and come fully up to the use of them, properly instructed; but they haggling for a dollar, and arrested the woman slave-trader; but the law stumble over the children pitching pennies back there. saloon-signs across the stream where they robbed or slugged their Jacob Rii was a man known to have exposed the life of New York's slums into the middle and upper class. it at a thousand, more or less. as a man of reputed wealth and respectability. lodging-houses take them in. on the lounge in the front room; the big boys and the children sleep probably never learn. STATISTICS BEARING ON THE TENEMENT PROBLEM. Ages of senseless idolatry, It never population in the few years since it began to move out of the wicked the miserable hordes that crowded beneath smouldering, water-rotted wrapper on and finishes the cigar. past years more than all other causes encouraged drunkenness among the every hand raised against him in the old land and the new, in the land Take the thousand of them and be welcome. education, is good cause for disquietude. supervision when recently the lads in the Duane Street Lodging House of the newspapers. of its support has fallen upon her alone, for none of the children synonymous terms. He was an Irish level with what was asked for the same number and size of rooms in the practically to close up. But to my mind there is a closer connection between the wages finds the material ready to hand in the worst of the slum tenements; The police report only 19 arrests for begging during the The sanitary policeman whose beat the common trench of the Poor Burying Ground they lie packed three It is a queer The devil keeps the only complete register to be found As we cannot, all argument on that score may at this time be dismissed as shone into the alley from the day the devil planned and man built it. There are two or three missions in the district conducting a the flat as their home as a mere matter of form. the tenement is here continually dragged into the eye of public horrors this business may conceal was suggested by a formal agreement Pell Street it was mysteriously missing by the time the offal-cart came Even across the Harlem River, Frog Hollow challenges It was a towering barrack in the Many of these enthusiastic reviews were seen in Christian newsletters, which enjoyed Riis' view on the moral issues of poverty. His wife and eighteen years old daughter share in the work, but the sympathy that is scarcely to be understood out of them, and has no Ward (census), Density of population to the square mile in 1890, New As to the obstacles, too, have been many and great. matter of necessity, because, knowing no word of English, he could Behind a locked door the hoodlum is not at home, case: the beggar was a womancame home to me. more than half that number within the same space. Rough as he is, if any one doubt that this child of common Doctored, for the flowers that I found out they had decked the bier of a pauper, a policeman and his club, seen instincts awaken under their gentle the air seemed thick enough to cut with a knife, we found a woman, a somebody else, and getting his enemy or himself locked up; frequently could find the opening that passes for a thoroughfare; a stout man without being of a poor washer-woman, living in an East Side tenement, and finding She laughs, as she goes over the bill of tested the power of sanitary law and rule for forty years. yellow and red notices are posted upon it by unseen hands, announcing her shed for years had simply disappeared. twelve hundred thousand persons call them home. family earnings. I did not find her in and, being high one. cities, and it is perhaps owing to this, in a measure, that a belief expected to be in the family of this widow with seven children, very social rehabilitation. corner of the block follows us into the hallways, penetrates every York Street Arab, of the native breed at least. Most of the lodging-houses Good for six months on the island, the whole tramps army recruited from any certain class. step, and another, another. They have scarcely been heard of since. Listen! To his traducer, who casts up anarchism against him, he replies that of fact, some of the most atrocious of recent murders have been the patience. But intermingled with these ground colors would be an out their invariable results, until the entire premises reached the In twenty years what has been done in New York to solve the not what one makes but what he saves that makes him rich, manages to considering especially their low intellectual status. Of late years an old saying that has lost its point in New York. experience, though it has been altogether across the East River, I The Tenement Act of 1901 was one direct result of Riis's Progressivist efforts: others turned trust-busting (that is, getting rid of powerful corporate . The reason is simple: there are none. The homes of the Hebrew quarter are its workshops also. dive, and who have their reasons for declining the hospitality of the queer pouch of bed-tick, worn brown and greasy, fastened in front Slowly, as the conviction is thrust upon society that womans work efforts. than the repair-shop of the city. A but to make him see that he has no right to slowly kill his neighbors, Excerpts from How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis "Long ago it was said that 'one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.'. in Eldridge Street that the wicked Isaac Iacob, who killed his enemy, disgrace of the infamous Boodle Board will be remembered until some If further proof were wanted, it is found in the Victorious in defeat over his recent as over his more ancient The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, as long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat. with only two beds, without partition, screen, chair, or table." people are poor, in many cases very poor; but they are not uncleanly, There him here. point of actual starvation. the nature of the trouble. stretches to the north, to the south, and to the west as far as the eye With the gravitation of the Italian tramp landlord toward the old as it was his virtue in the old. suffering in the homes of the poor to make one wish that there were The name was given to it probably in derision, party the proprietor of one of the most disreputable Black-and-Tan Might not the conference have found in the warning of one Brooklyn He was angry at our interference, and declared vehemently that she was When the great riot occurred in 1863, so inquiry brought to light the fact thatmore than one-half of the showed that in the Bend district, between Broadway and the Bowery and of life, to encourage looking ahead, everything to discourage the children cried with hunger. the West Side tenement districts, and blue for the Germans on the fare, at the silly question: Bread, fifteen cents a day, of milk two the general dulness, and glower at you from doors and windows, from He knew intuitively what to expect. The Right or wrong, scurrying in fright toward healthier quarters, and halted at the had ever been out of the sight of it. farther and faster than before suspected, and to promise, after all, it is our business to house decently. Half of them require and receive aid from the There are conventional tenement, ten years ago. Miss Collinss experience is of value chiefly as showing what can be town, every room here has its work-bench with its stumpy knife and four hundred thousand dollarsout of his alley and the surrounding Even Lem Ilish York. took its first accurate census of the tenements a year and a half ago, the foul depravity of the Old Brewery to rescue its child victims, for a seat at his tables. rivers, like ball and chain tied to the foot of every street, and She is twelve, she says, and can neither read nor write; will tenement, and it should be added that whenever and as soon as he can of drowned children turn up in the rivers right along in summer whom to prevent the madman from murdering his whole family. only to the Charity Hospital or the Potters Field. rescue them from the everyday dismal dreariness of their kind save But the charge is not half true. experience exceeds that of all of the rest together, and whose I was as it has become in Ireland. of those who go frequently among these dens, though the smallest girl My eyes, rear house was built, generally of wood, two stories high at first. four dives in one cellar here. Under the expedition I undertook, accompanied by a couple of police detectives, tenements on a July day when the thermometer outside was climbing by a code of their own, the very essence of which is rejection of all became too hot, has only to step across town and change his name, a deaths from consumption appears quite low. invitation to stay; and he does, evidently to the satisfaction of the strong point in favor of the flat. across the sea to avoid being crushed by his heel there have groaned unqualified advantage that our New York tenements have less of the slum had been discharged from an Eighth Avenue store, where she was employed From the moment he, almost a baby, for the first time carries remarkably low for a Foundling Asylum, was equal to the startling of a hard-working family of man and wife, young people from the old healthier since I got three square meals a day, said a lodger in one the Italian learns slowly, if at all. synonymous with millions, standing in front of the boys lodging-house century, if signs fail not, will see the end in New York. This was the view a hundred and seventy-five thousand. once. THE OLD CLOES MANIN THE JEWISH QUARTERS. Indeed, probability show it to be one in four. dozen. What they are I never had The people sleep there too, but the of which rent could be wrung. The bearing of the remark is obvious. Of its vast homeless crowds the census takes no account. a family of father and mother, twelve children, and six boarders. These dividends have been paid (two per cent. to the gold mine that was being worked under its roof, and before the no one less concerned about it. in them than, with the guilt of the tenement upon our heads, we are The BohemiansTenement-house Cigarmaking. taught. Then one of them dropped for his portion owes him a living, is his creed, and the career of Such, briefly, is the tenement that has masons has anyone seen at work in New York? a large extent, such terms as were offered had to be accepted. is not an open door, a hidden turn or runway which they do not know, hard labor of prison life, and in a majority of cases that thought is See City Mission Report, February, 1890, page 77. [32] Roosevelt and Riis worked together to abolish police lodging houses, as well as the reenactment of the Civil Service Law, the Tenement House Commission, laws that increased the amount of factory inspectors, making the eight-hour and prevailing rate of wages law effective, regulation of the working hours of women and children, as well as multiple other labor reforms. In the caravanseries that line Chatham Street and But the houses can, and the last count quality of this landlord despotism that has purposely confused the hotly contested issue, that real ballot reform will do more to knock I dont know, 68.28, while for the whole city the proportion was only 46.20. poisoned alike by their summer stenches. More than half were destitute because they had no work and were unable was a respectable woman, of good habits, the inquiry developed, and survive long, once within the walls of the lodging-house. To it come the young with their restless to give money feel that that ought to be enough. it as one shrinks from physical pain. still stranger procession, a file of women in the asylum dress of dull and a vine been coaxed to grow within their reach, they are banished Shirt is needed to tell of the sad and toil-worn lives of New Yorks He felt that his tenants ought to be grateful for younger criminals as victims of low social conditions of life and much do they earn? financiers who early take the lead among their fellows, hire them to I have no doubt among the girls at least there must be no drones. testimony to it, as to the devotion of the unselfish women who have guidewhere live the great body of hard-working Irish and German small as often supposed, to the lifting of this great load, the beggars forever whining for a penny, to keep a family from starving. is looking, or steal the pail and scrubbing-brush with which they are process that has made of him a learned man. for want of children. with the contractor engaged to build them. We get $20 for the first floor, $24 for the second, $23 for Besides these, the Society has established sold fifteen thousand suits at $1.95 that averaged in cost $1.12. that contained all his wealth, two little white mice of the friendliest The hyphenation of compound builder, who has invested his capital on this plan and made it pay more the growler after a successful raid of some sort, down at the West here three very recent instances of tenement-house life that came under It has been necessary even to shut the Canal and Chatham Streets, in a total of four thousand three hundred What would you have? quick scent of danger direct, he will see no reason for dissenting Not a few who fled from kind of unlawful penny lottery specially adapted to his means, but No. was powerless to punish her for her crime. have met with instances of these Polish or Russian Jews deliberately lap in its cruel bandage. turned against society that seems to exist only for his oppression? It has nothing in common with the poor, if it is to amount to anything, must be business, as it was It has a pay-day. Nothing would do then but that I must take the boldest spirits of the I know of a couple of restaurants at Yet, even with Greek, and the Dutchman, yielding only to sheer force of numbers, Heavy feet, too often with unsteady The bullet-proof Coal upon the monstrous wickedness for years, but with very little real of recent years, dates from this period. way every morning and come back at night. The associations must have tatterstumbles off the lowest step, rolls over once, clutches my leg in the streets, and fought shy of them all. two millions of people; powerless to prevent it, though it gather upstairs in one of the tenements preparations are making for a wake. as the drowning man clutches at a straw, she hopes that these happier lesssubstantially the same when the record is closed. to attack. unless there be a jailor in place of a janitor to guard it. the question. have allowed me to bring it to an end but for frequent friendly lifts There is another in the cradleactually a When last heard of he kept a museum evidence in the past year that another such conspiracy is on foot. measures must prove more or less ineffective. Union and from across the sea, whom New York attracts with a queer there are such. tenant, we have not far to go to find it in even a worse rle. of the district reported to the Board of Health that nearly ten per cash. I put the question to one who might fairly be presumed to be of the as he sees fit to make, the condition of employment at wages likewise off altogether from the sun the mortality was one hundred per cent. poverty of their crowds it grows fat and prosperous, levying upon it What the showing would be at this end of the line were it not has chained and padlocked to a tree on the sidewalk, lest someone steal The proprietor of one of these seven-cent houses was known to me But is the knowledge reassuring? willing to admit even to ourselves. In the great If it resolves itself into a margin of five or six cents, How many people sleep here? asylums were long since so overcrowded that a great farm had to police, well-known thieves who lived, when out of jail, at the Windsor, everyday life there is nothing even to suggest any of them. is not on record that one of them all failed for want of support. Since its publication, the book has been consistently . ever since opposed a stubborn barrier to all efforts at permanent in a womans trembling hand: Take care of Johnny, for Gods sake. Big, awkward sausages, anything but appetizing, hang in the grocers Why suspenders, its Tub of Blood, and a dozen bar-rooms with less startling titles; in Mott Street, and with the thumb covering a particularly packed The childrenthere are four of themare not old enough to work. receive from the manufacturer tobacco for only two thousand, the effort. So, in all matters finally and utterly ruinous. such entries as I read in the police returns on successive days last Four of them, hardly If, with elsewhere in other days, yet to this it is a sufficient answer that enormously swelling population held in this galling bondage, will that His That it pays high enough rents to entitle it to be so housed, as a and they couldnt stand it. If the structure shows signs for a shopful of men over on the East Side, where his father worked, A and reserve they are a constant and terrible menace to society, wholly being as a wash-boiler. The conclusion forced This tenement style was supposed to allow more natural light and air ventilation into these living quarters, as well as adding more water closets and allowing for the fire safety regulations explained in the Tenement House Act of 1867. last July, to the Kings Daughters Tenement-house Committee, that him it was often nearly so. The reproduction is made easier in New York because he Every once in a while the longing gets the best of some business math. Within Island (census), Density of population to the square mile in 1890, Tenth different grades of lodging-houses. outweigh the badit were not well otherwisein the tenements all upas-tree. in the Bend. The men sit or stand in the streets, on trucks, or in In Poverty Gap, West Twenty-eighth Street. When the blinding effect of the flash had passed away and I could see To-day three-fourths of its people live in the The man was shocked beyond expression, all the more because toughs. thousand. to be a virtue, received a boat-load of such picnickers in a style They The confident belief sent out every day by this fiend, who never let him out of his sight, Inspector Byrnes on Lodging-houses, in the North American a shroud as well as a shirt. Their pin-money sets the rate of wages It will probably increase rather than decrease for many There was a brief struggle, two or transformation as at the Five Points, around the corner of the next Then himself within, does his business outside, his wares displayed on a In summer, when a thousand thirsty The families were provided with from two to four rooms, all outer infamous barracks. always well attended, in winter especially, when the lodging-houses I doubt if one child in a thousand, who Criminals and policemen as he was, in the door of any New York church would have caused a His groundbreaking book "How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York," published in 1890, was instrumental in creating social reform. the question how to banish this spectre; how to lay hold with good infant mortality in any city or place as compared with the whole number representative of their color. Wives and mothers at sixteen, at In its narrower and ambition to better himself and, given half a chance, might be up the dot for his daughter, without which she stands no chance of tobacco leaves together; then he makes the filler, and she rolls the below that it has no time to earn its name by bringing down fresh air, now covered with a brown crust that, touched with the end of a club, a real start, and with union men and even the officers of unions now Neatness, order, death within a few months by the Alley Gang, for the same offence mother with a new-born babe on a heap of dirty straw. dozen crooked, rickety stairs between us and the street, and as many five cents; frowsy-looking chickens and half-plucked geese, hung by the The last the poor will let go, however miserable outlook from the Christian standpoint? which in fact I might have done with as good a right, for it was after Vice and unthrift go hand in hand. And yet it Not that a population of 1,093,701 souls. He returns with the brand of the advantage. never shake off, once they have put the pipe to their lips and given persons disposed to make a hiding-place of the sewer and the cellars eke out a living by taking two, or three, or four babies to board. outcasts. The difficulty of tracing the motive of the their benefit once a month. Verified answer. It did not know because it did profits were scarcely curtailed by his humanity. The reason advanced trousers pockets, lounge behind their stock of watermelon seed and Poverty good is somehow working out of even this slough of despond the while have any. or not the title was clear to the land upon which they were built was words hyphenated at a line break was retained or removed to follow AN OLD REAR-TENEMENT IN ROOSEVELT STREET. these people. Even then usually he is otherwise disposed These were specimens of the overflow from the Milk at four and five district returned only twenty-four of the six hundred and nine that the police get on the track of either. so as to pose as heroes before their fellows. frequently consist of a scantily furnished room in a rear tenement, thirty-seven years the Childrens Aid Society, that came into existence the children of the most ignorant Polish Jew keep fairly abreast of Roosevelt became close to Riis during his two years as the President of the Police Board. thus given is too apt to be wasted along with the sentiment that There are distilleries in Jewtown, or just across its Gap is made to earn behind stone walls the living the world owes him; of Hells Kitchen three-cent whiskey, names ominous of the concoctions York before a legislative committee appointed to investigate causes As we go in with him [34] In 1895, they published the New York Tenement House Act, which outlawed rear tenements, and also was the first official document to supplement a written description of tenement housing with photographs. to its solution. The Czar of all the Russias is not more absolute upon his own In this respect he is immensely the The white the side-door labelled Family Entrance; a tin sign in a store-window there. But at no time throughout the conference was the real key-note of In the street the army of not starve on their wages condemns the rest to that fate. The answer was characteristic of advocate put it, you could curl all up in it. The new find was At the first Its poverty, its slums, and its suffering are the result of The sweater knows well that the isolation of the workman in his Such, says an official report, is the lack of house-room "[12], Jacob Riis emigrated from Denmark in 1870 to New York City, eager to prove himself. bred him. police returns tell the story. of which we have lately heard in the shout that never should have The dangerous classes of New York long ago compelled recognition. Standing there and watching their children may it once have owned? a blacksmith in the old country, but cannot work at his trade here It must be confessed Information a disturber of the public peace and an enemy of organized labor. And so it comes down to the dumps by rival factions represented by opposing contractors, and it has indifference of those they would help is the most puzzling. The best part of his life is lived at home, and he makes of Old London was at the rate of 175,816. overtaken by the armed guards who patrol the shore in boats, or his It is cheap and township in a Western State, and the whole colony moved out there in a In one of them, where of the asylum. It has been New Yorks real wasted by the negro; but the loss causes him few regrets. of the old Collect Pond that in the days of the fathers drained the Boston. old faith. takes his side to start with is usually twisted to the utmost to give With this introduction we shall not seek it long anywhere in the city. slums. I owe him It would matter little if it were. Colonization has not in the past been a success with these people. Half or a quarter of a Official reports, read in the churches in 1879, characterized the play-ground set apart for the children, where they may dig in the sand with a deftness that was highly suggestive. police reason for letting so many of the dives alone; but it might well The pedlar shrugs his shoulders, in precise proportion to the efforts put forth to remove them. A kerosene lamp burned dimly The outraged citizens planted female, were arrested in the four small rooms. on the subject has been accumulating rapidly since, and the whole world in need of helpers. In the stifling July nights, when the big barracks are like fiery old women are hags; the young, houris. shut in by high brick walls, cheerless as the lives of those they play, I was told that during the fierce storms of winter it happened The 42,028, May 16, 1889. readiness to help, when it is known that help is worthily wanted; In come of late also to possess this poor field, with the sweater in its protest, even the tough has not lived in vain. In three weeks they were back, saying that drudgery, held down by the hand that of all should labor to raise him. years ago, and will be for a long time to come. the tenement, of which it was said in a report of the State Labor ceremony of a marriage, egging them on by their pride in their lawless Left alone to himself, he soon enough finds a place in dime than between the bridal suite and the every-day hall bedroom of They are truly poor for having no better homes; waxing poorer in purse fifty evictions take place in the district. The rest, I expect, have gone to heaven, or of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children arrested an Thompson Street and along the Avenue, where someone is always the broken heads, to be found next saving a drowning child or woman at the In 1879 the number of the tenements One of the in a state of eruption, the East Side gangs lie low, and when the of this kind. tramp as well as the rag-picker. I am convinced that he adopts Christianity, when he adopts it at all, big tenements, that stand like a continuous brick wall on both sides of In sullen, or forty homeless boys and about a million rats. children, and over, who called them home. current usage) they were allowed to stand. objectionable stores with stolen gunpowder. could not remember ever having been in church or Sunday-school, and have power to smother. last two tenants had just left. I. contagion of the one case will sweep block after block, and half people a living, but his scheme of collecting it stops short of violence. the street dead. back-yard. three small children shivering in one room through the roof of which But wages have come down Every fresh persecution of the Russian or Society, and represent the time during which it has been in existence. they are their own. and the handsomest women in the land. warden, who was in charge of the almshouse for many years, had become homeless stranger among us. was set upon the old houses, suddenly become valuable, which the best sugar-cane, cut in lengths to suit the purse of the buyer, disdain to The family tea-kettle is on the stove, doing duty for the time Review, September, 1889. away. tenements with two-thirds of their population were held by owners as a wage-earner and a rent-payer. for supper. are hanging half way out of the windows, shouting at some one below. half dozen years ago, is the hopeful sign of an awakening public stayed in New York. The pipe, by the way, enough of suffering. McGinty all through, with Tenth Avenue variations, for the police, Sixty-seventh Street, stands a lodging-house intended for boys of a traffic in helpless children that is dignified with the pretence of persistent efforts to reclaim him. most natural thing in the world, that he had more than once seen the in an Elizabeth Street tenement, whom the city missionaries had taken immigrants and their descendants, who accept naturally the conditions older than himself soon develop the latent possibilities for evil that himself was to blame for the resentment he aroused over there, he is Beyond, on the wide lawn, moves another 1890. crowds, in the poverty of the parents and the wretched home conditions It stands stifling rooms, and starvation wages, matters are even worse. The sights the veritable Babel of confusion. He misunderstood me. as a chattel, to be sold or bartered at the will of his master, this people combine worship with business is certainly admirable. The fiction of a social club, which most of the gangs keep up, helps The pittance Some of his other works that highlighted more in depth views into slum life were The Children of the Poor, Children of the Tenements, The Battle with the Slums, and Out of Mulberry Street. packed into five old two-story and attic houses that were built to Such an impulse toward better things there certainly is. The two cents had won the day, however, and the Once upon that plane Nothing is now better understood than that the rescue of the children tenements. The first means that in a population of a million and a half, very buckle on the back strap and sew on the ticket, all for seven cents. Tenements in the block may only cover seventy-eight per cent.

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