How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York

Front Cover
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890 - City dwellers - 304 pages
"Jacob Riis's illustrated tour of New York's slums had an immediate and extraordinary impact on society, inspiring reforms that changed the face of the city. In 1890, when the book was published, the Lower East Side was a landscape of teeming streets and filthy tenements crowded with immigrants living in dreadful conditions. How the Other Half Lives brings them to life - the Italians, Jews, Bohemians (Czechs and Slovaks), Blacks, and Chinese - in precise descriptions of their habits and traditions, jobs and wages, rents paid and meals eaten, and explores the effects of crime, poverty, alcohol, and lack of education and opportunity on adults and children alike. Riis's reliance on specific, hard facts as the tools and weapons of social criticism pioneered the style of crusading journalism that continues today. His use of photographs ... to put faces to his stories was a landmark in photojournalism"--From publisher's description (a later edition).
 

Contents

I
1
II
7
III
15
IV
21
V
28
VI
48
VIII
55
IX
71
XVI
159
XVII
179
XVIII
187
XIX
196
XX
210
XXI
217
XXII
234
XXIII
243

X
82
XI
92
XII
104
XIII
120
XIV
136
XV
148
XXIV
255
XXV
263
XXVII
268
XXIX
282
Copyright

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Page 17 - what is a tenement ? The law defines it as a house " occupied by three or more families, living independently and doing their cooking on the premises ; or by more than two families on a floor, so living and cooking
Page 116 - knowing that at least twenty cents of the thirty, two hundred per cent., were clear profit, if indeed the " pants " cost the pedlar anything. The suspender pedlar is the mystery of the Pig-market, omnipresent and unfathomable. He is met at every step with his wares dangling over his shoulder, down his back,
Page 43 - niggardly hand. That was a woman filling her pail by the hydrant you just bumped against. The sinks are in the hallway, that all the tenants may have access—and all be poisoned alike by their summer stenches. Hear the pump squeak ! It is the lullaby of
Page 18 - centre of the house, and no direct through ventilation is possible, each family being separated from the other by partitions. Frequently the rear of the lot is occupied by another building of three stories high with two families on a floor.
Page 8 - light or ventilation, the rate of rent being lower in proportion to space or height from the street ; and they soon became filled from cellar to garret with a class of tenantry living from hand to mouth, loose in morals, improvident in habits, degraded, and squalid as beggary itself.
Page 163 - unsatisfied. Tenement-houses have no aesthetic resources. If any are to be brought to bear on them, they must come from the outside. There is the common hall with doors opening softly on every landing as the strange step is heard on the stairs, the air-shaft that
Page 3 - and the evil they breed, are but as a just punishment upon the community that gave it no other choice, it will be because that is the truth. The boundary line lies there because, while the forces for good on one side vastly outweigh the
Page 124 - full of finished coats and trousers. Let us follow one to his home and see how Sunday passes in a Ludlow Street tenement. Up two flights of dark stairs, three, four, with new smells of cabbage, of onions, of frying fish, on every landing, whirring sewing machines behind closed doors betraying what goes on within, to the door that opens to admit the bundle
Page 107 - York. Half of them require and receive aid from the Hebrew Charities from the very start, lest they starve. That is one explanation. There is another class than the one that cannot get work : those who have had too much of it ; who have worked and hoarded and lived, crowded together like pigs, on
Page 19 - and business of New York, hold them at their mercy in the day of mob-rule and wrath. The bullet-proof shutters, the stacks of hand-grenades, and the Gatling guns of the Sub-Treasury are tacit admissions of the fact and of the quality of the mercy expected. The tenements to-day are

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