How the Other Half Lives

How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York is a work of documentary reporting by Jacob A. Riis, issued by Charles Scribner’s Sons of New York with illustrations chiefly from photographs taken by the author. The title of the book comes from an old saying, quoted in the introduction, that one half of the world does not know how the other half lives. Riis argues that this ignorance was once true because the half on top did not care, and that it could no longer be sustained once the crowding and upheaval below became too violent to ignore.

In the preface Riis explains that he began the book out of a belief that every man’s experience, if gleaned through decent and honest work, ought to be worth something to the community. He thanks officials of the Board of Health and the police, and the Registrar of Vital Statistics, Dr. Roger S. Tracy, whose help with tables and statistics he calls essential. He also thanks his wife.

The introduction sets out the central claim. The boundary line of the Other Half, Riis says, runs through the tenements. He states that three-fourths of New York’s people now live in them, that fifteen thousand tenant houses of the previous generation have swelled to thirty-seven thousand, and that more than twelve hundred thousand persons call them home. He calls the tenement system the evil offspring of public neglect and private greed, and concludes that nothing is left but to make the best of a bad bargain. He draws on testimony about the 1863 riot and on legislative inquiries linking crime, drunkenness and pauperism to bad housing.

The contents page shows how the book is organized. It opens with the genesis of the tenement and the awakening of public concern, then moves through the city’s districts and peoples. Chapters cover the downtown back alleys, the Italians, the notorious Bend, stale-beer dives, cheap lodging houses, Chinatown, Jewtown and its sweatshops, Bohemian cigarmakers in their tenements, and the color line in New York. Later chapters turn to social problems: the common herd, children, waifs and street arabs, the reign of rum, working girls, pauperism, and the wrecks and waste of city life.

The final chapters, titled What Has Been Done and How the Case Stands, shift from description to the question of remedies. The list of illustrations promises images such as Gotham Court, Bandits’ Roost, Bottle Alley, a sweater’s shop on Ludlow Street, and the evolution of the tenement over twenty years. It also lists floor plans of model buildings in Brooklyn.

The book opens with verses by James Russell Lowell in which Christ shows the comfortable the images of himself they have made in the poor. That epigraph signals the moral tone. Riis presents his account as drawn from plain public records, dark enough to chill any heart, and he says that if the sufferings and sins of the other half appear a just punishment on the community that gave it no other choice, it is because that is the truth.