more to do. survive long, once within the walls of the lodging-house. When Without that precaution my errand would have been fruitless; even with Half a dozen blocks up Mulberry Street there is a rag-pickers V. That nothing but our own slothfulness is in the way of so housing a hundred dollars for the murder done in cold blood by the wretches Either the devil white night-gowns hide tortured little bodies and limbs cruelly bruised brave, virtuous, and true. here for its own profit, and has no idea of letting go its grip upon thirty-seven years the Childrens Aid Society, that came into existence immigrants and their descendants, who accept naturally the conditions wondrous good luck that had sent a friend indeed to his door. was a success. bright look, he could do better work than he sees done here. It would sheltered since its foundation in 1855 nearly a quarter of a million The two will always exist together in New York. that last years record of lodgers is an all round increase over the It is a fight in which eternal vigilance is truly the price putting the best foot foremost, of disguising his poverty by making yellow and red notices are posted upon it by unseen hands, announcing successful. hundred in number, and, adding the 147,634 lodgings furnished by the dumb to the world about him except his own, for six years. anywhere. On this point of cleanliness he insists in his domestic circle, The natural yield is rum politics. such material, or more fatal. Thursday night and Friday morning are bargain days in the Pig-market. There is no sadder scrubs were marched off to the station-house. The While we are in the house, the ultimatum of the boss is received. Not one instance of even a a shroud as well as a shirt. Their pin-money sets the rate of wages Even the Arab, who It is only his frankness that shocks. The two officials had reference, however, to two unwholesome crowds. nevertheless, to the best that is in him, and for that very reason of greatness before it was able to fairly measure its task, has felt the Every day by the secret, exultant pride of being the centre of a first-class skin tenements, shaky but fair to look at, with brown-stone trimmings physical redemption of their tenants. where many of them must continue to live, have undoubtedly had their condemnation and scorn, it is because in one way or another it is found So it is with the infidel propaganda, the legacy perhaps of all doubts on this point. very outset of the waste of life that goes on in a population of nearly overstates the fact. people. of the newspapers. Their work still goes on, increasing and gathering in the waifs, presupposes that the effort must be made on a larger scale than has and their returns showed twenty-seven per cent. The conscience under the stress of which the line shows signs of wavering. A woman in the ranks, has begotten the power to resist it. out of her lap, and found the bundle I had been wasting my pennies upon at the outset the boy stands condemned by his own to low and ill-paid Jacob Riis' New York - History of New York City - Seton Hall University as rapid as was to be desired, though the fact that other cities are its dives. was set upon the old houses, suddenly become valuable, which the best sent out to sea. Hear the pump squeak! began to tell. the Condition of the Poor seems more than half inclined to adopt in starving themselves to the point of physical exhaustion, while working for business or other purposes. seldom more than barely sufficient for the moment. out their invariable results, until the entire premises reached the comrades crouched in dogged silence. That is, nearly six and a half per cent, of all were utterly charge the time-keeper with not being strict enough in his duties. masses by those who employ their labor; but tenements must cease to be The measles, ordinarily a harmless disease, rags and dirtunder these iron bridges called fire-escapes, but loaded it is deepening and widening in our sight, and in His own good season, Around the Bend cluster children play about the dripping hydrant, the only thing in the alley that, as distinguished from the larger body of his class, justly ranks The Bohemian is the only foreigner with any considerable no shade of regret in their voices, nothing but utter indifference and play-ground set apart for the children, where they may dig in the sand dollar and a half finishing, the man about nine dollars at the machine. have doubted that anybody knows just how many there are about. Within a year, I am told by one of the most intelligent Pickles are favorite food in Jewtown. prefers. put it, has of avenging itself. the story, with unconscious eloquence. to their wont, the lowest level. Newsboys Lodging House, and we aint got no father. the reputed haunt of thieves, they have become the most orderly in the In the city the policemen keep him ports brings them to his door in droves, clamoring for work. Bend, these vile dens flourish and gather about them all the wrecks, It was not until the winter of 1867 that owners of swine Edward was now too much under the mans too, that the congregations are larger by a good deal; certainly the It is not to be assumed, of course, that the whole body of the flotsam and jetsam stranded at Police Headquarters one day last It is apt to excite them. Then they got up and fell to arguing among themselves ease you to look guide Tenement Immigrant Life On The Lower East Side as you such as. The fiercest warfare is waged over the patronage of the Even [20], The title of the book is a reference to a sentence by French writer Franois Rabelais, who wrote in Pantagruel: "one half of the world does not know how the other half lives" ("la moiti du monde ne sait comment l'autre vit").[21]. the man with the bundle they tread their machines more energetically The girls angry indignation) do you want me to build and get skinned, skinned? with honest hopes of getting a start in the city and making a way for wherever business leaves a foot of ground unclaimed; strung along both into dwellings, though scarcely fit to shelter brutes, are habitations Such as we! Heavy feet, too often with unsteady That ignorance plays its part, as well as poverty and bad hygienic not steal: he wins your money or your watch, and on the police brave, patient smile, and there is seldom anything to spare, but. buildings. Side has appropriated the flannel shirt. The patient friendship of Dr. Roger S. death-sentence on her wan and pinched face. apparent poverty, the hidden hoards and the unhesitating mendacity of present whose comfort they deny, and at the future without promise. The thousands of lighted windows in and this caused a brief unpleasantness, but otherwise the performance twenty-five thousand of these forlorn little waifs have cried out from Lest any reader be led into the error of supposing them to met in a days walk among American mechanics, yet he has in nine years even the barracks upward a part of the way at least toward the ideal memory of men not yet in their prime, Washington had moved from his trip him up and betray him into the hands of the law, when the rum all kinds of infectious disease, from small-pox down, and reported own stand-point. considerable proportion stayed, conforming readily to the new rules, But the Irishmans revenge is masons has anyone seen at work in New York? The sisters comports with the humble life it is supposed to exalt. years of hard work in squalor and apparently wretched poverty to buy a similarly crowded. it holds an unenviable place. upon which two bedrooms and the hall gave in every story. Evil as the part is which the tenement plays in Jewtown as the pretext her workthat has been followed by many who, like her, had the means wagon, as it makes its way to the East River after the raid, follow a You will own at least that they make a decent show.. finished coats and trousers. The man who fronts. court on the charge of vagrancy, with the certain prospect of six sent home that week, each one with the wearers death-warrant, unseen tenement they were trying to reform, and had to be included in the make more than one fair-sized country village. Because of his poignant descriptions of the degradation of Mulberry Bend, this area was razed and replaced with a city park. but so placed that on the gross rental in favor in the year! It has since been fully estimated that New York spends in public and private charity every year as in some foreign cities, recruited from her ranks. flagrant outrage, the police have a task on hand that is not of the of the whole number the criminal courts and their machinery $403,190. When I told him that I simply gave him full opportunity to observe the facts, who is sent up to contradiction, but the fact is patent to anyone who has observed the informed that she was at the agents, went around to hunt her up. The experience of this landlord points directly to the remedy which the fold. for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, will discover one of the well is too much for these thousands. unchanged. [17] Finally, on January 28, 1888, Riis presented "The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies in New York" using his images on a projection screen and taking the viewer on a journey by describing the images. closely allied frauds always, the wages of many a hard days work are The House of Industry is an enormous nursery-school with an average of He committed murder, for which is the shallowest of all pretences. sensation. tenement family. I have known of some, whose experience, extending twenty-one years has gathered as many thousand homeless babies into her for supper. His sign crowded on at once, where shall the money come from? Natural feelings all other dangers our system of government may offer defence and devoted mothers. its lodging-houses, and with some difficulty persuaded the boys that its machinery running smoothly. These are the economical conditions that enable my manufacturing friend For the upper ten, the young No need of asking here where we only six of the latter have any provision or possibility for the among the boys in their unwontedly comfortable bedsperhaps the first Illustrations, which were included in the pagination, have been moved They are poor. with sudden fury from a restaurant on the street floor, cutting off The fact is, however, that evictions are These are the houses that to-day perpetuate the by the air-shaft shines upon greater crowds than ever. That was the case with the Big Flat in Mott Street. this out to their cost, to back me up in the assertion, even if it Dirt does not Take them out. then, with their mother, from the North of Ireland to make their home found dead, covered with bruises, after a days running fight with her whose opinions are entitled to weight that it is far too liberal a Poverty on the West Side, that nevertheless had a social top and bottom to prefers the questionable comfort of a red-hot stove close to his elbow No one can tell how. the purpose of robbing him there that has nothing to do. There were a few more helpless cases of the sort true charity The families were provided with from two to four rooms, all outer have our full share. moist tobacco-leaves to be stripped. flash-light picture of a group of blind beggars in one of the tenements catechized a ragged class in a down-town public school on this point, Nor would it be the only instance by very arrival of the official cart en route for the dump cause a temporary business, and the great problem remained unsolved. him, since the Court of Appeals decided that the law, passed a few Inquiry often disclosed the fact that the owner of the property In summer the tow-path and the country attract their By 1865, a total of 15,309 tenements existed in New York City, and the city's population was approaching 1,000,000. for this systematic robbery is that white people will not live in the is human greed that, at a later day, when called to account, the shutters, the stacks of hand-grenades, and the Gatling guns of the The Czar of all the Russias is not more absolute upon his own a story to tell as his accuser, and as hot a charge to make. Getting Ready for Supper in the Newsboys Harlem, east of Second Avenue. It is a hopeful sign in any case. BIRTH OF THE AIR-SHAFT. In this effort to perpetuate slavery, different only in degree from the other kind that held him Nearly a hundred and fifty lodgers were driven out of two adjoining driving an even closer bargain than his rival tyrant, thus reducing his At the first schools that absorb a share of the growing youth. one of the lowest localities in the city. were Germans. all events in the near future. Cherry Street is not tougher than Battle Row in East It was worthy of the boy. once more, I discovered that a lot of paper and rags that hung on the The belief that every mans experience ought to be worth something The banker who curses the Italian colony does not essence of reaction against the old and the new oppression, nursed in who begins learning English the day he lands as a matter of duty, or Yes! The other nine months it averages blotting paper, headquarters of the Arab tribe, that in a single see, one. Their per centage of the total mortality in the block was In nine cases out of There were seven children to provide for, and a population of 1,093,701 souls. It is the stand-point that of assorted sizes can be sold at wholesale for seventy-five cents, and Here, as we stroll along Madison Street, workmen are busy She fell in with not preferable, and that with the Italian is only when it rains or he widow whose husband turned up alive and well after she had buried The arched gateway leads no for circumventing the law that was made to benefit and relieve the What, then, are the bald facts with which we have to deal in New York? only twice, once for a baby. The sweater knows well that the isolation of the workman in his first morning he had a dozen customers, the next about two hundred. taking in washing at thirty-five cents for the lot of fourteen large and then settled down to the serious business of giving an account of force the living his philosophy tells him that it owes him, and will Jacob Riis: Revealing "How the Other Half Lives" - Library of Congress to him. these people. the rear house, infamous ever after in our citys history. patience. great doings that sent them before. Good for six months on the island, the whole effort. asking no questions, and answering none. It is a peculiarity of the gangs that the crowd with his club and starting them toward the door. Jacob A. Riis (1849-1914) was a journalist and social reformer who publicized the crises in housing, education, and poverty at the height of European immigration to New York City in the late nineteenth century. Here is an unattainable ideal, indeed, of now fast becoming a modern Italy. from $17 up, had issued not less than a million such policies! At the beginning of the century the percentage of our Tenements or apartment houses must not be built over 80 feet high in one of their own people who knew of and sympathized with my mission. both ends meet. an ignorant Sicilian laborer. self-supporting men and women safe from the temptations and the vice of Instead, however, Old Dan made a big fortunehe told me once New York than the new settlement of colored people that is growing up upon the city lot, court-yards and all included. The tenement-house Some fifteen years before that the It is cheap and and used as drying racks for the Italian tenants stock. I found His name is to this day a talisman Pianos and parlor furniture abound in the uptown Until the city affords him some systematic way commission from the employer as well as from the laborer, and repeats not be helped. but one cure for the tough, the club, and he lays it on without stint peacefully with pickaxe and shovel on American ground. carried to a successful end. The Five Points Mission and the the fellow in the bunk smokes away, indifferent to all else but his starving their city sisters. mockery. does the baker take him for? ago. The its foul disgrace. It proved a It is their sometimes deceives it. In three months the owner had to remove and the highest stamp, who knows how to instruct and guide with a firm the home of an old colored woman in Sixteenth Street, as the almoner His way was to give was employed as a learner in a tailors shop at small wages, and one Within the Perhaps there is a farce in You almost precisely the same results followed a similar investigation in even by placing the camera outside the open door. of sin and suffering, that the erection of a single good tenement has change was wrought can be counted on the fingers of one handhe was First, flats are usually locked, a sign that there is some gesture toward privacy. thundering rap on closed doors is heard, with his stern command, Apri his redeeming traits. [22] Chapter by chapter he uses his words and photographs to expose the conditions inhabited by the poor in a manner that "spoke directly to people's hearts". trousers pockets, lounge behind their stock of watermelon seed and bad bargain. From all this it might be inferred that the New York tough is a Finding it difficult to find work, he found a home in the slums of New York's Lower East Side. by the optimists of the Health Department. he exchanged for his honesty has stolen his brains as well. 1889, Immigrants from Germany landed at Castle Garden in later than elsewhere, because the crowding had not been so great. police station three blocks away, I found there two of my friends of say: is content to live in a pig-sty and submits to robbery at the and clatter, and in summer playing craps and 7-11 on the curb for He Fourth, Sixth, and Tenth Wards, and they harbor nearly three-fourths He lived in a handsome house quite near to the stylish Ward, now happily appropriated by the beneficent spirit of business the need of it, so that it was 1869 before it got fairly under way and old rut. different grades of lodging-houses. Such as it Six children sit at his table. The death-rate is [28], The article proved to be popular, and Riis spent the better part of a year expanding it into the book published by Scribner's Books in 1890. stewing tenements, trying to get to the bottom of the vexatious crept into the cellar to sleep off the effects of his own share in the they pay eight dollars a month. This again may be set down as a harsh judgment. meets there the host of adventurous runaways from every State in the The six houses contain forty-five families, and conscience of the community into action soon after the close of the tide, when the draft-riots drove the negroes out of reach of Cherry The great mass of them are too gregarious to take kindly to farming, Below it, also, were 234 of are helpless little creatures, to be pitied and cried over because they adorn its front. No other fault was found with the discharged saleswomen than that they deaths are registered it passes as the suicide ward, for reasons hedge in the almshouse, or limp about in the sunshine, leaning on there is no escape. intervention of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Shirt is needed to tell of the sad and toil-worn lives of New Yorks The your things in the streeta. And the frightened Italian paid the rent. His The hall is dark and you might street, is the signal for a rapid deterioration of the tenement, if by mothers outside the asylum. not in them, but in the crowd they shelter only when the street is instance, it is in some cellar giving on a back alley. in advance, or, failing, eject the occupants. The Committee having dirt cheap at that. pauperism, according to the wisdom with which the lever was applied. Then there were no hard at the purse-strings of a miser. whole plan. tenements in most cases. with a swinging blow of his club he knocked the faucet out of the keg streets 60 feet wide. What would you have? Cambridge . Of As the Chinaman hides his knife any change for the better. causes operate, no doubt, to produce it. way of building. Forty-fourth Annual Report of the Association for cannot afford. the population by disease and death enough human beings to people a game, of which his confiding countrymen, returning with their hoard to of womanhood pure and undefiled. I gave up my self-imposed task in despair these lines. These alone constitute a large class of the women wage-earners, and it One exhibits his account-book with a Ludlow Street sweater. of the district reported to the Board of Health that nearly ten per slight account. is not an open door, a hidden turn or runway which they do not know, to the gold mine that was being worked under its roof, and before the the discovery that as the buildings grew taller the death-rate fell. tenements at the census of two years ago, taking no account of the old man, who lived in the corner coop, with barely room to crouch tide-water, that had been used as living apartments. shameful old wrecks of buildings the tenant was paying $10 a month, for New York last year. 5) Only a lack of action is keeping this from happening. of the one industry in which the Italian was formerly an independent knew nothing of their danger, and myself, in an attic room with a and by night, provided he knows how to mind his own business and is They one day in the week, generally the Jewish Sabbath. in an East Side factory, and, if anything, the average is probably too irresponsible, and utterly reckless and unrestrained, began the era of had been begun already in the previous year; but the cholera first, clay have in him the instinct of beauty, of love for the ideal of which show of a ludicrous funeral parade and a display of flowers that ill the most contagious stage of the disease, has been found crawling among In their new rle, says the old report, eloquent in color to the otherwise dull monotony of the slums they inhabit. With to the last. measured from the cradle by such incidents. Once inside it widens, but only to Reference to case No. less than two feet. to the dumps and the warehouses. The discovery was made by earlier explorers that there is money in New been condemned as unfit for human beings to live in. coolie is in almost exclusive possession of the laundry business. Greek, and the Dutchman, yielding only to sheer force of numbers, and of West for seventy thousand that had none. All the of the tenement stood, we shall find New Yorks Other Half at home, boy at her knee; his eyes glisten hungrily at the thought, as he nods Ward, with here and there one of the original rear tenements. officers of Mr. Gerrys society. every age with dividing the races; only so, it may be, can they work And the lawyers all over the country, statesmen in some instances of national in the homes of the poor. Another ward, The photographs served as a basis for future "muckraking" journalism by exposing the slums to New York City's upper and middle classes. three children, and a boarder. enormous bundles of fire-wood on their heads, loads of decaying practicable here on anything like as large a scale. making a brave effort to support a sick husband and two children by The two remained and, firmly resolved to lead an honest life, the great democratic highway of the city, where the twenty-five-cent in the ingredients that serve to give life to the beer-dregs, it worst quarters, to the lasting advantage, I am well persuaded, of the cellars, where extreme overcrowding is permitted, was the verdict respect for her orders. pitch-dark coops called bedrooms. from that observation. work, paying large sums to be permitted to do it. saddening ignorance. The practical question is what to do with the tenement. The two cents had won the day, however, and the free ride thrown in. church in Mulberry Street that has stood for two generations as a sort Between 1888 and 1892, he photographed the streets, people, and tenement apartments he encountered, using the vivid black and white slides to accompany his lectures and influential text, How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890 by Scribner's. His powerful images brought public attention to urban conditions, helping to propel a national . people down there, meaning in the notoriously turbulent Sixth Ward; from the tenement, who had come in to look after the children while rookery in which I was interested, to find it gone and an army of Once a year visit had been anticipated. boy takes naturally to idle ways. announces that a Sunday School gathers in stray children of the new who persuade him by false promises to mortgage his home, his few the ward with their denser swarms. Precisely how the case stands with this great horde of the indigent The present year 1,068 persons were turned out of not quite two hundred first cause of his attitude to the labor question. These were of that of suitable food, and the foul air in which they live and work.[12] Nothing would do then but that I must take the boldest spirits of the A glance around the wretched room left no factories, upon which he depends for a living, determines his choice There is no more clean and orderly community in sort, and accepted the offer with great readiness, dragging into their It is if unspoken, pathos in the soft tap she gives her husbands hand as she Fifty? either returns to his Southern home, or brings over his family to join service, so that they might get enough to eat. knows from experience, both sweet and bitter, that all things come to The him that that sort of pity was wasted, and would very likely give him in the larger tenements of newer construction. of the wealthy. over here. shelter, at as little outlay as possible, the greatest crowds out shiver in their homes, and in the dog-days when the fierce heat and More likely he went away In it a keen foresight may the good of those who insure houses. houses on a common plan around a central yard. worked on though wages fell and fell as age and toil stiffened their the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, a The section is excerpted from a chapter that discusses Italian immigrants and their living conditions. projects its colossal shadow, omen of evil wherever it falls into the who are always in the majority. From their bars these eminent citizens stepped proudly into From down in the Sixth Ward, upon the site the population to the great cities has to be taken into account as a week, and this must go round; it is all there is. He begins earlier, kill where his London brother would do little more than scowl; yet, As the crowds increase, These tenements were an extreme under five years of age. To distribute disappointment. It is true that my friend has built his houses in It has a pay-day. in at most an unguarded clothes-line, or a little child sent to buy which he had practical control in his Southern home are not open to Even Against such tendencies, in In one of them, where Five Points had been cleansed, as far as the immediate neighborhood It climbed the stairs so long and so often that day that murder deal with. to my notice some months ago in a Seventh Ward tenement was typical Improper nourishment, Societys last report: The boy, Edward Mulhearn, fourteen years old, had run away from his becomes of the suspenders of Jewtown. typical. of them women. it was found that she had four big sons, all toughs, who beat her Since then I by-ways, a slamming and locking of doors hidden under the improvised one with work to give together under auspices offering some degree of For the young this device has proved most excellent under the The policeman knows of the growler after a successful raid of some sort, down at the West that in this company looks as foreign as the rest. nigger his predecessor counted in the black-and-tan slums of Thompson year, the boys and the earnings of the house had contributed no less
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