How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York

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Jacob August Riis. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I. GENESIS OF THE TENEMENT

CHAPTER II. THE AWAKENING

CHAPTER III. THE MIXED CROWD

CHAPTER IV. THE DOWN TOWN BACK-ALLEYS

CHAPTER V. THE ITALIAN IN NEW YORK

CHAPTER VI. THE BEND

CHAPTER VII. A RAID ON THE STALE-BEER DIVES

CHAPTER VIII. THE CHEAP LODGING-HOUSES

CHAPTER IX. CHINATOWN

CHAPTER X. JEWTOWN

CHAPTER XI. THE SWEATERS OF JEWTOWN

CHAPTER XII. THE BOHEMIANS—TENEMENT-HOUSE CIGARMAKING

CHAPTER XIII. THE COLOR LINE IN NEW YORK

CHAPTER XIV. THE COMMON HERD

CHAPTER XV. THE PROBLEM OF THE CHILDREN

CHAPTER XVI. WAIFS OF THE CITY’S SLUMS

CHAPTER XVII. THE STREET ARAB

CHAPTER XVIII. THE REIGN OF RUM

CHAPTER XIX. THE HARVEST OF TARES

CHAPTER XX. THE WORKING GIRLS OF NEW YORK

CHAPTER XXI. PAUPERISM IN THE TENEMENTS

CHAPTER XXII. THE WRECKS AND THE WASTE

CHAPTER XXIII. THE MAN WITH THE KNIFE

CHAPTER XXIV. WHAT HAS BEEN DONE

CHAPTER XXV. HOW THE CASE STANDS

APPENDIX. STATISTICS BEARING ON THE TENEMENT PROBLEM

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The belief that every man’s experience ought to be worth something to the community from which he drew it, no matter what that experience may be, so long as it was gleaned along the line of some decent, honest work, made me begin this book. With the result before him, the reader can judge for himself now whether or not I was right. Right or wrong, the many and exacting duties of a newspaper man’s life would hardly have allowed me to bring it to an end but for frequent friendly lifts given me by willing hands. To the President of the Board of Health, Mr. Charles G. Wilson, and to Chief Inspector Byrnes of the Police Force I am indebted for much kindness. The patient friendship of Dr. Roger S. Tracy, the Registrar of Vital Statistics, has done for me what I never could have done for myself; for I know nothing of tables, statistics and percentages, while there is nothing about them that he does not know. Most of all, I owe in this, as in all things else, to the womanly sympathy and the loving companionship of my dear wife, ever my chief helper, my wisest counsellor, and my gentlest critic.

In New York, the youngest of the world’s great cities, that time came later than elsewhere, because the crowding had not been so great. There were those who believed that it would never come; but their hopes were vain. Greed and reckless selfishness wrought like results here as in the cities of older lands. “When the great riot occurred in 1863,” so reads the testimony of the Secretary of the Prison Association of New York before a legislative committee appointed to investigate causes of the increase of crime in the State twenty-five years ago, “every hiding-place and nursery of crime discovered itself by immediate and active participation in the operations of the mob. Those very places and domiciles, and all that are like them, are to-day nurseries of crime, and of the vices and disorderly courses which lead to crime. By far the largest part—eighty per cent. at least—of crimes against property and against the person are perpetrated by individuals who have either lost connection with home life, or never had any, or whose homes had ceased to be sufficiently separate, decent, and desirable to afford what are regarded as ordinary wholesome influences of home and family.... The younger criminals seem to come almost exclusively from the worst tenement house districts, that is, when traced back to the very places where they had their homes in the city here.” Of one thing New York made sure at that early stage of the inquiry: the boundary line of the Other Half lies through the tenements.

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There is crape on the door of the Alderman’s court as we pass out, and upstairs in one of the tenements preparations are making for a wake. A man lies dead in the hospital who was cut to pieces in a “can racket” in the alley on Sunday. The sway of the excise law is not extended to these back alleys. It would matter little if it were. There are secret by-ways, and some it is not held worth while to keep secret, along which the “growler” wanders at all hours and all seasons unmolested. It climbed the stairs so long and so often that day that murder resulted. It is nothing unusual on Cherry Street, nothing to “make a fuss” about. Not a week before, two or three blocks up the street, the police felt called upon to interfere in one of these can rackets at two o’clock in the morning, to secure peace for the neighborhood. The interference took the form of a general fusillade, during which one of the disturbers fell off the roof and was killed. There was the usual wake and nothing more was heard of it. What, indeed, was there to say?

The “Rock of Ages” is the name over the door of a low saloon that blocks the entrance to another alley, if possible more forlorn and dreary than the rest, as we pass out of the Alderman’s court. It sounds like a jeer from the days, happily past, when the “wickedest man in New York” lived around the corner a little way and boasted of his title. One cannot take many steps in Cherry Street without encountering some relic of past or present prominence in the ways of crime, scarce one that does not turn up specimen bricks of the coming thief. The Cherry Street tough is all-pervading. Ask Superintendent Murray, who, as captain of the Oak Street squad, in seven months secured convictions for theft, robbery, and murder aggregating no less than five hundred and thirty years of penal servitude, and he will tell you his opinion that the Fourth Ward, even in the last twenty years, has turned out more criminals than all the rest of the city together.

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