First published in 1890, this is the author's study of the slums of New York, where Italians, Jews, "Bohemians", Blacks and Chinese struggled against the effects of poverty, alcohol and lack of education. The author's use of photographs to put faces to his stories is recognized as a landmark in photojournalism and as a result of his book, many reforms did take place to assist New York's poor.
How The Other Half Lives
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About the Author
Sam B. Warner, Jr. is Visiting Professor of Urban History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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43 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How did those immigrants survive ?,
By Joanna Daneman (Middletown, DE USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (COMMUNITY FORUM 04) (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
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This review is from: How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (Paperback)
How did our grandfathers and great-grandfathers (and great-great, I suppose) survive immigration and the slums? What was life like on the Lower East Side of New York? For those of us whose family has only been in the US for a few generations, this is a must-read. Whether Irish, Italian, Jewish, Chinese or Polish, German, Russian, hordes of refugees ended up in New York on the promise of a better life.Reading Riis' book reads like the newspaper in some ways; entrepreneurs lured poor people from Eastern Europe and contracted out their labor in sweat shops in the US. Sound familiar? But what is not so familiar are the living conditions in the tenements, dark, unventilated cages in blocks of buildings that rented for a surprising high rent to people who died by the thousands in the unsanitary conditions. Farm animals had it better. Why was rent so high? Supply and demand. Cheaper rent was to be had in Brooklyn and the outlying (as yet unincorporated) boroughs, but the WORK was in Manhattan, where you could get by as a tailor, a seamstress, a peddler or in some illegitimate activity. The conditions will make you cry; the story of foundling babies (abandoned newborns) is astonishing. A cradle was put outside a Catholic Church and instead of a baby each night, racks of babies appeared. The Church had to establish foundling hospitals run by nuns, who persuaded the unwed or impoverished mothers to nurse the baby they gave up, plus another baby (women can usually nurse two, though these malnourished women must have been hard-pressed.) The child mortality rate, especially in the "back tenements" or buildings built on to the back of others (dark and airless) was incredible. I wish the plates in the book were of better quality; Riis took many photographs, but the reproduction here is poor and they are hard to see. I recommend that if you are interested in this subject from seeing "The Gangs of New York" or for genealogical reasons, that you visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and see the buildings for yourself. Even cleaned up and no longer packed with unwashed people, they are heart-rending.
36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
horrendous edition,
By History Reader (South Bend, IN USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (Paperback)
This edition of How the Other Half Lives is astoundingly bad. It contains innumerable typos (the edition was clearly the result of scanning an old edition with sub-par OCR software). Moreover the illustrations and tables are 72dpi maximum making them a nearly illegible blur on the printed page. The blurb on the back claims the book was "first published in 1901" (in fact it was 1890). The same amount of care went into this edition as went into a New York Tenement.
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The One that Started It All,
By
This review is from: How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (Paperback)
For all intents and purposes, Jacob Riis' HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES is the birth of photojournalism. And this new genre, like the first movies and radio programs, fascinated its audience. Riis' sharp essays are matched only by his sharp eye for photography. I don't know which made more of an impact on me: the text or the pictures of unspeakable misery. But I think it's a safe bet to say that Riis' contemporaries were fixated more on the photographs. (After all, Riis turned to photography AFTER his published essays seemed to have little effect.) In any event, the result, then as now, is a provocative, compassionate, and angry work that exposed to the middle and upper classes of his time the effects of their indifference, at best, or the effects of their roles as slumlords and sweatshop owners, at worst.The only jarring aspect of the book is Riis' use of ethnic stereotyping. He makes several not-nice remarks about Jews, Chinamen, Italians, etc. However, we must not impose our early 21st Century values on a late 19th Century man. These types of remarks were commonplace back in the pre-politically correct times. In any event, Riis' overall intention was to help these people get out of their horrid conditions and not to slur their heritages. One last note, Luc Sante's introduction is brilliant and serves the book very well. Rocco Dormarunno, author of The Five Points Concluded, a Novel
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
THE first tenement New York knew bore the mark of Cain from its birth, though a generation bassed before the writing was deciphered. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
tenement property, rear tenements, model tenements, other half lives Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Mulberry Street, Cherry Street, Mott Street, Five Points, Health Department, East River, Ludlow Street, Board of Health, Gotham Court, Polish Jew, Potter's Field, Fourth Ward, Tenth Ward, Baxter Street, Children's Aid Society, Elizabeth Street, Fourteenth Street, Hester Street, Bayard Street, Miss Collins, Sixth Ward, Blind Man's Alley, Chatham Square, Little Italy New!
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
THE first tenement New York knew bore the mark of Cain from its birth, though a generation bassed before the writing was deciphered. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
tenement property, rear tenements, model tenements, other half lives Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Mulberry Street, Cherry Street, Mott Street, Five Points, Health Department, East River, Ludlow Street, Board of Health, Gotham Court, Polish Jew, Potter's Field, Fourth Ward, Tenth Ward, Baxter Street, Children's Aid Society, Elizabeth Street, Fourteenth Street, Hester Street, Bayard Street, Miss Collins, Sixth Ward, Blind Man's Alley, Chatham Square, Little Italy New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 42
books:
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100
books
cite this book:
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- The Battle with the Slum (New York City) by Jacob A. Riis in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and Front Matter (3)
- The East River (Images of America) by The Greater Astoria Historical Society on page 149, page 150, and Back Matter
- Children of the Tenements by Jacob A. Riis in Front Matter (1), and Front Matter (2)
- Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen by Jacob A. Riis in Front Matter (1), and Front Matter (2)
- Maggie: A Girl Of The Streets by Stephen Crane in Front Matter (1), and Front Matter (2)
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- Commissioner Roosevelt: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt and the New York City Police, 1895-1897 by H. Paul Jeffers on 8 pages
- The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in America: Encounters with the Fat Man by James R. Giles on 8 pages
- Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor by Daniel E. Bender on 6 pages
- American School Reform: Progressive, Equity, and Excellence Movements, 1883-1993 by Maurice R. Berube on page 3, page 11, and Back Matter
- The New American Ghetto by Camilo Jose Vergara on page 133, page 162, and Back Matter
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