Jacob Riis
Published in 1890 and sub-titled “Studies Among the Tenements of New York”, this book was written by Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant, to expose the ill treatment of the tenement poor in New York City. The book grew out of both his personal experience in the neighborhoods he wrote about, and his work as a reporter for the New York Tribune, where he started working as a police reporter in 1877. He pioneered the use of flash photography, allowing him to capture and communicate in a very concrete way the misery of the tenements. In 1888, the New York Sun published his essay “Flashes from the Slums: Pictures Taken in Dark Places by the Lightning Process,” and in 1889, Scribner’s published his photographic essay on city live which was to grow into “How the Other Half Lives.”1
Riis despised the tenements, which he saw as central to the problem of poverty in New York and responsible for crime, disease, and the perpetuation of the culture of poverty. The analysis is modern, and accurate, thought the phrasing used over a century ago takes getting used to – “In the tenements all the influences make for evil; because they are the hot-beds of the epidemics that carry death to rich and poor alike; the nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that through off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to the island asylums and workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last eight years a round half a million beggars to prey upon our charities; that maintain a standing army of ten thousand tramps with all that implies; because, above all, they touch the family life with deadly amoral contagion.”
Mixed in with acute social analysis is an large measure of racial prejudice. The chapter “The Cheap Lodging Houses”, depicting how people attracted to the city in swarms with the “vague idea that they can get along here if anywhere2,” journey down the scale from the twenty five cent hotel to the ten cent lodging house is as accurate a description of the
Riis despised the tenements, which he saw as central to the problem of poverty in New York and responsible for crime, disease, and the perpetuation of the culture of poverty. The analysis is modern, and accurate, thought the phrasing used over a century ago takes getting used to – “In the tenements all the influences make for evil; because they are the hot-beds of the epidemics that carry death to rich and poor alike; the nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that through off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to the island asylums and workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last eight years a round half a million beggars to prey upon our charities; that maintain a standing army of ten thousand tramps with all that implies; because, above all, they touch the family life with deadly amoral contagion.”
Mixed in with acute social analysis is an large measure of racial prejudice. The chapter “The Cheap Lodging Houses”, depicting how people attracted to the city in swarms with the “vague idea that they can get along here if anywhere2,” journey down the scale from the twenty five cent hotel to the ten cent lodging house is as accurate a description of the