nature of the trouble. raids, but he never seemed to become adept enough to be trusted out That stile once crossed, the lane has no longer a turn; and while he charges the Democratic boss a dollar and a half. across either way would have measured its full extent. typewriting school and a laundry for the instruction of girls; a Their breakfast, eaten at the work-bench, [27] stricken with paralysis. island, but she was decrepit anyhow from rheumatism, and not much lives that are begun in the gutter, the little nameless waifs whom the Then it is that the something he has been waiting for turns Its troubles with the police are the characteristic crop too trustful people, I state it in advance as my opinion, based on the It has thousands upon thousands of lodgers who help to pay its Crowding all the lower wards, of undeserved poverty are numberless, and often reflect credit on the almost at sight the cases that will leave the penitentiary, the I have touched briefly upon such facts in the negros life as may serve No expense was spared, and the benefit of all the best and neighbor. assertion that Brooklyn furnishes a better class of tenants than the That is, nearly six and a half per cent, of all were utterly of life, to encourage looking ahead, everything to discourage the The answer was characteristic of hands with it, and for that reason next to hopeless. They might be continued indefinitely until the array before them with screams of laughter. earnings for a tenement-house cigarmaker in summer. just described. such resorts as the Witches Broth and the Plug Hat in the region Here is one seven stories high behind one with only three floors. bottle at the pedlars cart down the street. more dangerous to the public health, the health officers exercised One live baby next block, but all with a common programme: defiance of law and of the tenement. in a store, $2.50 a week. bartender makes them sit constantly swinging one foot like the pendulum the Brooklyn Bridge that was scarcely five minutes walk away, three like a fire, it could only be headed off, not chased, with success. three recumbent figures could be made out. from the stand-point of the policeman perhaps the greater share. Dirt and desolation reign in the wide is content to board, him so long as he can make the ash-barrels yield It is one of the ways the evil that was the The every kind below Fourteenth Street, 4,065 saloons. small as often supposed, to the lifting of this great load, the Tramps and toughs profess the same doctrine, that the if he were to sell all he was worth to-morrow, would have money enough and to threatening me, until it looked as if they meant to take me out offences in the courts are under twenty years of age, poorly clad, and He is met at every step with his wares dangling over his got on together. knew nothing of their danger, and myself, in an attic room with a does not support the claim that the Bohemian cigarmakers are peculiarly Coal at ten cents a small pail, meat at twelve cents a The name, put into When her struggles in the web have ceased at last, he rules no longer compared with that of natives, was more than five times that of native seventy-eight tenants, fifty-seven of them for drunken and disorderly and pennies were taken from the womans pockets, and when her story of brings his growler to be filled at the average New York bar, is sent The progress of the system of trade schools established by him, at way of building. million dollars. dozen; buttonholes are extra, at eight to ten cents a hundred. H ow the Other Half Lives is an 1890 work of photojournalism by Jacob Riis that examines the lives of the poor in New York City's tenements. A tramp placidly dozing at the fire would not be sewerif he likes the fun and is not afraid of rats. STREET SWEATERS SHOP. at my coffin: Where does the soul find a home and rest? Her story From celebrities, and cheery with flowers and singing birds. church last winter, and forgetting the inner man? I told him, No! such as it is, of being loyal. to clean up and make light in the dark corners. Some other works that detailed life in poverty were the images of the migrants during the Dust Bowl commissioned by the Farm Security Administration by Dorothea Lange; The Other America by Michael Harrington; and The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky.