How the Other Half Lives
Glossary
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- "How the Other Half Lives" (title)
- Riis's title borrows an older proverb — 'one half of the world does not know how the other half lives' — and turns it into an evidentiary claim: the book exists to make the unseen half of the city visible to readers who could otherwise avoid knowing.
- Related: The Tenement
C
- Cheap Lodging-Houses
- Commercial flophouses offering a bed (or sometimes just floor space) for a few cents a night, serving the city's homeless and transient poor. Riis surveys their range from marginally decent to dangerously overcrowded.
- Related: Stale-beer dive, The Tenement
- Chinatown
- The Chinese immigrant quarter centered on Mott Street, which Riis covers with the era's characteristic mix of fascination and stereotype, focusing especially on opium dens and gambling houses as emblematic of the neighborhood.
- Related: Mott Street
F
- Five Points
- The notorious slum district of Lower Manhattan, infamous since well before Riis's time as the city's worst neighborhood; by the time of the book, its 'cleansing' had merely displaced the worst conditions a block away to Mulberry Bend.
- Related: The Bend (Mulberry Bend)
- Flashlight Photography
- Riis's use of the newly invented magnesium flash powder to photograph tenement interiors, alleys, and lodging-houses that were otherwise too dark to document. This technical innovation made the book's visual record possible and helped establish him as a founder of photojournalism.
- Related: The Tenement
G
- Genesis of the Tenement
- Riis's chapter-length account of how the tenement form emerged: originally single-family houses subdivided by landlords chasing profit, then purpose-built barracks-style buildings that packed in the maximum number of paying tenants at minimal cost.
- Related: The Tenement, Rear tenement, Gotham Court
- Gotham Court
- A notorious block of tenement housing Riis cites as an extreme case: during one cholera epidemic, tenants there died at a rate of 195 per thousand while the city's clean wards were scarcely touched, and the block's construction helped drive the city's overall mortality rate sharply upward.
- Related: The Tenement, Rear tenement
H
- Health Department
- The New York City agency Riis credits, alongside private reformers, with the earliest efforts to document and regulate tenement conditions — its statistics on mortality and overcrowding provide much of the book's evidentiary backbone.
- Related: The Tenement, What Has Been Done
J
- Jacob A. Riis (the author)
- A Danish immigrant who became a New York police reporter and used his beat covering Mulberry Street to document tenement conditions firsthand. His combination of journalism and pioneering flash photography directly shaped early housing reform; Theodore Roosevelt, reading the book as police commissioner, sought him out.
- Related: Flashlight Photography, What Has Been Done
- Jewtown
- Riis's chapter title (using the period's own, now-offensive terminology) for the densely packed Jewish immigrant quarter of the Lower East Side, centered on streets like Ludlow Street, where he documents the garment sweating system in detail.
- Related: The Sweating System, Ludlow Street, The Sweaters of Jewtown
L
- Ludlow Street
- A principal street of the Lower East Side's Jewish quarter ('Jewtown'), cited repeatedly as an example of extreme tenement overcrowding and the density that fueled the sweating system.
- Related: Jewtown
M
- Mott Street
- The main thoroughfare of Manhattan's Chinatown, the geographic and commercial center of the neighborhood Riis surveys in his Chinatown chapter.
- Related: Chinatown
- Mulberry Street
- The street running through the heart of Little Italy and Mulberry Bend, home to both the city's densest Italian immigrant population and its most notorious tenement block, and also the location of NYPD headquarters where Riis worked as a police reporter.
- Related: The Bend (Mulberry Bend), Five Points
P
- Pauperism in the Tenements
- Riis's chapter examining institutionalized poor relief and the population of tenement residents dependent on it, part of his broader argument that tenement housing manufactures dependency and destitution as reliably as it collects rent.
- Related: The Common Herd, The Wrecks and the Waste
R
- Rear tenement
- A second building erected in the back yard or garden of an existing tenement lot, further increasing density and cutting off light and air from both structures — one of the earliest and most damaging forms the tenement crisis took.
- Related: The Tenement, Genesis of the Tenement
S
- Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
- The child-welfare organization whose case records Riis cites directly — for instance the case of a child named Antonia Candia found covered in sores and abuse — as documentary evidence of the human cost of tenement poverty on the youngest residents.
- Related: Waifs of the City's Slums, The Problem of the Children
- Stale-beer dive
- A type of cheap, filthy basement drinking den, often serving beer dregs collected from other saloons' spent kegs, catering to the city's most destitute. Riis describes a police raid on one in Chapter 9 as emblematic of the bottom rung of tenement-district vice.
- Related: The Reign of Rum, Cheap Lodging-Houses
T
- The Awakening
- Riis's chapter title for the earliest stirrings of public concern about tenement conditions in New York — legislative investigations and reform proposals that predate his own book but that he presents as insufficient against the scale of the problem.
- Related: Health Department, What Has Been Done
- The Bend (Mulberry Bend)
- A notorious curved block of Mulberry Street in the Five Points district — the book's most extended set-piece, described as the site of routine abuse and murder. Riis's advocacy against it eventually got the block demolished and replaced with a public park.
- Related: Five Points, Mulberry Street, Bandit's Roost
- The Bohemians — Tenement-House Cigarmaking
- Riis's chapter on Bohemian (Czech) immigrant families who rolled cigars by hand inside their tenement apartments, another example, alongside the Jewish garment sweatshops, of manufacturing labor performed in overcrowded home settings rather than factories.
- Related: The Sweating System
- The Color Line in New York
- Riis's chapter documenting the city's Black tenement districts and the additional layer of discrimination — in housing, employment, and social standing — that Black New Yorkers faced on top of the general tenement conditions he describes elsewhere in the book.
- Related: The Tenement
- The Common Herd
- Riis's chapter title for the mass of unskilled tenement laborers at the bottom of the city's economic order, whose precarious, day-to-day existence he presents as a direct consequence of tenement housing and casual-labor wages.
- Related: The Tenement, Pauperism in the Tenements
- The Reign of Rum
- Riis's chapter on the saloon's dominance of tenement social life — as the era's chief refuge from crowded, joyless housing, and as a driver of the poverty and violence he documents throughout the book.
- Related: Stale-beer dive, The Harvest of Tares
- The Street Arab
- Riis's chapter title, using the period term for homeless or unsupervised children who lived largely on the streets, sleeping in doorways, alleys, or lodging-houses, and surviving through odd jobs, begging, or petty theft.
- Related: Waifs of the City's Slums, The Problem of the Children
- The Sweaters of Jewtown
- Riis's term for the subcontracting middlemen ('sweaters') who organized garment piecework among Jewish immigrant families, extracting profit by paying rock-bottom rates for labor performed inside overcrowded tenement rooms.
- Related: Jewtown, The Sweating System
- The Sweating System
- The subcontracted, piece-rate garment labor Riis documents in the Jewtown chapters — work done inside crowded tenement apartments, where whole families labored for pennies per finished garment, giving rise to the term 'sweatshop.'
- Related: Jewtown, The Sweaters of Jewtown
- The Tenement
- The book's central subject and villain — a form of multi-family housing that spread through Lower Manhattan as landlords subdivided existing buildings and threw up new ones to pack in the maximum number of paying tenants, with minimal light, air, or sanitation. Riis traces its origin, spread, and human cost across the whole book.
- Related: Rear tenement, Genesis of the Tenement, Gotham Court
- The Working Girls of New York
- Riis's chapter surveying the low-wage employment available to young tenement women — in factories, shops, and domestic service — and the particular vulnerability of women's tenement poverty compared to men's.
- Related: The Common Herd, The Sweating System
W
- Waifs of the City's Slums
- Riis's term for the tenement district's abandoned or neglected children, whose fate he treats as the clearest moral indictment of the tenement system — a generation raised without adequate shelter, supervision, or opportunity.
- Related: The Street Arab, The Problem of the Children
- What Has Been Done
- Riis's closing chapter, a summary account of roughly two decades of reform effort against tenement conditions up to the book's 1890 publication, and his own assessment of how far the case for housing reform still had to go.
- Related: Jacob A. Riis (the author), The Tenement