Jacob Riis: How the Other Half Lives

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Chapter I of How the Other Half Lives discusses the “genesis of the tenement.” Riis describes the evolution of New York City from the days of the Knickerbockers (the Dutch aristocracy) and George Washington into the nineteenth century. Behind proud old homes were “rear houses” inhabited by the poor, and older homes were purchased and divided up into tenement apartments. In time, “neatness, order, cleanliness, were never dreamed of in connection with the tenant-house system, as it spread its localities from year to year.” At the same time, “slovenliness, discontent, privation, and ignorance were left to work out their invariable results, until the entire premises reached the level of tenant-house dilapidation, containing, but sheltering not, the miserable hordes that crowded beneath smouldering, water-rotted roofs or burrowed among the rats of clammy cellars.” Riis goes on to provide statistics concerning the overcrowding and deaths—deaths that were often the result of “suffocation in the foul air of an unventilated apartment.” He points out that the East Side of New York City was at the time the most densely populated district in the world—290,000 people per square mile. (To put that figure in perspective, the population density for all of New York City in 1890 was about 8,300 per square mile, and the population density of the borough of Manhattan in 2000 was just under 70,000 per square mile.)

In Chapter XXV, “How the Case Stands,” Riis specifies conditions as they exist. One way in which he appeals to the sensitivities of more affluent Americans is by pointing out that the “security” of everyone demands, “on sanitary, moral, and economic grounds,” that people be decently housed. He then makes specific proposals for ways to solve the tenement problem: the law, remodeling and making effective use of old houses, and building model tenements. In his view, “the arrest and summary punishment of landlords, or their agents, who persistently violate law and decency, will have a salutary effect.” But he also argues that “it can be made to pay to improve and make the most of the worst tenement property, even in the most wretched locality,” and he gives examples, both of remodeling and of the construction of model tenements by such organizations as the Improved Dwellings Association and the Tenement House Building Company. Riis concludes by asserting that “if this book shall have borne ever so feeble a hand in garnering a harvest of justice, it has served its purpose.”