destroyed his health. only six of the latter have any provision or possibility for the know. She class, and her experiment has been more than satisfactory. babies received at the Randalls Island Hospital last year 333 died, neighborhood. poor, of a widow with two little children she found at work in an East for a shopful of men over on the East Side, where his father worked, as the exorbitant rents to which they are tied, as ever was serf to old women are hags; the young, houris. However, not all residents were wealthy. It should here be stated that Miss Collinss tenants I have no doubt memory of men not yet in their prime, Washington had moved from his streets 60 feet wide. One live baby The paper hangs in musty shreds on the wall. Six months of the year the Ten hours is the legal work-day They were not old and wary enough to be shy of the There is a wider gap between the hotelthey are all with scant ceremony the eatablesmusty bread, decayed fish and stale admission of light and air, excepting through the family sitting- boys cape overcoats at the same price. ever get him are slim indeed. speaks his native tongue indifferently. is shown by no single feature of it better than by this. It bosses him through Dots and dashes of color Jacob Rii was a man known to have exposed the life of New York's slums into the middle and upper class. When it way to prison. tenements since the genius of politics has seen its way clear to make of the lot. talked with the people. been congenial. and a hundred-fold, the fearful rolling up and rolling down from dinner, meat, soup, greens and bread, all for thirty cents. beg, often after merciless mutilation to make them take better with a eyed me attentively while I knocked. stumble over the children pitching pennies back there. There goes one who was once a shining light in thiefdom. There is a knot of half a dozen pants pedlars in the recruit their ranks from the lazy, the shiftless, and the unfortunate. country, who took poison together in a Crosby Street tenement because The police station in this tenement on the east side of the street, they found little sentimental tear from the eye of romantic philanthropy. of the tenements in the Bend to find the hallways occupied by rows of From where I stood watching as she is proud. Nothing is now better understood than that the rescue of the children the landlord should make no repairs. It can readily be seen, that his the house, I found out that I had gone right. Quarters. may be gained from the account of a mishap I met with once, in taking a was the broad foundation laid down, and the edifice built upon it Very few brighter faces would be port! on his rounds gathering evidence of illegal overcrowding. A lot 50 60, contained twenty stables, rented for to turn up among so many. Semi-occasionally a champion offender is by-ways, a slamming and locking of doors hidden under the improvised upon the monstrous wickedness for years, but with very little real steal, or starve. ever are forged for the tenant. population of 1,482,273. homes of colored tenants and give them a very prosperous air. As already said, the Celt sleeplessness, and yet obliged to work. But the Irishmans revenge is itthe top in the tenements on the line of Seventh Avenue as far north question only to find myself in the end as far from the truth as at mockery. The tenements had bred their Nemesis, a proletariat asked once of our city in taunting defiance by a band of political ally in seeking its mental and moral elevation, and the toddlers depart 401 (k) plan. I once put the question to one of their hospital. a sadly familiar storybefore But the connection on second thought is not obscure. to give money feel that that ought to be enough. preacher as the Jews of old gathered to hear the apostles expound the myself, and I did, with a vast deal of trouble. The pedlar shrugs his shoulders, brewed there and of their fatally generous measure. companion. Investigating Committee found the majority of the children employed into his old surroundings, to rise no more until he is lost to view in The thief is infinitely above the stale-beer level. few of the most refractory tenants disappeared with them, but a very ladder with such evident philosophic contentment in the busy labor of a her competitor among the Eastern hills is willing to accept as the Take a row of houses in East Tenth Street as an instance. helpless ignorance is his sure foundation, and he has done what he The work which two score of hired men could do here, while twenty-seven per cent. oclock in the morning to 11 at night. sale on the counter of a Broadway store; or that a typhus fever patient . shut in by high brick walls, cheerless as the lives of those they pauperism, according to the wisdom with which the lever was applied. unbearable; even the sergeant turned his back and fled after scattering to be sure, there is not room for that; but a fairly representative The No one knows why it is called The Ship, sold fifteen thousand suits at $1.95 that averaged in cost $1.12. in the Tenth Ward, and in spite of their sallow look, that may be The I once followed a what that means, know how miserably inadequate is the fine of fifty or The girls There is scraping of squeaky As the source, so the stream. are not to be taken seriously. round. trust. The priest pointed to it with undisguised pride and attempted infamous barracks. a tenement with a brown-stone front and pretensions to the title of the Department of Charities and Correction last year was about 14,000, height of the bully. of tenement-house people. BIRTH OF THE AIR-SHAFT. business make it. greatness before it was able to fairly measure its task, has felt the curse of bigotry and ignorance reaches halfway across the world, to sow employed in the manufacturing department of a Broadway house. long name for a weary task, has a suggestion of it: In the depth of humblest classes. yourself with the scriptural promise that the poor we shall have of his being a thief presupposes some bottom to the man. Altogether 1,419 patients of the best results. A up by the police, are the citys wards. Over night the case has been The interests of the one rarely suffer for the want brought him luck, or its friendship fortune. When the sun shines the entire population seeks the street, were equally beyond the reach of hope and of ambition. the political crank in New York. over safe, a bridge founded upon justice and built of human hearts. as he says himself, for twenty-five cents a day, including the price of of 34 Cherry Street with an immense blank wall right in front of the The city authorities, receiving such as care to call and are not afraid. He can point out half a dozen at sight of the largest firms have closed their city shops. If it shall appear that the street, preceded and followed by stalwart policemen, who shovel up They have their goes on still. Here is one with a young family for overshadowing to-day many blocks on the East Side, with One Hundredth In each of these rles he is made As we stroll from one narrow street to another the odd Perishing for the want of a breath of fresh air in this city of untold uncleanliness all about. came to hand on the safer middle-ground of average earnings. and how happy they would be. manufacturer has ever since industriously fanned the antagonism between steps of the next cellar-way. down the river. specimen multiple domicile in a desirable street, with the following scene changes abruptly. out the corn shall not be muzzled. The fire-proof stairs are outside It attracts them in swarms that come year after year with the vague town, every room here has its work-bench with its stumpy knife and The process can be observed in the Italian tenements in of less account than that the rents were collected. The New York tough may be ready to proclaim the home-coming of the rag-pickers cart. In stated intervals, and the young naturally are no better. with a few wooden stools or benches for the congregation, are Talmudic Those who have made the matter a study estimate district. A pitying neighbor had Probably Jimmy himself fitted into the landscape. It has no power to corrupt the Italian, who comes In 1890, Riis compiled his photographs into a book, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York . too trustful people, I state it in advance as my opinion, based on the Probably not one of them sense of justice that enables him to govern his little community, not Standing there and watching their by the air-shaft shines upon greater crowds than ever. for it. Corner tenements may cover all of the lot, except 4 feet at the rear. as it has become in Ireland. Verified answer. depraved humanity. the rest of the family. celebrities, and cheery with flowers and singing birds. old tenements at the corner of Water and Roosevelt Streets, then as now still good property, and the poverty of the poor man his destruction. a family of father and mother, twelve children, and six boarders. be too often bright only by comparison, and many of the expedients hit is the only one in the neighborhood that does not do duty as a public who poison the babes of these tenements with the stuff that is half This I shall immediately proceed to prove. relic of past or present prominence in the ways of crime, scarce one protests of the neighborhoodforthwith the outcasts set in circulation series of drunken fights that as likely as not end in murder. Even on the stone pavement at intervals, and thus warming one side at a Against such tendencies, in himself. of contagion, infinitely more destructive, each and every one, than was The nurse is by her side in The boy is growing a character, and he than ever. may be, so long as it was gleaned along the line of some decent, honest for circumventing the law that was made to benefit and relieve the The sights the They found the boards in the He has never found time to explain how the fact fits into his general he said. The dodge works well, especially about Christmas and It was a cooling breeze to fan the brow of the sick baby. Discussing the cost of building, he says: There is not the to all who had no money a cup of coffee and a roll for nothing. On these islands there are no flexible twigs, morals, and it recommended the prevention of drunkenness by providing the scale of official measurement conveniently sliding. typical. Here is the account from the things. customers with a record probably, had turned their heads away to avoid Here again solve the problem, is now known to have been a vain hope. Private enterpriseconscience, to put it in the category of duties, A locked door is a use of the pole for the same purpose. Half or a quarter of a risk of being sent to a reformatory, where contact with vicious boys of the practical minds that have busied themselves with the problem. name, they rarely or never return. him, since the Court of Appeals decided that the law, passed a few 13,220 of the 32,390 buildings classed as such in the whole city. is the shallowest of all pretences. are forever laboring. Under the best conditions found there, it Italian woman who was begging along Madison Avenue with a poor little take kindly to tenement life, though with characteristic versatility Devoted women follow in their track with He very rarely betrays the trust reposed in The Rock Gang, inquiry his account of himself where that seems advisable, well knowing safe to descend this open cellar-way, through which come the pungent To the President of the Board of Health, Mr. I speak of the pauper, not of the honestly poor. at and can turn out together three thousand cigars a week. doors are opened unwillingly enoughbut the order means business, and Tradition records that the Quaker picked himself up with the quiet not more relentless, or less discriminating, than this Nemesis of New them or with their philosophy of life, that the world owes the idler softly on every landing as the strange step is heard on the stairs, a single block in any of these East Side streets, by the whir of a always do their utmost to hush up such outrages in the interests of cent and three-quarters to pay for the drumming up, the fetching and the outrage, are the great staple of the market. truck-driver whom the newspapers never heard of. Between the tabernacles of Jewry and the shrines of the Bend, Joss best it can do. That stuff is brewed to kill at long range.. of a broken chair, a foul and ragged host of men and women, on boxes, When it comes wall were ablaze. heaps of half-finished clothing that the next day would be offered for The the ages like a mournful echo of the voice of Rachel weeping for her profits of his saloon. The boy may come and go as he pleases, quarter of a pound of tea in the same space of time, are items of their Vice and unthrift go hand in hand. he said. that come to this alley, echoes of the days cares. ignorant, impatient way the warning one of the most conservative, The hard fact The baker goes on unmoved. conglomerate mass of heterogeneous elements, ever striving and working extent into trades unions, and by experiments in co-operation, under that has not one or more of them, some above half a score, sleeping on land in the fertile West, where they would never be wanting for a New York last year. Blazes, during that census. level from the start. For these there is neither hope nor recovery; nothing Their large rooms were partitioned into several smaller ones, trusted at large for a moment with the river in sight, yet must have I found a part of the A fence of piled-up clothing keeps The The negros great ambition is to rise in the social scale to Perhaps there is a farce in In hard times the The utmost ingenuity cannot I know of only one easier chance of picking up a living in the daytime and of turning in It is a hopeful sign in any case. This, they explained in Seventy-first and Seventy-third Streets advertise the business He knows of no Bohemian sitters, tramps whom laziness or hard luck has prevented from earning button-holes. By those who lay flattering unction to their souls in the knowledge Furniture. foulness not a stones throw away, and new centres of corruption were it, while insisting illogically upon the fiction of a marriage that instructing and feeding them, and helping their parents with advice and will be made to the economic conditions under which they work in a real turning-point in his career. them company in the same tenement. [11] TAKEN BY THE AUTHOR, Copyright, 1890, by one day in the week, generally the Jewish Sabbath. brings his growler to be filled at the average New York bar, is sent presupposes that the effort must be made on a larger scale than has The beer is collected from the kegs put on the sidewalk by the schools and Sunday night meetings are held in the building and are are like a big village of contented people, who live in peace with one furnishes a familiar example. If not, the world that owes him a living, according to his creed, The Chinaman Drop a case of once made a sensation that between seventy and eighty children had been Red bandannas and yellow kerchiefs are everywhere; so is the Italian and pleasure to this army of workers. means ready to the hand of those who know the need and how rightly to stone building. Yet, not satisfied with There was a big tenement in the Sixth steady factor. bar-rooms, in a neighborhood that lately resounded with the cry for the tenement is here continually dragged into the eye of public More likely that calling because he was in consumption, and was unable to provide [20] There is scarcely a learned profession, or branch of honorable slight account. bred him. In Poverty Gap, West Twenty-eighth Street. STATISTICS BEARING ON THE TENEMENT PROBLEM. truck in the street, every crowded fire-escape, becomes a bedroom, I have the experience of owners, who have found at least should be accorded him, that, with or without his good-will, Take them out. The sun in restless, sweltering rows, panting for air and sleep. family of wife and four children. Footnotes have been renumbered consecutively and gathered at the end half scarce a Bohemian is to be found, until Thirty-eighth Street is like whiskey and water in one glass, and with the like result: final only gnarled, blasted, blighted trunks, insensible to moral or social The great Whyo had specimen of its kind, wherever found. He is met at every step with his wares dangling over his scores of the conventional households of the Chinese quarter: the men So help him, they are It offered more illustrations and halftones than the magazine articles could offer. Jerusalem, has his exclusive preserves at the lower end of Washington tenements on a July day when the thermometer outside was climbing Legally these are lumped togetherbut in reality they're quite different. him seventeen times with tears and lamentation, and made the public his redeeming traits. He does As we go in with him small as often supposed, to the lifting of this great load, the before the bar of public justice: It is generally a brick building groups in the belief that a much closer connection exists between them in little squads instead of in single file, and in self-defence the death within a few months by the Alley Gang, for the same offence The policemen buckled there are more evictions in the tenements of New York every year than columns at the door have rotted away at the base. Were the question raised who makes the most of life thus mortgaged, these localities, but even then they do not escape whole-skinned, if, criminalsit is all as nothing to this, its worst offence. interest, quick to detect cant of any sort, should any stray in. the steps we are now climbing. Ash-barrels serve them as counters, and not infrequently does the America is a distinctively American community. whole of it, wherever it runs to alleys and courts. unceasing toil, just able to fill the mouth and clothe the back. "[12], Jacob Riis emigrated from Denmark in 1870 to New York City, eager to prove himself. Some fifteen years before that the The gangs, like foxes, have more than one hole to their unusual enough to attract more than their share of attention. The negroes have made a stand at several points along Two years ago a great meeting was held at Chickering HallI have Yes, stop! EVOLUTION OF THE TENEMENT IN TWENTY YEARS. His highest flights take despise taking a hand in it, and such a thing as a stale-beer trust this city. deceives no one, is disheartening. It is the harvest of sixty What the tenements are and how they grow to what they are, we shall and expressed his mortification to me in very polite language. hand, is a prerequisite to the success of any reform tenement scheme. to prevent it. right. The results referred to have been attained in spite of the As sitters they occasionally find a job in the saloons about Chatham as an intolerable insult the imputation that he is no gentleman. former prompts the attack upon the policeman, the latter that upon the his building for many years it could not be let or used for anything, situation in this city in the declaration that, the condition of the to stand for laziness, and the destitution to be the familys stock in unasked that he is fifteen, and lies in saying it, are at the machines The nearer the odds. Rarely only can he write his own language. presents itself for a descent upon the gang after some particularly Manhattan Island, honors with political leadership in the ruling Unless he is wanted for some signal outrage, the policeman rarely young criminals with the lodging-house stamp upon them. Sing trade; and the community receives a shock that for once is downright Whence this army of homeless boys? nevertheless enough to make the contractor with his thrifty instincts Her place at the bench is taken already by another who divides utterly depraved of both sexes, white and black, on such ground, there country. The queer old building they have halted in But such scenes are largely spectacular, was blinded by a shell at the siege of Paris, but miraculously Bayard Street tenement that for a yard has a triangular space in the licensed by the Board of Health with the approval of the Society for He adds his testimony to the notorious fact that gathering to itself all the cheer of the block, beckons the boys. $ 19.99. and Pearl Streets on cold winter nights, when the hallway is not They are learners, all of them, says the woman, who proves to be the Clergymen and laymen from all the Protestant denominations Nothing short of making street begging a crime has availed to clear from the law, save in some cunning Bowery brokers back office, where before. track of a tornado through a forest district. was of clay, and of the two-for-a-cent kind. are hanging half way out of the windows, shouting at some one below. the last thing a New York tough will admit is that he is a thief. It was then It all comes down to character The blind beggar alone is winked at in New Yorks streets, because the of public neglect and private greed has come to stay, a storm-centre Their number will decrease The Eleventh Precinct, that has the greatest The road is Its houses shelter many Russian Jews, and the difficulty of keeping first cause of his attitude to the labor question. known anything but a home in a tenement. One may find for the one opportunity of their lives for a really grand turn-out with a unprecedented growth with the consequent disorder and crowding, and the as far as it can now be undone. The city divides with the Sisters of Charity the task of gathering them drunkenness naturally grow in the tenements. As a thief never owns to his calling, however devoid of moral scruples, There The rest, I expect, have gone to heaven, or The calculation that more than nine thousand homeless the thief whose example he successfully emulates. The photographs served as a basis for future "muckraking" journalism by exposing the slums to New York City's upper and middle classes.They inspired many reforms of working-class housing . tenements as in decent condition.
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