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Riis
1890
A police reporter's block-by-block, flash-photographed survey of tenement New York.
How the Other Half Lives
Jacob A. Riis · 1890
Riis, a Danish immigrant and New York police reporter, used the newly invented magnesium flash to photograph tenement interiors, alleys, and lodging-houses that had never been documented before, then paired the images with a neighborhood-by-neighborhood account of how the city's poor actually lived. The book is credited with directly shaping early housing reform — Theodore Roosevelt, reading it as a police commissioner, sought Riis out — and stands as one of the founding works of photojournalism. It is also, unmistakably, a document of its own era's prejudices, sorting its sympathy for the poor by ethnic stereotype even as it argues for their dignity, which makes it as valuable a record of 1890s attitudes as of 1890s housing.
27 chapters · 79,082 words · ~6 hr read
Contents
Front Matter
Riis's own preface, and his introduction laying out the book's founding claim: that one half of the city does not know how the other half lives.
The Tenement Problem
How the tenement form emerged in New York and spread, and the first stirrings of an awakening to what it had produced.
A Neighborhood Survey
Block by block through Lower Manhattan's immigrant quarters — the down-town back-alleys, Little Italy, Mulberry Bend, a police raid on the stale-beer dives, the cheap lodging-houses, Chinatown, Jewtown and its sweatshops, the Bohemian cigarmakers, and the city's color line.
Vice, Drink, and Poverty
The common herd, the reign of rum, and the wrecks, waste, and pauperism that Riis argues the tenement system produces as surely as it produces rent.
The Children
What tenement life does to the youngest — waifs, street Arabs, and the working girls of New York, alongside the problem of the children as Riis frames it.
What Has Been Done
Riis's closing account of two decades of reform effort, and where, in his own assessment, the case stands.