How the Other Half Lives

“The bullet-proof shutters, the stacks of hand-grenades, and the Gatling guns of the Sub-Treasury are tacit admissions of the fact and of the quality of the mercy expected. The tenements to-day are New York, harboring three-fourths of its population. When another generation shall have doubled the census of our city, and to that vast army of workers, held captive by poverty, the very name of home shall be as a bitter mockery, what will the harvest be?”

This is the final passage of Chapter 2. It is one of the earliest and strongest expressions of alarm, designed to rouse the city’s wealthy inhabitants from their complacency and reveal the danger of further neglect. Powerful institutions already arm themselves against the prospect of an angry mob. Here Riis argues for the urgency of addressing the conditions that give rise to such mobs, particularly when New York’s impoverished communities already know and feel the disdain of the wealthier communities. By describing the tenements as synonymous with New York itself, Riis advances his argument for immediate and substantial reform of existing buildings, coupled with the intelligent and humane construction of new ones, rather than long-term projects designed to replace the entire tenement system. Finally, and perhaps most important of all, Riis refers to a “vast army of workers” drawn from the tenements. These are not all criminals and people with alcohol addiction, nor are they people who are unemployed and refuse or cannot earn a living. They are New York’s working impoverished population, and they deserve a decent place to live.

“The one thing you shall vainly ask for in the chief city of America is a distinctively American community.”

In Chapter 3, Riis surveys New York City’s ethnic composition and finds that it is “mixed,” composed of those who are not “native-born” (21). To Riis, this means not only foreign-born residents but also descendants of those who are not, in his opinion, “distinctively American.” Textual evidence shows, for instance, that Riis means to exclude from the phrase “distinctively American” those of African heritage, nearly all of whose ancestors were born in the United States, though Riis’s description of New York’s African American tenants is comparatively sympathetic. Riis also excludes second- and third-generation Irish immigrants. According to Riis’s usage, then, “distinctively American” refers to US-born Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

“Were the question raised who makes the most of life thus mortgaged, who resists most stubbornly its levelling tendency—knows how to drag even the barracks upward a part of the way at least toward the ideal plane of the home—the palm must be unhesitatingly awarded the Teuton. The Italian and the poor Jew rise only by compulsion. The Chinaman does not rise at all; here, as at home, he simply remains stationary.”

At the conclusion of his brief-yet-broad overview of New York City’s ethnic communities, Riis claims that the German immigrants are most likely to maintain their dignity and character in the tenements and even to improve the quality of their surroundings. Riis reaches a less flattering conclusion about Chinese, Jewish, and Southern European immigrants. It is worth noting that Riis himself was an immigrant from Denmark, so his bias toward Northern Europeans might be somewhat motivated by personal pride. More important, however, is the fact that Riis’s view of Northern European and especially German “racial” superiority was widely shared in his day, and the catastrophes of the First and especially the Second World War were consequences of that view.

“Take a look into this Roosevelt Street alley; just about one step wide, with a five-story house on one side that gets its light and air—God help us for pitiful mockery!—from this slit between brick walls.”

In Chapter 4, Riis leads the reader on an imaginary tour—imaginary for the reader but real for the author—of downtown New York City’s back alleys. He describes cramped spaces and a scarcity of both air and light. Though tenements vary in size and occupancy, the five-story house mentioned here represents a typical tenement building.

“The people who live there come to look upon death in a different way from the rest of us—do not take it as hard.”

This quotation appears in Chapter 4’s final paragraph, where Riis describes the death by suicide of a mother of six who threw herself out a tenement window. The observation that tenement dwellers “do not take [death] as hard” as their well-to-do neighbors comes from Riis’s unnamed “optimistic friend,” who cites it as proof that conditions in the tenements are not as bad as they seem (47). Riis replies that his friend “has never found time to explain how the fact fits into his general theory that life is not unbearable in the tenements” (47). Those who observed large groups of enslaved people on Southern plantations often mistook numbness and stoic resignation for the absence of grief. Here Riis’s friend adopts the same general attitude toward tenement-dwellers.

“Never was change more urgently needed.”

Here Riis refers to the notorious tenements along a Mulberry Street curve known as “the Bend.” Conditions there are so bad that the buildings are slated for destruction and will be replaced by a public park. Riis’s assessment applies to both “the Bend” and the broader tenement problem.

“There is a standing quarrel between the professional—I mean now the official—sanitarian and the unsalaried agitator for sanitary reform over the question of overcrowded tenements.“

Compared to “unsalaried agitator[s]” such as Riis, city officials, often acting from different motives than those that inspire Christian reformers, tend to classify a far smaller percentage of tenements as “overcrowded.” Riis does not dwell at great length on this bureaucratic sclerosis—19-century bureaucracies were miniscule compared to their modern equivalents—but it does support his overall argument that landlords, private investors whose greed has been the principal cause of the tenement problem, must also be its solution.

“Granted, that the Chinese are in no sense a desirable element of the population, that they serve no useful purpose here, whatever they may have done elsewhere in other days, yet to this it is a sufficient answer that they are here, and that, having let them in, we must make the best of it.”

Although the entire book is marked by “racial” characterizations reflective of the era’s prevailing attitudes, Riis reserves his harshest judgment for the Chinese immigrants who he does not understand and whose influence he fears. Riis does not insist on expulsion. He urges tenement reform in all neighborhoods, including Chinatown, if only to “make the best” of a bad situation. There is no evidence that Riis notices the similarities between his own attitude toward Chinese tenants and the general attitude toward impoverished people that allowed landlords to create the tenement problem in the first place.

“Money is their God.”

Here Riis refers to New York City’s Jewish immigrants, the residents of “Jewtown.” This is the simplest and briefest example of an oft-repeated stereotype that resulted in immense persecution. In the context of Riis’s book, however, it serves a purpose similar to the previous quotation regarding Chinatown, i.e., native New Yorkers must understand that groups of immigrants are living among them, and the best way to ensure that all can live together in peace is to improve the conditions in which they live. In short, the tenant’s very foreignness becomes an argument for reform.

“Every fresh persecution of the Russian or Polish Jew on his native soil starts greater hordes hitherward to confound economical problems, and recruit the sweater’s phalanx.”

The “sweater” refers to the man in charge of tenement-house sweatshops, where clothing-makers labor in inhumane conditions (122). In “Jewtown,” both the “sweater” and the laborers are likely Jewish. Also of note here is the fact that Riis acknowledges the global dimensions of New York City’s tenement problem. European events and prejudices, which in the next century would assume murderous proportions, drive immigration to the United States.

“The two races mingle no more on this side of the Atlantic than on the rugged slopes of the Bohemian mountains; the echoes of the thirty years’ war ring in New York, after two centuries and a half, with as fierce a hatred as the gigantic combat bred among the vanquished Czechs.”

This passage highlights one tenement-related problem that defies swift reform. Europe has a bloody history, and European immigrants have long memories. In this particular case, the “two races” are the Germans and the Czechs, whose ancestors fought one another in the catastrophic Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). Despite living in close proximity, the Germans and Czechs want nothing to do with one another, for these immigrants, like millions of others, carry their Old World animosities with them to the United States, at least for a generation or so until their children and grandchildren become more thoroughly assimilated.

“Cleanliness is the characteristic of the negro in his new surroundings, as it was his virtue in the old. In this respect he is immensely the superior of the lowest of the whites, the Italians and the Polish Jews, below whom he has been classed in the past in the tenant scale.”

Riis’s tendency toward “racial” generalizations should not completely obscure his argument that Black citizens deserve better treatment and in fact have proven to be much better tenants than others mentioned. It should be noted, however, that there is another argument implied. Elsewhere in Chapter 13, Riis notes that the Black tenants are being driven northward, away from the worst tenements, by the surge in foreign immigration, so his argument on behalf of the Black tenants is at least in part an argument against the downtown East Side tenements.

“The readiness of the poor to share what little they have with those who have even less is one of the few moral virtues of the tenements.”

This sentence serves as an answer to skeptics who regard impoverished people as bereft of character and thus responsible for their own plight. There is irony in the phrase “moral virtues” as well, for the tenements both cause and showcase the extreme poverty that calls forth the tenants’ generosity.

“Few outcast babies survive their desertion long.”

Riis estimates that in the past 20 years some 25,000 infants have been abandoned by desperate mothers who did not have means to care for them. If these babies are picked up on the street, the mortality rate is probably close to 90%.

“But I have not set out to write the political history of New York.”

This quotation appears in a chapter entitled “The Reign of Rum,” which describes the (in Riis’s view) catastrophic influence of the saloons on the city’s poor, so it is noteworthy that Riis mentions politics. Many saloon owners also happen to exert tremendous influence in public affairs. Of one such owner, who occupies a position of “political leadership in the ruling party,” Riis writes: “Criminals and policemen alike do him homage” (213). The line between saloons and politics is often indistinguishable. Indeed, the “rumshop turns the political crank in New York” (211).

“And yet, if his misdeeds have helped to make manifest that all effort to reclaim his kind must begin with the conditions of life against which his very existence is a protest, even the tough has not lived in vain.”

The “tough” is a boy or young man, a gang member, and nearly always a criminal. Riis regards these boys with a mixture of disdain and sympathy. On one hand, they can be “an arrant coward” who only “hunts with the pack” (220). On the other hand, they show evidence of character and are redeemable under the right circumstances. Either way, Riis makes clear that these individuals are a product of the tenements.

“Slowly, as the conviction is thrust upon society that woman’s work must enter more and more into its planning, a better day is dawning.”

In New York City, Riis notes, there are at least 150,000 working women and girls. Many are supporting themselves or entire families, and most hail from the tenements, where every source of income matters. Because they are women in a world that expects them to be married and supported by a husband, they receive lower wages, often “to the point of actual starvation” (240). Some die by suicide. Others become sex workers. The tenements exacerbate all of these problems, though Riis does observe a general broadening of minds on this subject.

“I speak of the pauper, not of the honestly poor.”

Throughout the book, Riis distinguishes between the “honest poor” who earn wages, albeit low ones, and the “pauper,” someone who is unemployed and asks for money. According to Riis, they resemble thieves, both in dishonesty and in the belief that the world owes them a living. Riis characterizes the “thief [… as] infinitely easier to deal with than the pauper, because the very fact of being a thief presupposes some bottom to the man,” whereas the impoverished person who is unemployed is “as hopeless as his own poverty,” and for this Riis blames “the tenement, the destroyer of individuality and character everywhere” (246).

“The aim of these pages has been to lay bare its source.”

Riis devotes Chapter 22 to the people he calls “helpless human wrecks,” those who inhabit the city’s psychiatric hospitals. Historically, people with mental health conditions have not fared well at the hands of their societies. Riis links the swelling psychiatric hospitals to severe poverty and the broader problem of the tenements, which are the “source” of such “ills.”

“The world forgets easily, too easily, what it does not like to remember.”

Here Riis refers to a recent incident on the corner of 5th and 14th Streets involving a “poor, and hungry, and ragged” man who “slashed about him with a knife, blindly seeking to kill, to revenge” (265). Riis notes that the man was imprisoned, is now “probably in a mad-house, forgotten,” and the world goes on as if nothing happened, even on that same street corner, where “carriages roll by” carrying their “gay throng of shoppers” (265). This anecdote of the knife-wielding man represents both an observation and a warning.

“The danger to society comes not from the poverty of the tenements, but from the ill-spent wealth that reared them, that it might earn a usurious interest from a class from which ‘nothing else was expected.’”

Wealthy New Yorkers’ condescension toward the city’s working impoverished population helped create the tenement problem. The landlords’ desire for “usurious [i.e., unreasonable and therefore exploitive] interest” stemmed from basic greed. The attitudes of those who regard impoverished people as wholly or even largely responsible for their plight, however, amount to “criminal ignorance” and thus remain an obstacle to reform (265).

“Let it be well understood that the two are inseparable, if any good is to come of it.”

Here Riis addresses landlords, whose “own pockets” and “the real welfare of their tenants” are the “inseparable” things (271). This is a strong example of Riis’s broader approach, which is to combine smart business sense with an appeal to Christian principles. The tenement owners do not need to run charities. They can and must approach their properties from a business perspective, albeit one modified by deep, personal, and primary concern for their tenants.

“The faculty of the tenement for appropriating to itself every foul thing that comes within its reach, and piling up and intensifying its corruption until out of all proportion to the beginning, is something marvellous.”

Throughout the book, Riis blames the tenement itself for the conditions that prevail inside and around it. A building, of course, cannot bear responsibility for anything, so in fact this is Riis’s way of 1) exonerating the “honest” impoverished individuals by attributing their poverty and even many of their vices to the appalling conditions in which they live, and 2) placing blame upon the greedy landlords who allow such conditions to prevail.