How the Other Half Lives

Rating:
Summary: Jacob Riis' landmark expose of the New York City slums
Review: "The first tenement New York knew bore the mark of Cain from its birth, though a generation passed before the writing was deciphered."

"How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York" is arguably one of the most important books published in the United States in the 19th-century ("Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" are the obvious other contenders for the title). Together with its sequel "Battle with the Slum," this book uses sensationalist photographs and prose (as the above opening line indicates) from Jacob Riis to document the appalling living conditions in the Lower East Side of New York City at the turn-of-the-century. The chilling photographs of the filth and squalor of these tenements are unforgettable and while the prose does get a bit lurid at times, this famous journalistic record exposing the poverty and degradation of the New York slums is also a sociology treatise wherein Riis explores the evolution of the tenement. Within this context, the birth of the airshaft takes on profound significance as Riis tries to establish some of the causes for the effects he has documented as the premier social reformer in American history.

In its day "How the Other Half Lives" was a rhetorical document, constructed by Riis to advance an irrefutable position that something needed to be down about these conditions. Riis was a major social reformer and his book is of historic importance. Even more than a century removed from its publication it is still a powerful work. If he were walking the streets of New York City today no doubt Riis would be photographing and telling of the plight of the homeless and the "modern" projects that have replaced the tenements of his own time. At the very least, it gives readers a clear sense of what poverty and degradation was like at the previous turn of the century.