Customer Reviews

The Battle With the Slum (Patterson Smith Reprint Series in Criminology, Law Enforcement, and Social Problems. Publication No. 77)

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What sets THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM apart from Jacob Riis' classic, HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES, is this book's more active response to the conditions of the poor and disenfranchised in New York City's slums. HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES was a breakthrough in reporting. The reader was given a barrage of facts and statistics, as well as photographs and ethnic break-downs of each of the immigrant groups.

While THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM also includes photographs and statistics, it also reports on HOW these conditions have to be handled, and details the victories Riis and the reformers achieved in ridding the area of its more notorious elements. In almost militaristic fashion, Riis and the reformers battled corrupt local political machines (read Tammany Hall), interested businesses, and greedy landlords. Each neighborhood is practically mapped out like a battlefield. While HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES gives the reader an appreciation for the suffering that the poor, BATTLE WITH THE SLUM gives the reader an appreciation for Jacob Riis and what others like him have done.

Though not as heart-rending as "How the Other Half Lives", this book by Riis is important to shed light on how society cleaned up some of the worst slums in US history.

Tammany Hall, the Democratic party machine, was responsible for political patronage jobs that were do-nothing plums; a photo shows the street-cleaning of Tammany broomsmen versus that of a reformer who took over cleaning the precinct's streets. Various charitable societies worked strenuously to ameliorate the worst of the slums, to pass laws requiring light and air in tenements, though landlords were clever in circumventing or perverting the legal requirements (a window in a room could be on an inside wall; the airshaft--a thin passageway between buildings was all the air many apartments got.) Schools were at first overcrowded rooms with no desks, no ventilation and seventy students attempting to learn. Reformers got desks, ventilated buildings, smaller class sizes. This is a fascinating story of how people worked together to try to better an abusive situation in the poorest sections of American cities.

This book hilights the lows of urban life around the turn of the century, a time when immigration and migration were happening all around. City life in america had a huge underside with noise, crime, poverty, and squalor. Racial and ethnic conflicts were previlant. Riis' photos capture this side of city life in America.

Jacob Riis produced some award-winning photographs of the Five Points slum, but these are not in the Kindle edition. I guess you get what you pay for, since the download is free. So, if you want the photos you will have to pay for the print edition, or get a download that you know contains these photos.