Jacob Riis immigrated to the United States from Denmark in 1870. After struggling for several years, he took a position as a police reporter for the New York Tribune in 1877. His newspaper work brought him face to face with the dark underside of city life in New York City. He joined with a group of social reformers who launched a crusade for better living conditions for immigrants. He began writing down his observations and then used photography to provide the public with visual reality of the plight of the poor. He became a legend as a reporter, reformer, and photographer and received accolades from persons such as Theodore Roosevelt. The selections below are excerpts taken from three important late 19th century journals that published Riis’ work exposing the harsh realities of the New York City tenements. The first two highlight the despair one normally associates with tenement life in the period. The third piece, however, although emphasizing the troubling aspects of immigrants living in the slums, also reveals some redeeming social values that emerged even in the midst of such wretched circumstances. Prior to his death in 1914, Riis compiled his writings and illustrations into the book How the Other Half Lives, an influential work that stimulated city leaders to pursue some reform measures.
How the Other Half Lives
New York alone, of the great cities of the world, has grown up with the century. The village of a hundred years ago is the metropolis of to-day. So fast a pace is not without its perils; in the haste to become great, our city has lost opportunities for healthy
Growth that have passed not to return____
It was in the old historic homes downtown that the tenement was born of ignorance and nursed in greed____
Turn but a dozen steps from the rush and roar of the elevated Railroad, where it dives under the Brooklyn Bridge at Franklin Square, and with its din echoing yet in your ears you have turned the corner from prosperity to poverty. You stand
Upon the domain of the tenement____Like ghosts of a departed
Day, the old houses linger; but their glory is gone. This one, with its shabby front and poorly patched roof, who shall tell what
Glowing firesides, what happy children it once owned?____ Dirt
And desolation reign in the wide hallway, and danger lurks on the rickety stairs____A horde of dirty children play on the bro
Ken flags about the dripping hydrant, the only thing in the alley that thinks enough of its chance to make the most of it; it is the best it can do. These are the children of the tenement, the growing generation of the slums....
The cosmopolitan character of lower New York, as well as the constant need of the policeman and the use of iron bars, were well illustrated by the statement of the agent at one of my visits, that there were one hundred Irish, thirty-eight Italian, and two
German families in the court. It was an eminently Irish suggestion that the two German families were to blame for the necessity of police surveillance; but a Chinaman whom I questioned as he hurried past the iron gate of the alley was evidently of a different
Opinion, though he prudently hesitated to express it____
Perhaps this may be put down as an exceptional case; but one that came to my notice some months ago. In a Seventh Ward tenement was typical enough to escape that reproach. There were nine in the family: husband, wife, an aged grandmother, and six children; honest, hard-working Germans, scrupulously neat, but poor! All nine lived in two rooms, one about ten feet square that served as parlor, bedroom, and eating room, the other a small hall made into a kitchen. That rent was seven dollars and a half, more than a week’s wages for the husband and father. That day the mother had thrown herself out the window, and was carried up from the street dead. She was ‘‘discouraged,’’ said some of the other women from the tenement, who had come to look after the children while a messenger carried the news to the father of the shop____
That pure womanhood should blossom in such an atmosphere of moral decay is one of the unfathomable mysteries of life. And yet, it is not an uncommon thing to find sweet and innocent girls, singularly untouched by the evil around them, true wives and faithful mothers, literally like ‘‘jewels in a swine’s snout’’ in these infamous barracks.
...The problem of the children becomes in these swarms, to the last degree perplexing. It is not unusual to find half a hundred in a single tenement. I have counted as many as one hundred and thirty-six in two adjoining houses in Crosby Street.
There was a big tenement in the Sixth Ward, now happily in the process of being appropriated by the beneficent spirit of business that blots out so many foul spots I New York—it figured not long ago in the official reports as ‘‘an out-and-out hog-pen’’—that had a record of one hundred and two arrests in four years among its four hundred and seventy-eight tenants, fifty-
Seven of them for drunken and disorderly conduct____
It is said that nowhere else in the world are so many people crowded together on a square mile as here. The average five-story tenement adds a story or two to its stature in Ludlow Street, and an extra building on the rear lot, and yet the sign
‘‘To Let’’ is the rarest of all there____Through dark hallways and
Filthy cellars, crowded, as is every foot of the street, with halfnaked children, the settlements in the rear are reached. Thieves know how to find them when pursued by the police, and the tramps that sneak in on chilly nights to fight for the warm spot
In the yard over some baker’s oven____
Life in the tenements in July and August spells death to an army of little ones whom the doctor’s skill is powerless to
Save____Fifty “summer doctors,’’ especially trained to this work,
Are then sent into the tenements by the Board of Health, with free advice and free medicine for the poor... but despite all efforts the grave-diggers in Calvary work overtime, and little coffins are stacked mountain-high on the deck of the Charity Commissioners’ boat when it makes its semi-weekly trips to the city cemetery...
.. .But one tremendous factor for evil in the lives of the poor has been taken by the throat, and something has unquestionably been done, where that was possible, to lift those lives out of the rut where they were equally beyond the reach of hope and of ambition. It is no longer lawful to construct barracks to cover the whole of a lot. Air an sunlight have a legal claim, and
The day of the rear tenement is past____ The dark, unventilated
Bedroom is going with them, and the open sewer. The day is not far distant when the greatest of all evils that now curses life in the tenements—the dearth of water in the hot summer days— will also have been remedied, and a long step taken toward the moral and physical redemption of their tenants.
These are the bright spots in the dreary picture; bright only by comparison.
Source: J. A. Riis, ‘‘How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements,’’ Scribner’s Magazine (Vol. VI, No. 6, December 1889), 643, 644, 647, 654, 657,658,660,661.
Merry Christmas in the Tenements
Across the narrow yard, in the basement of the rear house, the lights of a Christmas tree show against the grimy window-pane. The hare would never have gone around it. It is so very small. The two children are busily engaged fixing the goldfish upon one of its branches. Three little candles that burn there shed light upon a scene of utmost desolation. The room is black with smoke and dirt. In the middle of the floor oozes an oil-stove that serves at once to take the raw edge off the cold and to cook the meals by Half the window-panes are broken, and holes stuffed with rags. The sleeve of an old coat hangs out of one, and beats drearily upon the sash when the wind sweeps over the fence and rattles the rotten shutters. The family wash, clammy and gray, hangs on a clothes-line stretched across the room. Under it, at a table set with cracked and empty plates, a discouraged woman sits eying the children’s show gloomily. It is evident that she has been drinking. The peaked faces of the little ones wear a famished look. There are three—the third an infant, put to bed in what was once a baby-carriage. The two from the street are pulling it around to get the tree in range. The baby
Sees it, and crows with delight. The boy shakes a branch, and
The goldfish leaps and sparkles in the candle-light____ Outside
The snow is falling. It sifts silently into each nook and corner, softens all the hard and ugly lines, and throws the spotless mantle of charity over the blemishes, the shortcomings. Christmas morning will dawn pure and white____
Source: Riis, ‘‘Merry Christmas in the Tenements,’’ The Century Magazine (Vol. 55, No. 2, December 1897), 166, 182.
The Tenant
We have considered the problem of the tenement. Now about the tenant. How much of a problem is he? And how are we to go about solving his problems. The government ‘‘slum inquiry,’’ of which I have spoken before, gave us some facts about him. In New York it is found 62.58 per cent of the population of the slums to be foreign-born, whereas of the whole city the percentage of foreigners was only 43.23. While the proportion of illiteracy in all was only 7.69 to 100, in the slum it was 46.65 per cent. That, with nearly twice as many saloons to a given number, there should be three times as many arrests in the slum as in the city at large need not be attributed to nationality, except indirectly in its possible responsibility for the saloons____
Jealousy, envy, and meanness wear no fine clothes and masquerade under no smooth speeches in the slums. Often enough it is the very nakedness of the virtues that makes us stumble in our judgment. I have in mind the ‘‘difficult case’’ that confronted some philanthropic friends of mine in a rear tenement on Twelfth Street, in the person of an aged widow, quite seventy I should think, who worked uncomplainingly for a sweater all day and far into the night, pinching and saving and stinting herself with black bread and chicory coffee as her only fare, in order that she might carry her pitiful earnings to her big, lazy lout of a son in Brooklyn. He never worked. My friends’ difficulty was a very real one, for absolutely every attempt to relieve the widow was wrecked upon her mother heart. It all went over the river. Yet one would not have had her different.
Sometimes it is only the unfamiliar setting that shocks. When an East Side midnight burglar, discovered and pursued, killed a tenant who blocked his way of escape, a few weeks ago, his ‘‘girl’’ gave him up to the police. But it was not because he had taken a human life. ‘‘He was good to me,’’ she explained to the captain whom she told where to find him, ‘‘but since he robbed the church I had no use for him.’’ He had stolen, it seems, the communion service in a Staten Island church. The thoughtless laughed. But in her ignorant way she was only trying to apply the standards of morality as they had been taught her. Stunted, bemuddled, as they were, I think I should prefer to take my chances with her rather than with the woman of wealth and luxury who, some years ago, gave a Christmas party to her lapdog, as on the whole the sounder of the two, and by far the more hopeful.
All of which is merely saying that the country is all right, and the people are to be trusted with the old faith in spite of the slum. And it is true, if we remember to put it that way, - in spite of the slum. There is nothing in the slum to warrant that faith save human nature as yet uncorrupted____
Source: Riis, ‘‘The Tenant,’’ Atlantic Monthly (Vol. 84, Issue 502, August 1899), 153, 161-162.
World History
