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

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

First published in 1890, Jacob Riis's remarkable study of the horrendous living conditions of the poor in New York City had an immediate and extraordinary impact on society, inspiring reforms that affected the lives of millions of people. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. Jacob Riis (1849-1914) was a journalist and photographer born in Denmark. Lucy Sante was born in Verviers, Belgium, and now lives in the Hudson River Valley. Her books include Low Life , Evidence , The Factory of Facts , Kill All Your Darlings , The Other Paris , and Maybe the People Would Be the Times, and most recently , Nineteen Reservoirs . She has written for many periodicals, notably the New York Review of Books since 1981. Her honors include a Whiting Writer's Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman fellowships. Since 1999 she has taught writing and the history of photography at Bard College. List of Illustrations Introduction by Luc Sante Suggestions for Further Reading A Note on the Text How the Other Half Lives Preface Introduction 1  Genesis of the Tenement 2  The Awakening 3  The Mixed Crowd 4  The Down Town Back-alleys 5  The Italian in New York 6  The Bend 7  A Raid on the Stale-beer Dives 8  The Cheap Lodging-houses 9  Chinatown 10  Jewtown 11 The Sweaters of Jewtown 12 The Bohemians — Tenement-house Cigarmaking 13 The Color Line in New York 14 The Common Herd 15 The Problem of the Children 16 Waifs of the City’s Slums 17 The Street Arab 18 The Reign of Rum 19 The Harvest of Tares 20 The Working Girls of New York 21 Pauperism in the Tenements 22 The Wrecks and the Waste 23 The Man with the Knife 24 What Has Been Done 25 How the Case Stands Appendix Explanatory Notes PENGUIN CLASSICS HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914) was the first reformer to effectively convey to a wide public the unacceptable nature of living conditions endured by the urban poor. His use of the relatively new medium of photography brought an unprecedented power to his message. In 1870 Riis, born in Ribe, Denmark, arrived in New York as a Danish immigrant, one among thousands of the poor, friendless, and unskilled. Like so many, he frequently spent nights in police station lodging houses, the shelters of last resort in late nineteenth-century New York. He soon left the city to work at an assortment of rural jobs, but returned in 1877 to find steady employment as a police reporter for the Tribune (1877–88) and, later, the Evening Sun (1888–99). New York’s police headquarters was then on Mulberry Street, in the heart of the Lower East Side slum district. As Riis’s familiarity with the neighborhood’s squalid living conditions deepened, he began to employ his journalistic skills to convey his revulsion to the public. For ten years (1877–87) Riis wrote and lectured stressing his view that the poor were victims rather than makers of their fate, a concept then emerging among social reformers. However, despite his considerable rhetorical skills and instructional use of statistics, architectural plans, and maps, Riis was unable to communicate the elemental shock he felt on his nightly sorties through the worst slums. It was the 1887 invention of flash photography — which allowed photographs to be taken in the darkest tenements — that provided Riis with a powerful new resource. Initially employing amateur and professional photographers, and later on his own, Riis photographed the horrors of slum life specifically to shift prevailing public opinion from passive acceptance to a realization that such living conditions must be improved. Armed with this visual evidence, Riis added “magic lantern” slide shows to his lectures. Local newspapers reported that his viewers moaned, shuddered, fainted, even talked to the photographs he projected, reacting to the slides not as images but as a virtual reality that transported the New York slum world directly into the lecture hall. Riis’s predominantly middle-class audiences may never have experienced slum life, but they immediately understood it as a severe and intolerable threat to human dignity. But for Riis, even the verisimilitude of photography, made doubly powerful by the novelty of the medium, was not enough. At times he manipulated his subjects in an attempt to heighten the impact of his pictures. In some of his photographs, for example, young boys huddle over a ventilation grate as though it is the