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

Rating:
Summary: How did those immigrants survive ?
Review: How did our grandfathers and great-grandfathers (and great-great, I suppose) survive immigration and the slums? What was life like on the Lower East Side of New York? For those of us whose family has only been in the US for a few generations, this is a must-read. Whether Irish, Italian, Jewish, Chinese or Polish, German, Russian, hordes of refugees ended up in New York on the promise of a better life.

Reading Riis' book reads like the newspaper in some ways; entrepreneurs lured poor people from Eastern Europe and contracted out their labor in sweat shops in the US. Sound familiar? But what is not so familiar are the living conditions in the tenements, dark, unventilated cages in blocks of buildings that rented for a surprising high rent to people who died by the thousands in the unsanitary conditions. Farm animals had it better. Why was rent so high? Supply and demand. Cheaper rent was to be had in Brooklyn and the outlying (as yet unincorporated) boroughs, but the WORK was in Manhattan, where you could get by as a tailor, a seamstress, a peddler or in some illegitimate activity.

The conditions will make you cry; the story of foundling babies (abandoned newborns) is astonishing. A cradle was put outside a Catholic Church and instead of a baby each night, racks of babies appeared. The Church had to establish foundling hospitals run by nuns, who persuaded the unwed or impoverished mothers to nurse the baby they gave up, plus another baby (women can usually nurse two, though these malnourished women must have been hard-pressed.) The child mortality rate, especially in the "back tenements" or buildings built on to the back of others (dark and airless) was incredible.

I wish the plates in the book were of better quality; Riis took many photographs, but the reproduction here is poor and they are hard to see. I recommend that if you are interested in this subject from seeing "The Gangs of New York" or for genealogical reasons, that you visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and see the buildings for yourself. Even cleaned up and no longer packed with unwashed people, they are heart-rending.

Rating:
Summary: Examining Society's Social Structures
Review: Jacob Riis can be considered one of the greatest social reformers of modern times. He used his writing and photography to publicize the lifestyles of the lower classes in New York City in the late nineteenth through early twentieth centuries. In How the Other Half Lives, Riis described the inherent injustices and terrible living conditions of New York City tenements. He exposed the public to the evils of tenement life, portraying New York City living conditions of the lower classes for what they truly were. He successfully accomplished his goal of attracting attention to a dire situation.

Riis wrote How the Other Half Lives to evoke sympathy to awaken the masses to the poverty in their backyards. Through his writings and photographs Riis knew people would become aware and respond to the living conditions in New York slums. Tenements were large buildings that overflowed with families living under miserable conditions. People representing many different nationalities lived in New York City tenements, and the population of immigrants grew incredibly during this time of emigration. It quickly became the most heterogeneous city in the country, and the different Europeans lived together under terrible conditions. Some immigrant groups of the same nationality lived in small separate communities together. Most settled on the East Side of New York, where the New York aristocracy had lived. The contrast between the days when the aristocracy lived on the East Side and when the immigrants moved there is quite apparent.

Jacob Riis stated, "Homes had ceased to be sufficiently separate, decent, and desirable to afford what are regarded as ordinary wholesome influences of home and family." Tenements were overcrowded, dark, and unsanitary. Riis felt nobody should live in these conditions, and he called people to recognize the horrors of immigrant life. The homes of these immigrants were described in this way, "Large rooms were partitioned into several smaller ones, without regard to 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." One of Riis's photographs, "In Poverty Gap, West Twenty-Fourth Street An English Coal Heaver's Home" depicts a typical poor immigrant family who obviously had very little materially and lived in a dilapidated tenement. The family seems very hardened in emotion, as if they are not even real. The combination of poignant quotes and photographs such as these led people to challenge the status quo.

One of Riis's major tasks was to distinguish the difference between the "haves" and "have-nots" of New York City by comparing the immigrants with the few rich. There was very little social mobility for tenement immigrants, who made up the majority of the population. He appealed to the consciousness of the rich by saying, "As business increased, and the city grew with rapid strides, the necessities of the poor became the opportunity of their wealthier neighbors." This points out the exploitation of immigrants by the wealthy class that Riis felt existed. No matter how hard they worked, there seemed to be no way out for the immigrants. "Knee Pants at Forty-Five Cents a Dozen - a Ludlow Street Sweater's Shop" is a photograph that shows an entire family working diligently in their confined tenement. This illustrates that there was no hope for immigrant families; they kept working but reaped no benefits. Riis blamed the tenement living conditions for the crimes and unethical behavior he saw among the immigrants. He blamed their poor standard of living for the abundance of crime and other abuses in immigrant neighborhoods. "A Downtown Morgue" presents us with drinking, one of the vices of the immigrants, but implies that they had nothing to encourage them to stay away from it. The photograph also reinforces the poverty and hopelessness, suggesting the immigrants had nothing to live for so they wasted their lives away on alcohol. Riis took a special interest in children because he saw them as innocent people who had become so jaded by their surroundings that they became criminals. "Prayer Time in the Nursery, Five Points House of Industry" portrays young children praying, probably indicating Riis's dream that all children would be set on the right path and stay there throughout their lives.

A major criticism to Riis's work is that he was prejudiced and writing from a biased point of view. Riis reflected the view of the upper classes toward the immigrants and poorer classes, and readers can pick up on this through the biases in his work. He could not fully understand the plight of the people he studied because he was not one of them. Riis used terms that were crude and unflattering to the nationalities of those whom he was describing. He describes the "Chinaman" in the following way, "Ages of senseless idolatry, a mere grub-worship, have left him without the essential qualities for appreciating the gentle teachings of a faith whose motive and unselfish spirit are alike beyond his grasp." He also referred to the Chinese as a "terrible menace to society" because of their marijuana smoking. Riis wrote that "lower class" Italians were foreign, different, and therefore separate from others. Other examples of vivid language Riis used were, "the tramps, peddlers, hags, rude swains, and the really pretty girls." Since he was an outsider due to his class, he could not possibly relate to the people he was describing.

Rating:
Summary: A really fine book
Review: Like books by Steinbeck, How the other half lives is a eye opening expose of life for the have-nots in the late 19th century. The progression through the different areas of NYC shows that there were a lot more poorer people in the city than I thought. Riis is thorough and pulls no punches in showing how the other half true lives.