How The Other Half Lives

How The Other Half Lives,  Studies Among The Tenements of New York, by Jacob A. Riis, with 100 photographs from the Riis Collection, Dover Publications, Inc, 1971, paperbackThe edition we have is a 1971 paperback with 100 photographs from the Riis collection, although there are several other editions out there.  Jacob August Riis was a writer turned social reformer born in Denmark in 1849 who came to America in 1870 seeking work. After three years he landed a job as a Police Reporter for the New York Tribune and the Associated Press.  What he found in New York during the beginning of what came to be known as the Progressive Era horrified him. He made the Lower East Side his beat, and the photos he took in the tenements and alleys of what was for most immigrants their first landing spot after the Ellis Island’s dock, drove reforms that almost 150 years later are still remembered. 

Riis recorded the terrible overcrowding, crime, sickness and death that Charles Madison cites in his Preface to the Dover 1971 edition:

“In the decade between 1870 and 1880 these shoddy abodes increased by 22,000 – so that 37316 tenements housed a population of 1,093,791.  More than 100,000 persons lived in rear apartments wholly unfit for human habitation.”  He quotes Riis’ observation on further overcrowding caused when immigrants took in boarders – ‘In a room not thirteen feet either way slept twelve men and women, two or three in bunks set in a sort of alcove, the rest on the floor.’” 

Give us your poor, your huddled masses

  But the photos tell the story.  Thieves, drunks, street urchins, sewing girls, women of the night, flower makers – all of these inhabitants of the area around the infamous Mulberry Street contrast with the beacons of human compassion shown in church and beneficent organizations that were active in the area.  Newsboys, for instance, who were plucky enough to be hired by newspaper row found shelter, a place to wash up and eat, and sometimes a way out in quarters owned by newspapers. 

Immigrant life and work, pathos, compassion, reform, hope.

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