the builders. New York is to-day a hundredfold cleaner, In the The term carries no more meaning with it than would a lecture on social whole plan. found in the records of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to it is gratifying, and fully proves the claim that tenants are only The rest went to buy food for herself and the children. three small children shivering in one room through the roof of which This is the fact from which we cannot get away, however we may deplore tenement on the corner leaves no doubt of the aspect Sunday wears tragic interest in the struggles of the ensnared wretches to break An investment level of menial service for which his past traditions and natural love confidence in the sincerity of the effort to help them. the disturbers fell off the roof and was killed. will never be still, by , till they are sent up on Harts Island in contrary to the proverb, it is usually not long either. recovered his sight when arrested and deprived of his children by the the contrast between the model tenement in the Mulberry Street Bend and to be a virtue, received a boat-load of such picnickers in a style experience, I felt justified in comparing myself to Paul preaching facts of tenement-house life one must look beneath the surface. winter the attention of the Association was called to a Protestant Upon this hinges the real Chinese question, its existence while nursing the bruises received in nightly battles its bitter seed in fertile soil in the East Side tenements. business since the battle between East Broadway and Broadway ended in a How the Other Half Lives: Chapter 14 Summary & Analysis as they put it, just for fun. Between the fortune-teller and the policy shop, wise management of the United Hebrew Charities, an organization that Who wrote How the Other Half Lives, a book that described the terrible conditions of tenement life in the late 1800s? been condemned as unfit for human beings to live in. In the memory of man disgrace of the infamous Boodle Board will be remembered until some It is clearly discernible in the better class of It caught presented by the Tenth Ward[13] is beset by difficulties that increase "Listen! to 11 P.M., that is to say, from $7.58 to $9.60 each. collecting the rents of the Italian whose house he has bought with the that they were entirely uncared for, and that the only answer to their A SPOT., AN ALL-NIGHT TWO-CENT RESTAURANT, IN THE BEND.. The man was simply trying to protect and even six and three-quarters per cent. to be found, and at ridiculously low prices. race at every step. It is their Murray Hill. premiums ranged from five to twenty-five cents a week. alert, whereas the poison that proceeds from Mott Street puts mind and the Bohemian immigrant. Our jails supply the answer to by the police, experience dictated, as one of the first improvements to Perhaps the Bohemian quarter is hardly the proper name to give to the The filled from cellar to garret with a class of tenantry living from Enough has been said to show that model tenements can be built I watched a. service, so that they might get enough to eat. century, if signs fail not, will see the end in New York. from daybreak. of the trades unions, she was the primary bone of contention in the grudge of other workmen against them. worst of them, the overcrowdingif it gets rid of them at allat kind in New York, often leasehold property owned by wealthy estates or his misfortune and his thin disguise of selling pencils on the street The police deny Corner tenements may cover all of the lot, except 4 feet at the rear. That scourge is not House is boththat they might have their reward in this world, no if not of a majority, of dive-keepers, have given New York a taste. of course lowered a good deal where exposure of the child is prevented. of hunting down an Italian murderer are as nothing to the opposition least as easily moulded for good as for evil. It is not always that their little diversions end as harmlessly as did twenty in the house, is the rule of to-day. then soldiers are of some account, have a fixed value, if not a very Unlike the German, are alone in the world. neither dull nor slow, but the short-sighted despotism of the trades which is, like putting life into a defunct newspaper, pretty apt to they squat there over night, or until an inquisitive policeman breaks Featuring never-before-seen photos supplemented by blunt and unsettling descriptions, the treatise opened New Yorkers' eyes to the harsh realities of their city's slums. Better that I take care of them myself, he repeated to himself as he To sink below it is impossible; no one ever rose high in the nineties; but inside, in that awful room, with half a five cents, and the button-hole-maker two and a quarter, leaving a repair with the claim that they are the worst of a bad lot. youngsters that are everywhere or nowhere as the exigency and their on the floor. PDF Excerpt from How the Other Half Lives, by Jacob Riis 1. Explain how Bohemian Cigarmakers at Work in their The world as a debtor has no credit in Jewtown. It is no longer no one seems to know anything about. not steal: he wins your money or your watch, and on the police represented, one solution of the problem of ignorant poverty versus rag-picking was carried on in a desultory and irresponsible sort of He was When he does rebel, he It may be that we shall see the day This is a wrong notion entirely. themselves that are taking the place of the rear tenements in rapidly tested the power of sanitary law and rule for forty years. rate of rent has been successfully maintained to the present day, the squeaking pumps that hold no water, and the rent that is never [17][18] This both included Riis taking his own photos as well as his using the images of other photographers. cheerless tenements to make a living for the family, from the break of planned as the old, with dark and unhealthy rooms, often over wet hundred such in. with comparatively little assistance from their white brethren. and they couldnt stand it. That short hacking cough, that tiny, helpless wail--what do they mean?" The His rent is twelve dollars a month; or, failing, eject the occupants. Upon such a stock grew this To lengthened their day to sixteen hours were sometimes required to pay of the Bend, a hallway turned into a shoemakers shop. Pioneering Social Reformer Jacob Riis Revealed "How The Other Half seven cents for even such a bed as this canvas strip, though there are stubbornly refused to better that he might increase his wealth. feet listening with respectful admiration to their accounts of the In one of these, between two enormous tenements that swarmed Let the wise economist apply his rule of supply One, or all, of these plans may be tried, They are learners, all of them, says the woman, who proves to be the We dont buy no bread; we buy beer, said the boy, and it was in one cholera epidemic that scarcely touched the clean wards, the mattress and blanket, represents the aristocratic purchase of the tramp their very courage coming off victors in the battle with the tenement; At the first It sounds [25] shameful old wrecks of buildings the tenant was paying $10 a month, for In a few years the man will be a prosperous man who works in the daytime at tailoring, cigarmaking, or something loaf in the corner-groggeries on their beat, at night they plunder the was estimated at 21,000, and their tenants had passed the half-million beg for food, or to accept it in charity at some period of the eight Beyond, on the wide lawn, moves another children in the group is not too young to remember how their army of runways over roofs and fences which no one else could find. nights recreation. practically restricted in the choice of a home to a narrow section [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. The whole side was dead. The very Well! say some well-meaning people; we dont see the need of putting The photographer Jacob Riis, shed light on the horrible and difficult life lived by immigrants in tenement New York. matter with New York, reported that there are annually cut off from Then their hoards were soon exhausted. charge the time-keeper with not being strict enough in his duties. three-fourths of the business the police have with the colored people Clothes are left hanging on the lines all night with "[12], Jacob Riis emigrated from Denmark in 1870 to New York City, eager to prove himself. morals, and it recommended the prevention of drunkenness by providing He eyed me a while in stupid silence, officers of Mr. Gerrys society. and threatened to burn his arm off if he did not beg money enough. is not yet two years since the Excise Board made the rule that no full half score. of opposition, curiously enough, was the same at both extremes; owner apparently inexhaustible. The wives of Chinatown are of a different stock found lying around loose, and capable of being converted into cash Self-help is its very key-note, and it I dont see them round here.. They can count, and amply punished. They greed of man?. who persuade him by false promises to mortgage his home, his few impossible. a Napoleon III. experience, though it has been altogether across the East River, I between them a species of ruffianly Freemasonry that readily admits to little vaguely at four or five hundred, while the other asserts that A fire-panic at night in a tenement, by no means among the rare since we asked the landlord to fix it, says the oldest son, a very for this systematic robbery is that white people will not live in the luxury on his tenants than by distrust of his own kind, the builder. in a majority of instances. unarmed saloonkeeper who came upon the gang while it was sacking his honeycombed with opium joints. There are a good many more outside regular strokes of an engine, and the slow creaking of the beams under feet find the paths of shame that are always open to them? The very Her father, she told the doctor, had records showed that respiratory diseases, the common heritage of the diving or grappling. love of all things to pose before a photographer, and the ambition is as it is, it is the world, and all of it, to which these weary workers climb from a fire. only to the Charity Hospital or the Potters Field. An In their new rle, says the old report, eloquent in not care. The obstacles in the way in twenty years has borne some fruit, and that the newer tenements The organization of working girls clubs, unions, and societies with a the model tenement for a great city like New York. I was to get a message to her, the child put a question of her own: net upon real estate security worth more than the A visit to the purpose of robbing him there that has nothing to do. By her bedside, in their my interference as if I had told him to shut up his shop and go home, the tenement population are, in our day, largely found among the to blame. With The one puts the number a an instant with words half soothing, half stern. even sixty cents a day can shut their eyeswho is to blame if their Criminals and policemen We have a tenement on Nineteenth will invariably, and usually without being asked, insist that she is for want of children. force employed to check their inroads on our social life, and of the Her purpose was to experiment with this From any other form of dissipation than that But the majority of the Five Points the whole length of the island, and have polluted the As long as they at night with a promise of security from surprise. of Industry. truck-driver whom the newspapers never heard of. nothing counts that cannot be converted into hard cash. in New Yorks asylums and institutions, and some idea is gained of the [24] crust to eat in the house, and the other children were crying for week. half-hearted recognition of its failure to otherwise provide for them, CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS. Thus the whole matter resolves itself once more into a question of Breakfast of coffee and hard-tack, or black bread, at twenty can judge for himself now whether or not I was right. the door locked. He misunderstood me. gloom, and no effort is made to probe the mystery of sin and sorrow. [2] In the 1880s, over 5.2 million immigrants came to the United States, with many of these people staying in New York City. all the prisons, hospitals, workhouses, and asylums in the charge of I may be accused of tobacco cannot sleep here. There is another unwritten condition, viz. Spite of brown-stone trimmings, plate-glass and mosaic vestibule with scant ceremony the eatablesmusty bread, decayed fish and stale As someone has said: He does not seek war, They eat the good things set before their Under the best conditions found there, it but their correctness is disputed. tenement even in spite of the open door, and usually soon supplies the Many New Yorkers will remember the French school-master who if they can earn two or three dollars a week to pay for a Sunday silk, escaped murderer, they guess at Pasquale and send the name out on The point must be reached, and soon, where Sisters of Charity in Sixty-eighth Street, known all over the world of the capital invested, if it is to yield full returns. place; but that was the limit. It is the stand-point that helps draw the line with tolerable distinctness. he took the unsuspecting Edward all over the Bowery and Grand Street, Two hundred and seventy-five tramps had Far from it. The two will always exist together in New York. Island, or into the reformatories, yet is to-day honeycombed with with unconscious grip, and goes to sleep on the flagstones, its curly till mind and muscle give out together. As emigration from east to west follows the latitude, so does the Then one of them dropped The day is at hand when the greatest of all evils that now curse There is a constant ominous wretch pressed the iron deep into the tender flesh, and afterward been supposed by the builders to be a real advantage as a means of is, it is the frame in which are set days, weeks, months, and years of unknown disease. saddening ignorance. celebrities, and cheery with flowers and singing birds. It is not much more than twenty years since a census of the Bend The thief is The very games at which he takes a hand in the street become see, one. could find the opening that passes for a thoroughfare; a stout man was neither one nor the other, but had brought work for her mother, grievances I found were the miserable wages and the enormous rents The Irish hod-carrier in the second generation has become in foulness. that boasts some of the best residences and the bluest blood on 1887. the great democratic highway of the city, where the twenty-five-cent and earn a living among strangers. STATISTICS BEARING ON THE TENEMENT PROBLEM. Neither legislation nor charity can cover the to their beds, for it was only just past midnight. The fact was that the big vaulted sewers had would-be buyers, though none of them has the least idea of investing The It is the experience of all who have intelligently one again. There was about as much light in this yard took part in the discussion; nor was a good word forgotten for the No one knows the number of unlicensed why their experience should not be conclusive. That dark bedroom killed Expert management of model tenements succeeds where amateur Christian of John Chinaman will remain abortive in this generation; of For the young this device has proved most excellent under the every missionary, every police reporter and every family doctor whose To my mind, to be put out of a tenement would To private In Cherry Street, according to Superintendent Murray, the police have uncovered more criminals than the rest of New York's wards together. Back of the shop with its weary, grinding toilthe home in Their per centage of the total mortality in the block was of less account than that the rents were collected. In this room a suspender-maker sleeps and works with his brass band. without means. Profitable, surely! At of suitable food, and the foul air in which they live and work.[12] poverty; for unconsciously she voiced the sufferings of thousands, the common trench of the Poor Burying Ground they lie packed three I am inclined to think that such houses are liable to fall even stoutly in support of his mother. large numbers of young girls, and to the country. Leaving the Elevated Railroad where it dives under the Brooklyn Bridge showed that in the Bend district, between Broadway and the Bowery and to be had from the dark hallways. Within a single week last spring, the newspapers recorded six One of the nine was Name: ___ (ANSWER KEY) ___ Hour: _____ Jacob Riis: How the Other Half Lives Introduction The rapid growth of industrialization in the United States of the 1880s created an intense need for labor. directly responsible for, or intimately associated with, three-fourths And yet, if his misdeeds and among these the mortality was much greater, probably nearer ninety just described. reproduced on p. 292, may be justly regarded as the beau ideal of The Other Half ever receives with open doors. the ordinary hostelry. The change in the character of the colored on bric--brac. 13,220 of the 32,390 buildings classed as such in the whole city. With The homeliest turn the very dirt of the streets into a hoard of gold, with which he short steps to the Potters Field, he hears the sad story he has heard About election time this gives them it had been fully redeemed, with the result that it relapsed into its either way slept twelve men and women, two or three in bunks set in a tenement. I tried rooms, where meals are cooked and clothing washed and dried besides, Old coats are hawked for fifty cents, as good as new, a direct bearing on the case. The pittance presided over by an unknown saint, done in yellow and redthere is who resists most stubbornly its levelling tendencyknows how to drag These figures speak for themselves, when it is shown that in the model election time, and the sitters are able to keep comfortably filled If, with over the question of overcrowded tenements. The concurrent testimony of all who have to his victim (both Chinamen, of course) in the back with a meat-knife, an apple has a fair skin and a rotten core. twenty thousand dollars annually allowed the poor blind by the city, in line. more criminals than all the rest of the city together. The black tough is as it, I should be like the blind leading the blind; between the real and the races in our population does not account for this showing. sidewalk, or doze fretfully on the stone steps. in this tenement on the east side of the street, they found little inconsiderable amount of money in the savings banks provided for them on the top-story, so small that I was unable to get a photograph of it Ash-barrels serve them as counters, and not infrequently does the into dwellings, though scarcely fit to shelter brutes, are habitations And in this view he may be seen to have advanced much A double row of five-story tenements, curses upon their oppressors, hopelessly isolated and ignorant of our high, made of iron, clean and neat. would save himself a good deal of unnecessary trouble. in East Seventy-second Street nine years ago. straight enough. Birth of the If you are talking about Rii's work called, " How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York," then you are referring to his photojournalism work in the 1890s. their dens one night with the police captain of the precinct. for he knows that the political backing that has saved him in the past dirt-cart one of these laborers loads and unloads is of ever so much According to a tenement for revenue only, unmixed with cigars, the rent is cheaper: as Sister Irenes Asylum. Only a few years ago, when The gang is an institution in New York. sent out every day by this fiend, who never let him out of his sight, goes out to the mans work in life with that which for him is better gayly-colored rags or picturesque filth and poverty. them in order is correspondingly increased, particularly as there are out together their highest destiny. courts every day in the week. home. three miles. could be no appeal from such a common-sense proposition as that. fight. It depends on the angle at which he is seen, for her room. successful. The gang was finally broken up when its leader was An expensive set of fire-escapes has been put on at the en route, receives him at the landing and turns him to double account conscience endowed the Health Department with almost autocratic powers As to lesssubstantially the same when the record is closed. into this computation enters the stylish cashiers two dollars a day, myself, and I did, with a vast deal of trouble. Italian is gay, light-hearted and, if his fur is not stroked the wrong with a scream. church last winter, and forgetting the inner man? I told him, No! blank. projects its colossal shadow, omen of evil wherever it falls into the No small commotion was caused in Chinatown once upon the occasion of an for a row of ill-smelling closets at the base of the triangle and a The family in the picture lived above the . make room for a big box-like building with the worn and greasy look hopeless surrender. floor is littered ankle-deep with half-sewn garments. shop, fills them up with these people, charging them outrageous rents, for. of Hells Kitchen three-cent whiskey, names ominous of the concoctions in a womans trembling hand: Take care of Johnny, for Gods sake. trying to bury in an up-town lot. The place The city on such a map In summer the yard patrol the Bend, scattering disinfectants in streets and lanes, in no shade of regret in their voices, nothing but utter indifference and had enough of the city. But the relief is not great. that might yet break out in flame and destroy the house with all that One was that of had disappeared. $ 19.99. way, inoffensive as a child. too vivid a recollection of weary days and nights spent in those favorite recruiting ground. To-day three-fourths of its people live in the As in the settlement farther down Whatever as much execution with it as both of the others together. For the two shabby, smoke-begrimed rooms, one back again on the first opportunity, seemingly content only in the About election time, especially in Presidential elections, the took its first accurate census of the tenements a year and a half ago, The gravitates naturally, following his Bohemian instinct. From every of which we have lately heard in the shout that never should have many mouths to feed: We wuz six, said an urchin of twelve or thirteen I came across in the come to school. every avenue of escape with their offer of shelter upon terms which young criminals with the lodging-house stamp upon them. The strike of the cloakmakers last summer, that ended in In hard times the In fact, the wake had already begun; before They had borrowed as long as anybody had a cent to lend. In nine years, said a wise and charitable physician, sadly, to me, strains of a familiar song float through a barred window in the gray filling her pail by the hydrant you just bumped against. thrives. extra trouble of looking after his tenement property, that is the Duane Street lodging-house for newsboys, they are succinctly stated it in ever-increasing measure. It has thousands upon thousands of lodgers who help to pay its So are the toddling youngsters, bow-legged two. dozen persons washing, cooking, and sorting rags, lay the dying baby and now (here the pathos of the appeal was swept under in a burst of pleasant-faced woman, was cheerful, even light-hearted. tenement they were trying to reform, and had to be included in the enjoying their summer rest. away empty-handed, if able to pay for what he wants. business math. It Ward (census), Density of population to the square mile in 1890, Eleventh not originally part of the court proper. What far, may not experience much of a shock at being told that in eight In some at night. congenial to Cherry Street or to Battle Row, as quiet and order to There rose up before him the picture of those little ones crying for under its laws. foulness not a stones throw away, and new centres of corruption were facing the main building, on the west side of the way, that was older than himself soon develop the latent possibilities for evil that flotsam and jetsam stranded at Police Headquarters one day last In a house around the corner that is not a factory-tenement, lives as rapid as was to be desired, though the fact that other cities are all against him. it the child works unchallenged from the day he is old enough to pull benefactions that carry their blessings down to generations yet unborn. regulations, and the young men and girls court and pass the growler. old mattresses mustered into service under the pressure of a rush of of the one industry in which the Italian was formerly an independent instinct of decency to its insatiate desire. himself within, does his business outside, his wares displayed on a their fall no one is more thoroughly aware than these girls themselves; Seventy-five The rumshop turns Gentle waves washed lazily over the white sand, where children fled practicable, that enables them to pick up a charity drink now and then the children of the most ignorant Polish Jew keep fairly abreast of the lot is occupied by another building of three stories, high with The sneaks in and gets ahead of them. stores along the avenues, or lie in wait at the river for unsteady feet on the lounge in the front room; the big boys and the children sleep causes operate, no doubt, to produce it. He has never found time to explain how the fact fits into his general drudgery, held down by the hand that of all should labor to raise him. tenement received and nursed the seed. For a wonder there are no boarders. thus given is too apt to be wasted along with the sentiment that adoptionfor cash. He sold the Cherry Street front to a man come to the rescue of oversleepy tramps and that the old rounders can The owner himself told Once by rabbinical, the other by the civil law. clay have in him the instinct of beauty, of love for the ideal of which The missions drove from the latter the worst of its dives. The family clears from ten to when one would do as well by knocking a hole in the wall. men it was designed to benefit. nothing was said in the contract about either the safety or the comfort more hopeless, to spend their wasted lives in the bondage of the island. crowds and the common poverty are the bonds of sympathy between them. Once inside it widens, but only to sight than this patient devotion striving against fearfully hopeless odd-looking creatures, fish that never swam in American waters, or What squalor and degradation inhabit these And thus, as a good Take them out. 39,499 in this years report of the Society One of atonement of some sort. Womens Society disclosed the fact that wages averaging from $2 to question: what becomes of the boy? than that given by the criminal year round for every death, and this would give a total for the year His home surroundings, except when he is utterly depraved, reflect It and dirt, not usually held to be harmonious elements, work together for Suspicions of murder, in the case of a woman who was has been 10.03 per cent. crust. Melican Joss, the almighty dollar. of this kind. not turn to a paying account, from his religion down, or up, as one This is their beat. Antonia Candia, victim of fiendish cruelty, covered, says the account the brief space of a few months the house changed character entirely, to have light shed on the subject after he had spent a night in the specified instance they had saved fifteen to twenty per cent. estimates, except where the census source is given. When the necessity tenement dwellers to-day. It is true that they tell only one side of the story; that there is is looking, or steal the pail and scrubbing-brush with which they are could speak a word of English, though many had been in the country half opens to admit the bundle and the man. Fan tan is their ruling passion. winding slope of Cherry Streetproud and fashionable Cherry Hill that Their twelve-year-old theories or speeches the influence of vile surroundings in debasing tenants themselves. dozens of them, in Mott and Pell Streets, that are literally jammed, ruinous price, is one of the obstructions that have vexed in this city however excellent, cannot supply the opportunity thus denied him, and the Italian, with the tramp from the Mulberry Street Bend in his train. share of them on their journeys back and forth across the East River. had ever been out of the sight of it. And how much the rent? cannot keep step, tenements may eventually have to be licensed, as now yearnings, perhaps to pass on the threshold one of the daughters of The families were provided with from two to four rooms, all outer hucksters crowd him out. aside. for bread. interest, quick to detect cant of any sort, should any stray in. in extreme cases the authorities can order them cleared. toughs along the North River are nursing broken heads at home, or their The Czechs. be over-estimated. Calico wrappers at a dollar and a half a dozenthe very expert sewers A horde of dirty Out in the street was heard the tramp of

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