by Jacob Riis
Introduction
The rapid growth of industrialization in the United States of the 1880s created an intense need for
labor. The flood of tens of thousands of people— of them immigrants— northeastern cities
created a housing problem of major proportions. Landlords, rushing to realize quick profits,
persisted in subdividing their apartments into ever smaller units, forcing the poor into increasingly
overcrowded living conditions.
In the late 1880s, Jacob Riis, himself a Danish immigrant, began writing articles for the New York
Sun that described the realities of life in New York City's slums. Riis was one of the first reporters
to use flash photography, allowing him to take candid photos of living conditions among the urban
poor. In 1890, he published How the Other Half Lives, illustrated with line drawings based on his
photographs. Riis's work helped spark a new approach to reporting called "muckraking" that
eventually led to the Progressive Era reform movements to improve these conditions. Here is an
excerpt from Riis's book.
Source
The twenty-five cent lodging-house keeps up the pretence of a bedroom, though the head-high
partition enclosing a space just large enough to hold a cot and a chair and allow the man room to
pull off his clothes is the shallowest of all pretences. The fifteen-cent bed stands boldly forth
without screen in a room full of bunks with sheets as yellow and blankets as foul. At the ten-cent
level the locker for the sleeper's clothes disappears. There is no longer need of it. The tramp limit
is reached, and there is nothing to lock up save, on general principles, the lodger. Usually the tenand
seven-cent lodgings are different grades of the same abomination. Some sort of an apology
for a bed, with mattress and blanket, represents the aristocratic purchase of the tramp who, by a
lucky stroke of beggary, has exchanged the chance of an empty box or ash-barrel for shelter on
the quality floor of one of these "hotels." A strip of canvas, strung between rough timbers, without
covering of any kind, does for the couch of the seven-cent lodger who prefers the questionable
comfort of a red-hot stove close to his elbow to the revelry of the stale-beer dive. It is not the most
secure perch in the world. Uneasy sleepers roll off at intervals, but they have not far to fall to the
next tier of bunks, and the commotion that ensues is speedily quieted by the boss and his club.
On cold winter nights, when every bunk had its tenant, I have stood in such a lodging-room more
than once, and listening to the snoring of the sleepers like the regular strokes of an engine, and
the slow creaking of the beams under their restless weight, imagined myself on shipboard and
experienced the very real nausea of sea-sickness. The one thing that did not favor the deception
was the air; its character could not be mistaken.
The proprietor of one of these seven-cent houses was known to me as a man of reputed wealth
and respectability. He "ran" three such establishments and made, it was said, $8,000 a year clear
profit on his investment. He lived in a handsome house quite near to the stylish precincts of
Murray Hill, where the nature of his occupation was not suspected. A notice that was posted on
the wall of the lodgers' room suggested at least an effort to maintain his up-town standing in the
slums. It read: "No swearing or loud talking after nine o'clock." Before nine no exceptions were
taken to the natural vulgarity of the place; but that was the limit.
There are no licensed lodging-houses known to me which charge less than seven cents for even
such a bed as this canvas strip, though there are unlicensed ones enough where one may sleep
on the floor for five cents a spot, or squat in a sheltered hallway for three. The police station
lodging-house, where the soft side of a plank is the regulation couch, is next in order. The manner
in which this police bed is "made up" is interesting in its simplicity. The loose planks that make the
platform are simply turned over, and the job is done, with an occasional coat of whitewash thrown
in to sweeten things. I know of only one easier way, but, so far as I am informed, it has never
been introduced in this country. It used to be practised, if report spoke truly, in certain old-country
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towns. The "bed" was represented by clothes-line stretched across the room upon which the
sleepers hung by the arm-pits for a penny a night. In the morning the boss woke them up by
simply untying the line at one end and letting it go with its load; a labor-saving device certainly,
and highly successful in attaining the desired end.
. . . If the tenement is here continually dragged into the eye of public condemnation and scorn, it
is because in one way or another it is found directly responsible for, or intimately associated with,
three-fourths of the miseries of the poor. In the Bohemian quarter it is made the vehicle for
enforcing upon a proud race a slavery as real as any that ever disgraced the South. Not content
with simply robbing the tenant, the owner, in the dual capacity of landlord and employer, reduces
him to virtual serfdom by making him become his tenant, on such terms as he sees fit to make,
the condition of employment at wages likewise of his own making. It does not help the case that
this landlord employer, almost always a Jew, is frequently of the thrifty Polish race just described.
. .
. . . Probably more than half of all the Bohemians in this city are cigarmakers, and it is the herding
of these in great numbers in the so-called tenement factories, where the cheapest grade of work
is done at the lowest wages, that constitutes at once their greatest hardship and the chief grudge
of other workmen against them. . . .
Men, women and children work together seven days in the week in these cheerless tenements to
make a living for the family, from the break of day till far into the night. Often the wife is the
original cigarmaker from the old home, the husband having adopted her trade here as a matter of
necessity, because, knowing no word of English, he could get no other work. As they state the
cause of the bitter hostility of the trades unions, she was the primary bone of contention in the
day of the early Bohemian immigration. The unions refused to admit the women, and, as the
support of the family depended upon her to a large extent, such terms as were offered had to be
accepted. The manufacturer has ever since industriously fanned the antagonism between the
unions and his hands, for his own advantage. The victory rests with him, since the Court of
Appeals decided that the law, passed a few years ago, to prohibit cigarmaking in tenements was
unconstitutional, and thus put an end to the struggle. . . .
. . . I have in mind an alley— inlet rather to a row of rear tenements— is either two or four feet
wide according as the wall of the crazy old building that gives on it bulges out or in. I tried to count
the children that swarmed there, but could not. Sometimes I have doubted that anybody knows
just how many there are about. Bodies of drowned children turn up in the rivers right along in
summer whom no one seems to know anything about. When last spring some workmen, while
moving a pile of lumber on a North River pier, found under the last plank the body of a little lad
crushed to death, no one had missed a boy, though his parents afterward turned up. The truant
officer assuredly does not know, though he spends his life trying to find out, somewhat illogically,
perhaps, since the department that employs him admits that thousands of poor children are
crowded out of the schools year by year for want of room. . . .
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