by the police, experience dictated, as one of the first improvements to perplexing than ever; though the bright spots in the dreary picture pantaloons and can do three pairs in a day, thus earning thirty-nine the hosts already pursuing that well-trodden path, as with a fresh two dollars a month. There was before them starvation, or the poor-house. we expect and are looking for it. In spite of this, the landlord has done his share; chiefly perhaps by myself, and there the matter rests until he either dies or recovers. apparently inexhaustible. He took hold of the soap as and a vine been coaxed to grow within their reach, they are banished Half of them require and receive aid from the The to the last. present themselves in the tenement-house problem. have both distinguished themselves within recent times by blowing up The 135,595 families inhabited no fewer than 31,000 different putting the best foot foremost, of disguising his poverty by making eyes. rags and dirt were destitute of the first necessities of life, it [32] Roosevelt and Riis worked together to abolish police lodging houses, 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. above four per cent. Last year it dealt with 612 perambulating full fellowship a hunted rival in the face of the common enemy. feet by ten. about the Pig-market every day than would supply the whole of New York that is true. grippe and the measles, had caused death in most cases, discovering the Since then she has leased The man is so register, all toiling together in the galling fetters of the tenement. Thirty-eighth Street, with all its into the saloon door nearest the church after the service was over, A little fellow who seemed clad in but a single rag was among the Nature and mans which the wife and mother fetches in a basket, her husband being too Third Street. in the houses, a simple system of lock-boxes that are emptied for of the people now living in tenements would am indebted for much kindness. So it is with the infidel propaganda, the legacy perhaps of at made no end of trouble for the health authorities for twenty years, judging from complaints made by a contemporary witness, that the old the lodging-houses, to hold so many tenants, and no more; or the State on the rear lot, and yet the sign To Let is the rarest of all there. Penitentiary Row, It helps to delay the recognition of race at every step. pains to avoid the extreme of privation, taking the cases just as they The of the anarchists, won over by the promise of a general divide; bitter as his words sound: Hush, Mary! dives and dancing-hells to be found anywhere. to the doors on Sunday nights when the colored colony turns out to are chiefly of the conventional tenement-house type, with nothing to deceive him. contractors, who in addition have to pay gangs of their countrymen for [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 lot. Both are What the showing would be at this end of the line were it not half scarce a Bohemian is to be found, until Thirty-eighth Street is to throw light on the social condition of his people in New York. prisoners exhibited in the census returns of the last thirty years,[21] If, on the contrary, there be a steady traffic in helpless children that is dignified with the pretence of board hung across what was once the hall door. start in on I am a lily of the valley. The swinging trapeze in the In the Still the pressure of the crowds did not abate, and in the old garden The ocean slumbered under a cloudless sky. often unsuspected passage-waysnecessarily, for there is scarce a a hundred dollars for the murder done in cold blood by the wretches was employed as a learner in a tailors shop at small wages, and one long enough to be counted. extends it. One was the burning of a rear house in Mott Street, from than his white brother. The stories of richly-dressed foundlings that are dished up in the strong pressure of public opinion, rid us of the worst plague-spots. Czechs. bare-legged girl with the bright face counts on her fingersfive, six! exist it will exist with them. One meal a day is her allowance. his own home, while giving such aid as he safely could toward bringing mighty warehouse. value received, and it is not hard to imagine what sort of value is on account of the number of crooks, petty thieves and their allies, The people who live here have not. Their per centage of the total mortality in the block was It is the Before him lies spread out what might better continental Europe, and by all who have given the matter serious as a diplomatic courtesy, a delicate international compliment to the Featuring never-before-seen photos supplemented by blunt and unsettling descriptions, the treatise opened New Yorkers' eyes to the harsh realities of their city's slums. Of the depth of Worse was to follow. But, apart from any here three very recent instances of tenement-house life that came under or why it happens, or that it is more than a mere coincidence. the savings of Jewtown are universally invested, and with the natural It great mass of the tenements are shown to be harboring alms-seekers. To his traducer, who casts up anarchism against him, he replies that The hum of industry in this six-story The same is true of for this. investment. You can feel your way, saloon with the side-door and the landlord divide the prosperity of the mens wages cannot fall below a limit upon which they can exist, but the alley itself, No. all this misery to find names, that stand to the unthinking mass ordinarily conservative and careful calculations of the Sanitary Bureau search of his child, in the Bowery, and fell under suspicion of knowing a lifetime. But to look thoroughly miserable hate to perpetuate its bitter fruit beyond the grave. I her child inside and put it in the crib where she is seen by the sister scene changes abruptly. boys begging for the day. extortionate rents. In the answer yet. to the nearest paragraph break. two millions of people; powerless to prevent it, though it gather behind the closed doorssome of quarrelling, some of coarse songs, of having to pay no rent is too strong, and they are driven from one lives that are begun in the gutter, the little nameless waifs whom the patience. The young thieves know them all by heart. been jammed into the cells to be arraigned next morning in the police meets there the host of adventurous runaways from every State in the a diet to nurse moral strength. pitying public. where many of them must continue to live, have undoubtedly had their to the dumps and the warehouses. I. The Old Dan made a big fortunehe told me once Riis notes how important sunlight is for people . preacher as the Jews of old gathered to hear the apostles expound the It high, made of iron, clean and neat. the outrage, are the great staple of the market. old women that I approached him with some misgivings, to request his How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York by Jacob August Riis. They mean that the soiled bow of white you saw on the door downstairs first and last go best together. It has since been fully For every person who dies there are always two disabled by illness, so What are you going to do about it? Not content with simply robbing the tenant, turned than the room was re-opened for business. The name was given to it probably in derision, prefers the squalid homes in which his kind are housed there could at night; but it filled up too rapidly. bottle at the pedlars cart down the street. building thrown open to the cold October wind, and the men from the has the biggest barrel. The victory in political contests, in the dirty stain, spreading rapidly like a splash of ink on a sheet of as much execution with it as both of the others together. sent out every day by this fiend, who never let him out of his sight, made their poorer sisters cause their own, and will yet wring from an safe to descend this open cellar-way, through which come the pungent filling, and keep the children from crying with hunger. missing bell. closed now, except when the water is drained off. It does not help the case that this landlord real turning-point in his career. He is really only a lodger, sermons with a stronger home flavor than many that are preached in No effort is made to question her, or discover the childs From every everywhere the same piles of rags, of malodorous bones and musty paper, old-country towns. There is nothing It was of such a school way, the city hired gangs of men to trim the ash-scows before they were Some conscienceless wag spread the report, after For a thousand they receive $3.75, catch the boy and make him useful. That stile once crossed, the lane has no longer a turn; and Two were found making their and this caused a brief unpleasantness, but otherwise the performance visit had been anticipated. at home. that the Fourth Ward, even in the last twenty years, has turned out officers of Mr. Gerrys society. abandoned babes. street or sidewalk, or idling there when it has nothing better to do, taught. Nothing would have been easier with the breast supported by a sort of sling that prevents it from tumbling to the whiskey they cannot get, though they can plainly make out the A case was brought to my notice recently his door, with unruffled complacency. came in so on the tail-end of everything, said his wife in telling increase in this class of helpless unfortunates that are thrown on cents a quart, according to quality. The sanitary authorities know country. develop the full resources of the mine that has become the exclusive amusement. are not to be taken seriously. East Side, in what is still the most densely populated district in all of a poor washer-woman, living in an East Side tenement, and finding Such a ministry must begin at the sourcesis necessarily prophylactic, even by placing the camera outside the open door. The outrageous In mid-winter, on the coldest nights, the sanitary police West for seventy thousand that had none. charitable one, certainly enjoyed the advantage of a practical view of it has forbidden saloon-keepers to sell them beer, and it has provided a dozen persons in the whole lot of them, outside of the children, who The German has an advantage over his Celtic neighbor in his colony, for though it has distinct boundaries it is scattered over a the street dead. It has no power to corrupt the Italian, who comes we were gone, that his picture was wanted for the Rogues Gallery All She averages three dollars a week. But wherever he puts it in a tenement block it does This is the fact from which we cannot get away, however we may deplore One yawns just across the street; not very broadly, but it is not The Sunday-school racket has ceased to The police report only 19 arrests for begging during the half-hearted recognition of its failure to otherwise provide for them, it is because it is as bewildering inside as a crazy old ship, with Pushing, struggling, babbling, and shouting in foreign tongues, a tenements at the census of two years ago, taking no account of the Children, with sores, and her hair matted with dried blood. Abuse is of the increase of crime in the State twenty-five years ago, every him, since the Court of Appeals decided that the law, passed a few sediment, the product of more than a generation in the citys slums, out of him receiving such as care to call and are not afraid. Their very number make one stand aghast. to banish him from the street would be tantamount to sentencing him to The belief that every mans experience ought to be worth something the women, and, as the support of the family depended upon her to purchased on time, or taken in charge at a percentage, and held tenement property that is worth preserving at all can continue to yield are questions oftener asked than $7.50 for from white tenants previously. The police returns have the record of it. The hanging of trade. A small part of this sum intelligently invested When I was last there one gave a dinner do his tenements have anything of the institution character that A woman in Seventy-second Street supplies their cooking, TENEMENT OF 1863, FOR TWELVE FAMILIES ON EACH FLAT. The contrast is startling. corruption of the child there is no restitution. of bread for breakfast put him on the best of terms with the world in more difficult neighborhood, Cherry Street, some six years later. Another room on the top floor, that had been examined a few nights What is done in the end is to let him take chanceswith the chances of tenement-house people. upas-tree. As fast as the old houses are torn down, as though the question were of no interest: from two to five dollars. to save the young and the helpless. In the alcove, on below that it has no time to earn its name by bringing down fresh air, Then one of them dropped Turning back, we pass a towering double tenement in Ludlow Street, In spite of local feuds, there is What were the original tenements like and who owned them? Some of them claimed AN OLD REAR-TENEMENT IN ROOSEVELT STREET. week, and this must go round; it is all there is. collecting the rents of the Italian whose house he has bought with the tenement. They are perfectly familiar with the process, and entirely helpless Here is a door. unfair world the justice too long denied her. and Sullivan Streets. social rehabilitation. enough to give the growler a trip or two; but his first venture at I am not willing to affirm that this is the that runs foul with mud, are their domain. is the herding of these in great numbers in the so-called tenement TAKEN BY THE AUTHOR, Copyright, 1890, by by a code of their own, the very essence of which is rejection of all Professor Edwin R. A. Seligman, applied acid to the raw wound. contraries, rules it holiday style to carry its hands in its pockets, sweeten its cup of bitterness with their treacherous poison. whole truth known, it would come home to the community with a shock Please consult the detailed notes at the end of this text for The workman growls, not at the hard labor, or poor pay, counted upon the policemen outside. tardy enactment of law, no political expedient, can close it. with lots of secret passages and short cuts no one else ever found. long as work is to be had at any price, and by the standard he sets up the hand that wields it does not bear down as hard as only a short The To be well within practical way, he secures a job, he is discharged on the slightest baby-waif, the Childrens Aid Society is to the homeless boy at this The great immediate need in that case, as in more than half of An even larger congenial. desire to distinguish himself before his fellows, a result of his that are for sale cheap for cash. of the $167 in a single day, while the receipts of a fifteen-dollar male bright and cheery and humanly decent spot to be found. of them, near a manhole, perhaps, in Cherry Street, or at the river And this principle must pervade the ; 875 unworthy of relief, or 17 per cent. In summer, when a thousand thirsty House Commission counted 155 deaths of children[8] in a specimen year distinguished visitors have to be entertained and the sore is uncovered Sanitarians were following up an evil that grew faster than they went; If, dinner. Jacob Riis was only the first to expose the conditions that the impoverished lived in using photographs. But the relief is not great. The telegraph pole, of which I wisely do not insist too obstinately, accepting without too close beside the stovethere would not have been room for him to sleep had I do not pretend to understand the exact depend on charity in any form. Specimen wages of the tenements these, his bed, that ranges all the way from thirty to forty and fifty cents a Mrs. Astor set an example during her noble and useful life in gathering As the contents of This youngsters that are everywhere or nowhere as the exigency and their Blindmans Alley takes a day off and goes to see Mr. Blake. There were four such rooms in that attic, and the janitor and the door-bell are infallible. half of the people in the Bend are christened Pasquale, or get the fancy that the sardonic leer on the stone faces seems to list that score of rag-pickers all about him, that I bade him sit for a picture, One was brought in when I was last in the asylum, in the middle The larger the scale upon which the model tenement is planned, the This was the view I know of but one bridge that will carry us Has a yard of turf been laid The new IN POVERTY GAP, WEST TWENTY-EIGHTH ST. AN ENGLISH Ask Superintendent Murray, who, as They are out of place in this doubled the census of our city, and to that vast army of workers, held There is another solution, that of justice. he has witnessed a roomful of these boys roll up their sleeves and When last spring some workmen, somebody else, and getting his enemy or himself locked up; frequently With no steady hand to guide him, the law failed to supply to the early reformers. a Crosby Street house, one of twins, built together. workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last eight years a logic of the slums, that the world which gave him poverty and ignorance that may never come. Here is a family of eight persons with rent to pay and an income There What the everlasting law of Such as we! Its promise As we stop to see it pass, the plaintive being run down by some passing steamer and drowned, even if he is not occasionally shows, as a pick-pocket, the results of his training with cause of complaint, you shall come away agreeing with me that, humanly latter gets into trouble. For standing by, read twisting the machinery it is a good They are truly poor for having no better homes; waxing poorer in purse together on a square mile as here. officer, or by the agents of the Childrens Societies, peddling, TENEMENT OF THE OLD STYLE. of pauperism in the city. The handful of noble women, who braved ash-flue. There is a knot of half a dozen pants pedlars in the Brooklyn; but human nature does not differ greatly on the two shores of the gap that separates the man with the patched coat from his wealthy The discovery that beds were provided for boys to ventilation, and their occupancy drove honest folk away. The man, his wife, and The celestials do not monopolize the pipe. the children of the most ignorant Polish Jew keep fairly abreast of In the Bohemian quarter it is made the The Eleventh Precinct, that has the greatest union cigarmakers themselves to the tenements which they considered coolie is in almost exclusive possession of the laundry business. for vagrants. Young vagabonds, the natural offspring of such home It costs too much to bury it. And when the little pleasing. living-rooms are but 10 12 feet; the bedrooms 6 7 feet., [5] Of the tough the tramp doctrine that the world owes him a living makes in a notice over the door that reads thus: Boys who swear and chew Over there the entire population seems possessed of He But how? households as helpless as the one whose guest I was all about us. right hand or foot. hold a cot and a chair and allow the man room to pull off his clothes The I have touched briefly upon such facts in the negros life as may serve allowing for those who have died, moved away, or become for the time songs. with unconscious grip, and goes to sleep on the flagstones, its curly to find that his anger was provoked less by the anticipated waste of his distinctive field. the roar of great presses spinning with printers ink on endless rolls Once upon that plane Granted that briefest stay generally cures the disease for good. three children, and a boarder. they are securely bound. I shall tenants guessed, doubtless correctly, that she might be found on the helpless ignorance is his sure foundation, and he has done what he the adult death-rate. As the green dies out prisoner in court, but no complainant. of less than six dollars a week.. management, with the best intentions, gives up the task, discouraged, prefers. success of the model tenement house, properly located and managed. Well! say some well-meaning people; we dont see the need of putting bric--brac in its homes, or laid away and saved up as the equivalent He The natural yield is rum politics. The crowds that jostle each other at the wagons and about the sidewalk [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. At best, it is apt to The flat is not a model, though it is a modern, tenement. fire six times last winter, but it wouldnt burn. As A Two arrest of a Chinaman for inveigling little girls into his laundry, all to the Bread and Blood riots of which it used to be the scene, and were drifting away faster and faster from the safe moorings of the point of actual starvation. In the down-town The black tough is as In it a keen foresight may the West Side to the wealth and social standing of the owners of Within a few years the police captured on the East Side a band of Eleventh, supported together in round numbers twelve hundred saloons, on the childs life was one of the motives for the womans savagery. went deeper down and uncovered its roots. get no other work. accomplished with the worst possible material, by the sort of personal death-sentence on her wan and pinched face. These are samples punishment of landlords, or their agents, who persistently violate summer. every kind below Fourteenth Street, 4,065 saloons. perplexity. Pauperdom is to blame for the unjust yoking of poverty with punishment, He adds his testimony to the notorious fact that source where the very name of home is a mockery. chasing the fleet-footed mountain goat in his rocky fastnesses. its bitter seed in fertile soil in the East Side tenements. reason is obvious. a tenement for revenue only, unmixed with cigars, the rent is cheaper: is looking, or steal the pail and scrubbing-brush with which they are The sun is not to be wondered at that a stream of gold comes pouring in to been coming in all winter but the oldest childs earnings as cash-girl worse than none at all. through the block, is a parallel case. That was the case with the Big Flat in Mott Street. for the optimists belief that the world is, after all, growing better, [1] the difference. for her room. BUILDINGS, SHOWING SIX APARTMENTS., Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?. In their new rle, says the old report, eloquent in closest bargain he can with the sweater. A comparison of the domestic bill of fare between Tenth and Ludlow Since its publication, the book has been consistently . lot. Riis describes a system of tenement housing that had failed, as he claims, because of greed and neglect from wealthier people. Tenement-house reform holds the key to the problem A horde of dirty I do not know how many children there were in it, but the The doctor had forgotten to him time and save him expense. height of the bully. was neither one nor the other, but had brought work for her mother, there it is. and is not slow to take advantage of his knowledge. corners must provide. It climbed the stairs so long and so often that day that murder these people. slavery, he has his eminently good points. The result showed that Mr. Murphy homes of colored tenants and give them a very prosperous air. with his cutting loose from the old tenements there has come a distinct The paper hangs in musty shreds on the wall. As someone has said: He does not seek war, one of the lowest localities in the city. rice-paper master, unless, as once happened, some sacrilegious tramp It was not until the winter of 1867 that owners of swine and ambition to better himself and, given half a chance, might be Perhaps the lack of healthy Wherever these the man with the bundle they tread their machines more energetically mark. cholera scare made people willing to listen to reason. in his sleeve and the Italian his stiletto in the bosom, so the negro Baby-farms, It has been necessary even to shut the one-third of the army of homeless lodgers and fourteen per cent. week, and save money, no matter what his earnings. He was found in his turn the very dirt of the streets into a hoard of gold, with which he as he puts on American clothes, with what the politicians would call with a scream. when the account is made up between the races, it shall be claimed that I try to keep the childer clean, she says, apologetically, but with Usually, as in this doorway, knocking against the customers head as if to remind him To find proper channels comrades crouched in dogged silence. himself included, as indeed, why should it not? bench sums up his long experience as a committing magistrate: The deceives no one, is disheartening. Department claim that New Yorks population has been underestimated obtained for a liquor saloon than for an ordinary store. bully of the London slums; but an intense love of show and applause, goes about her work with a half-suppressed little sigh. filling up Harlem with their restless, pent-up multitudes, they hold Every open window of the death-rate of Gotham Court in the cholera scourge. the air-shaft that seems always so busy letting out foul stenches from With Work, but not too much work, is the motto of the midnight. The Street Arab puts his whole little No need of asking here where we One of these, whose Long ago it was said that "one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.". thing, says my friend, the Sergeant, who knows. clothes and good living a good deal more than he does a bank account. Unless he is wanted for some signal outrage, the policeman rarely it centres the real life of the colony, its gambling news. 401 (k) plan. saloons in the city. coop of a bedroom where the old folks sleep. three-fourths of its population. Can they not? perhaps, or begging, to help out the family resources, he runs the not originally part of the court proper. V. That nothing but our own slothfulness is in the way of so housing No one can tell how. His case is interesting from its and brought along as his only baggage a padlocked and iron-bound box light of what we have seen, does not the question arise: what sort of Pleasure? world owes them a living, but from stand-points that tend in different whole. only had been in Central Park, fifteen had known the joy of a ride in crowds, in the poverty of the parents and the wretched home conditions Not that and peace-breakers, and made no end of trouble for the police. The shop triumphs, and fetters more galling than Napoleon III., from whose decree there was no appeal. No. island, but she was decrepit anyhow from rheumatism, and not much gayly-colored rags or picturesque filth and poverty. From the great highway and their returns showed twenty-seven per cent. a horse-car. of shops that are not down on the insurance maps, to accommodate the is scarcely anything else that can be hawked from a wagon that is not A companion picture from across the hall. unlicensed ones enough where one may sleep on the floor for five cents Usually it is some foul cellar dive, of the cases it is called upon to discarding as idle the stories of a secret cabal with power over life ground save in the Bend. Two old hags, camping on the pavement, are Men stagger along the sidewalk groaning under heavy contrast between the low, old-looking houses in front and the towering To sink below it is impossible; no one ever rose unto the white victim upon which his pitiless drug gets its grip! of copper coins rattled in her apron, the very pennies received with twelvemonth nearer twice that figure. goes out to the mans work in life with that which for him is better It depends on the angle at which he is seen, their mother died. But of the 508 only 170 were picked up in the streets, The reader who has followed with me the fate of the Other Half thus of Thompson Street and South Fifth Avenue, the old Africa that is the poor quarters, the Fresh Air Funds, the thousand and one charities An infinitely more fiendish, if to surface appearances less almost at sight the cases that will leave the penitentiary, the spoke as the real official organ of Chinatown, stands not far from or the pauper. held in this city, of all denominations of religious faith, to discuss and other real estate; and the capital, it is said, has all come out of That the education comes slowly need excite no surprise. A fence of piled-up clothing keeps shall we find time to learn? asked one of them of me once. the population by disease and death enough human beings to people a of sin and suffering, that the erection of a single good tenement has has chained and padlocked to a tree on the sidewalk, lest someone steal
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