How the Other Half Lives

Content Warning: This chapter discusses death by suicide.

Chapter 4—one of the book’s lengthiest chapters—features an imaginary tour of New York City’s downtown tenements. This chapter also highlights Riis’s photojournalistic approach, for it is the first of 11 consecutive chapters that feature at least one visual depiction of life in the tenements. Whereas the book’s introduction and first three chapters provide background, Chapter 4 represents the beginning of Riis’s quest to expose conditions among the city’s working impoverished.

Riis opens by describing the scene on once-fashionable Cherry Street in downtown, the southernmost part of Manhattan Island, which sports the highest concentration of tenements. Here he finds the children, “the growing generation of the slums” (30). He also finds buildings that once served as homes for New York City’s elite converted into multi-family tenements. An image (“At the Cradle of the Tenement—Doorway of an Old-Fashioned Dwelling on Cherry Hill”) depicts both of these: two children standing on the sidewalk while an older woman looks on from the doorway of a building that looks as if it dates from an earlier century.

Riis next explores the chapter’s main subject: the back alleys of downtown Manhattan. A photograph (“Upstairs in Blindman’s Alley”) shows a woman and three others, at least two of whom are adult men—the third is partially obscured—sitting around a small stove with a small kettle in cramped quarters. The alley is so named—”Blindman’s Alley”—for the people who are blind who ask for money found there. In a nearby tenement, the notorious Gotham Court, the most recent cholera epidemic resulted in a death rate of 195:1,000 thanks to these tight living spaces. Passing through a narrow alley, Riis arrives at a rear-tenement on Cherry Street with “an immense blank wall in front of the windows,” depriving the tenants of light and air (38). Riis’s description of the concentration of buildings and narrowness of the alleys appears designed to give the reader a feeling of claustrophobia that must have been shared by the tenants themselves. Riis recalls a fire on Madison Street that occurred within the last decade, claiming the lives of 10 women and children who could not reach the fire escapes.

Continuing along Cherry Street, Riis describes “Jews’ Alley” inside Penitentiary Row, where Jewish immigrants have settled. Here Riis reflects the characteristic bigotry of his age: “The Jew runs to real estate as soon as he can save up enough for a deposit to clinch the bargain” (42). Riis then meanders in partial darkness through a Cherry Street tenement. Clean water is in short supply, but the nearby saloon thrives. Inside the tenement, a child lay dying of measles. The family appears resigned to their fate. A photograph (“An Old Rear Tenement in Roosevelt Street”) shows a four-story rear-tenement with linens hanging on clotheslines and living quarters bunched together. Riis regards the clothesline as the “true line to be drawn between pauperism and honest poverty,” for the clothes-line “begins the effort to be clean that is the first and best evidence of a desire to be honest” (46). Riis concludes by describing a “typical enough” case of a mother of six who died by suicide by throwing herself out a tenement window (46).