How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890) is an early publication of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. The photographs served as a basis for future "muckraking" journalism by exposing the slums to New York City's upper and middle classes. They inspired many reforms of working-class housing, both immediately after publication as well as making a lasting impact in today's society.
In the 1880s many people in upper- and middle-class society were unaware of the dangerous conditions in the slums among poor immigrants. After the Civil War, the country transformed into an industrial superpower and became largely urban. [1] Simultaneously, a wave of unskilled southern European, eastern European, and Asian immigrants came to settle in the "promised land" of the United States. This migration was vastly different from the previous booms due to the influx of non-western European and non-Protestant individuals, which made the split between the "new" and "old" immigrants much larger. [2] In the 1880s, over 5.2 million immigrants came to the United States, with many of these people staying in New York City. This increased New York City's population by 25%, therefore making the tenement problem much more extreme. [3]
In the years after the Civil War, many of the former residents of the most notorious slums were wealthy enough to move out of these conditions, or had died in the war. [4] Also, the elevated railway in the Bowery in 1889 transformed this evolving neighborhood back into the squalid, seedy neighborhood it was before the war, and even made it worse. [5]
The slums were viewed as a problem by people before the publication of How the Other Half-Lives. Some political reformers believed that a wider distribution of wealth would fix the problem, while the Socialists believed that public ownership and a redistribution of wealth would fix the problem. [6] National organizations such as the American Red Cross, The National Conference of Charities and Corrections, and the Women's Christian Temperance Union were involved in different aspects of the slum problem, but these efforts were local in scope instead of national. [7]
By 1865, a total of 15,309 tenements existed in New York City, and the city's population was approaching 1,000,000. [8] It was colloquially known to be a housing type for the poor made for maximum densities, within the constraints of a 25-by-100-foot (8-by-30-metre) lot. [9] When the Tenement House Act of 1867 was passed, the tenement was defined as:
Any house, building, or portion thereof, which is rented, leased, let or hired out to be occupied or is occupied, as the home or residence of more than three families living independently of one another and doing their own cooking upon the premises, or by more than two families upon a floor, so living and cooking and having a common right in the halls, stairways, yards, water-closets, or privies, or some of them. [10]
It was with the publication of this act that the basic "dumbbell" layout of the tenement was first used. This tenement style was supposed to allow more natural light and air ventilation into these living quarters, as well as adding more water closets and allowing for the fire safety regulations explained in the Tenement House Act of 1867. [11]
On top of this, many of the landlords of these tenements did little to improve their conditions. When asked about the enforcement of the new statutes, the Superintendent of Buildings said that he was satisfied with hard wood in these tenements because it "burned slowly." [12]
Jacob Riis emigrated from Denmark in 1870 to New York City, eager to prove himself. Finding it difficult to find work, he found a home in the slums of New York's Lower East Side. [13] He went back to Denmark for a short time, returning to New York to become a police reporter. During this time, Riis became a devout Christian and devoted himself to "the service of God and his fellows." [14]
Riis turned to photography as a sort of "pastime" and found it a useful tool when writing his police reports. Once he began using magnesium flash powder, he could capture the dark and dingy conditions of the tenements. [15]
How the Other Half-Lives was only one book in Riis' bibliography highlighting the conditions in the slums of New York. Some of his other works that highlighted more in depth views into slum life were The Children of the Poor,Children of the Tenements, The Battle with the Slums, and Out of Mulberry Street. [16]
In January 1888, Riis bought a detective camera and went on an expedition to gather images of what life was like in the slums of New York City. [17] [18] This both included Riis' taking his own photos as well as his using the images of other photographers. [17] Finally, on January 28, 1888, Riis presented "The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies in New York" using his images on a projection screen and taking the viewer on a journey by describing the images. [17] Throughout 1888, Riis continued his lectures in local New York City churches, which were reviewed in several newspapers including New York Sun , Brooklyn Times, New York Evening Post , and Harper's . [19]
In February 1889, Riis wrote a magazine article based on his lectures in Scribner's Magazine , which was a resounding success. The book version of Riis' work was published in January 1890 as How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. [20]
The title of the book is a reference to a sentence by French writer François Rabelais, who wrote in Pantagruel : "one half of the world does not know how the other half lives" ("la moitié du monde ne sait comment l'autre vit"). [21]
How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York explained the living conditions in New York slums as well as the sweatshops in some tenements, which paid workers only a few cents per day. The book explains the plight of working children; they would work in factories and at other jobs. Some children became garment workers and newsies (newsboys).
Riis describes a system of tenement housing that had failed, as he claims, because of greed and neglect from wealthier people. He claims a correlation between the high crime rate, drunkenness, and reckless behavior of the poor and their lack of a proper home. [22] Chapter by chapter he uses his words and photographs to expose the conditions inhabited by the poor in a manner that "spoke directly to people's hearts". [23]
While Riis treats many of the ethnic groups he encounters with slurs and numerous stereotypes, he still keeps his general hypothesis that the reason for the poverty in these communities is caused by the conditions surrounding them. [24] Riis often does have an "ethnic hierarchy," often its most extreme toward the Chinese. [25]
Riis ends How the Other Half Lives with a plan of how to fix the problem. He asserts that the plan is achievable and that the upper classes will not only profit financially from such ventures, but have a moral obligation to tend to them as well. [26]
How the Other Half Lives follows a general outline for the charity writings of the nineteenth century: a section on crime, the Protestant virtues and vices (intemperance, idleness, disorder, uncleanliness), miserable conditions of living, disease, the loss of modesty (especially women), the dissolution of the family, the institutions that would help in their uplift, as well as future sources of reform. [27] The difference introduced photography to prove the squalid conditions and to increase sympathy for the individuals living in these slums. Riis finally convinced the average reader of newspapers that the poor were not so by choice; that the dangerous and unhygienic conditions in which they lived were imposed by society, rather than the result of loose moral standards; that the slums were something that needed to be fixed rather than gaped at or shunned. [28]
The article proved to be popular, and Riis spent the better part of a year expanding it into the book published by Scribner's Books in 1890. It offered more illustrations and halftones than the magazine articles could offer. [29]
The book was successful. Soon after its publication, The New York Times lauded its content, calling it a "powerful book". [30] The praise for How the Other Half Lives continued in many other newspapers across the country. Many of these enthusiastic reviews were seen in Christian newsletters, which enjoyed Riis' view on the moral issues of poverty. [29] The Christian Intelligencer reviewed the first edition saying "Books like this that lift the curtains and expose to public gaze the great evils of the system will hasten the day of reform." [29] Many of these Christian reviewers found Riis' work to apply their own cities, and called for similar reforms that Riis outlines in How the Other Half Lives. [31]
One of the most famous people who liked Riis' work was Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt became close to Riis during the former's two years as the President of the Police Board. [32] Roosevelt and Riis worked together to abolish police lodging houses[ definition needed ], as well as the reenactment of the Civil Service Law, the Tenement House Commission, laws that increased the amount of factory inspectors, making the eight-hour and prevailing rate of wages law effective, regulation of the working hours of women and children, as well as multiple other labor reforms. [33]
Because of this awakening caused by Riis' efforts, many reforms were quickly compiled to improve conditions for the working poor. In 1894, the Tenement House Committee was established. [34] In 1895, they published the New York Tenement House Act, which outlawed rear tenements[ definition needed ], and also was the first official document to supplement a written description of tenement housing with photographs. [34] In addition to this legislature, more reform was brought about by the New York Tenement House Act of 1901, which changed the minimum requirements of tenement housing to include reforms in the amount of light received by living quarters, increased fire safety regulations, more ventilation, restrictions on building height, and increased room space. For these reforms, Riis has almost been given full credit for inspiring these acts, especially the Act of 1901. Because of his poignant descriptions of the degradation of Mulberry Bend, this area was razed and replaced with a city park. [35]
How the Other Half Lives also inspired reform on a national scale. The Department of Labor published The Housing of the Working People in 1895, which was the second major tenement study of the decade. [36]
Jacob Riis was only the first to expose the conditions that the impoverished lived in using photographs. Some other works that detailed life in poverty were the images of the migrants during the Dust Bowl commissioned by the Farm Security Administration by Dorothea Lange; The Other America by Michael Harrington; and The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky.
Jacob August Riis was a Danish-American social reformer, "muck-raking" journalist, and social documentary photographer. He contributed significantly to the cause of urban reform in the United States of America at the turn of the twentieth century. He is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City; those impoverished New Yorkers were the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography. He endorsed the implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. He was an early proponent of the newly practicable casual photography and one of the first to adopt photographic flash. While living in New York, Riis experienced poverty and became a police reporter writing about the quality of life in the slums. He attempted to alleviate the poor living conditions of poor people by exposing these conditions to the middle and upper classes.
Five Points was a 19th-century neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City. The neighborhood, partly built on low-lying land which had filled in the freshwater lake known as the Collect Pond, was generally defined as being bound by Centre Street to the west, the Bowery to the east, Canal Street to the north, and Park Row to the south. The Five Points gained international notoriety as a densely populated, disease-ridden, crime-infested slum which existed for over 70 years.
A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. They are common on the British Isles, particularly in Scotland. In the medieval Old Town, in Edinburgh, tenements were developed with each apartment treated as a separate house, built on top of each other. Over hundreds of years, custom grew to become law concerning maintenance and repairs, as first formally discussed in Stair's 1681 writings on Scots property law. In Scotland, these are now governed by the Tenements Act, which replaced the old Law of the Tenement and created a new system of common ownership and procedures concerning repairs and maintenance of tenements. Tenements with one- or two-room flats provided popular rented accommodation for workers, but in some inner-city areas, overcrowding and maintenance problems led to shanty towns, which have been cleared and redeveloped. In more affluent areas, tenement flats form spacious privately owned houses, some with up to six bedrooms, which continue to be desirable properties.
The New York State Tenement House Act of 1901 banned the construction of dark, poorly ventilated tenement buildings in the U.S. state of New York. Among other sanctions, the law required that new buildings must be built with outward-facing windows in every room, an open courtyard, proper ventilation systems, indoor toilets, and fire safeguards. One of the reforms of the Progressive Era, it was one of the first laws of its kind in the U.S.
The history of New York City (1855–1897) started with the inauguration in 1855 of Fernando Wood as the first mayor from Tammany Hall, an institution that dominated the city throughout this period. Reforms led to the New York City Police Riot of June 1857. There was chaos during the American Civil War, with major rioting in the New York Draft Riots. The Gilded Age brought about prosperity for the city's upper classes amid the further growth of a poor immigrant working class, as well as an increasing consolidation, both economic and municipal, of what would become the five boroughs in 1898.
Mills House No. 1 or the Mills Hotel at 160 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York City was built as a hotel for poor men. It was funded by banker Darius Ogden Mills and designed by Ernest Flagg and opened in 1897. The building is now The Atrium.
The Committee of Fifteen was a New York City citizens' group that lobbied for the elimination of prostitution and gambling. It was established in November 1900. The Committee hired investigators who visited city locations where prostitution and gambling were alleged to have taken place and filed reports on each site. The investigators visited bars, pool halls, dance halls, and tenements during the year 1901. The investigators posed as clients to determine the locations where prostitution took place.
The People of the Abyss (1903) is a book by Jack London, containing his first-hand account of several weeks spent living in the Whitechapel district of the East End of London in 1902. London attempted to understand the working-class of this deprived area of the city, sleeping in workhouses or on the streets, and staying as a lodger with a poor family. The conditions he experienced and wrote about were the same as those endured by an estimated 500,000 of the contemporary London poor.
Albion Fellows Bacon was an American social reformer and writer from Evansville, Indiana. As Indiana's foremost "municipal housekeeper," a Progressive Era term for women who applied their domestic skills to social problems plaguing their communities, Bacon had a range of reform interests. She is best remembered for her efforts to improve housing standards and her work on tenement reform. A recognized expert in the field of housing reform, Bacon was persistent in her efforts to secure passage of legislative proposals for the issue, which resulted in passage of housing legislation in Indiana in 1909, 1913, and 1917. Bacon earned a national reputation as a social reformer that resulted in her appointment to the President's Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership and served on its standards and objectives committee.
Reverend Louis or Lewis Morris Pease was an American Methodist clergyman, educator and prominent reformer during the mid-to late 19th century. He founded the Five Points Mission and later the Five Points House of Industry, established in New York City's infamous Five Points district, which provided religious teaching and work for the area's predominantly working-class Irish Catholics.
Mulberry Bend was an area surrounding a curve on Mulberry Street, in the Five Points neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City. It is located in what is now Chinatown in Manhattan.
Baxter Street is a narrow thoroughfare that runs in a north–south direction in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It lies between Mulberry Street and Centre Street. It runs through Little Italy and the edge of Chinatown. Today, it runs one-way southbound from Grand Street to Hogan Place, and one-way northbound for its southernmost block from Worth Street to Hogan Place.
Alfred Tredway White was an American housing reformer and philanthropist, and was known as "Brooklyn's first citizen." After attending Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he developed the Home Buildings (1877), Tower Buildings and the Riverside Buildings (1890). He advocated a model of "philanthropy plus five percent," accepting a limited financial return on his projects.
Lawrence Turner Veiller (1872–1959) was an American social reformer of the Progressive Era in New York. He was a major figure in the Good government and urban planning movements of the early twentieth century.
Columbus Park formerly known as Mulberry Bend Park, Five Points Park and Paradise Park, is a public park in Chinatown, Manhattan, in New York City that was built in 1897.
The Trench in Potter's Field is a black and white photograph produced by Danish-American photographer Jacob A. Riis, probably in 1890, depicting a trench used as a mass grave for tenement residents who died during the period of mass immigration in New York. This photograph was part of the larger work made by Riis to depict the conditions of the lower classes of New York in his photographic and journalistic work.
Bandits' Roost, 59 1/2 Mulberry Street is a black and white photograph produced by Danish-American photojournalist and social reformer Jacob Riis in 1888. The photograph was possibly not taken by Riis but instead by one of his assistant photographers, Henry G. Piffard or Richard Hoe Lawrence. It was first published in the photographic book How the Other Half Lives, in 1889, which aimed to document the social conditions of the poorest people of New York.
Lodgers in Bayard Street Tenement, Five Cents a Spot is a black and white photograph taken by Danish-American photographer Jacob Riis, in 1889. It was included in his photographic book How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890.
Street Arabs in the Area of Mulberry Street is a black and white photograph taken by Danish American photographer Jacob Riis, probably in 1890. The designation of street arabs was given back then to homeless children. Riis took several pictures of these children, during the journalistic and photographic work that led to the publication of his landmark book How the Other Half Lives (1890), where they were published with the title of Street Arabs in Sleeping Quarters.
"I Scrubs", full title: ‘I scrubs.’ Little Katie from the W. 52nd Street Industrial School, is a black and white photograph taken by Danish American photographer and social reformer Jacob Riis, c. 1890. It was included in his second book, The Children of the Poor (1892), a follow-up to How the Other Half Lives (1890). This time Riis took aim at the poor children, specially those who were already working at a very young age. Similarly to the purpose of his previous book, Riis wanted to alert people to the creation of better conditions for the children of the poorer classes.
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How the Other Half Lives public domain audiobook at LibriVox