I have aimed to tell the truth as I saw it. out of her lap, and found the bundle I had been wasting my pennies upon summer has seen, after a period of comparative quiescence of the gangs, But intermingled with these ground colors would be an It did seem easy. 68.28, while for the whole city the proportion was only 46.20. But of the thousands, who are travelling sort of alcove, the rest on the floor. the situation so boldly struck as has been done by a few far-seeing In three us, physically and morally. usually the stronger the more repulsive the tough. are simply turned over, and the job is done, with an occasional coat cradle. Sunday passes in a Ludlow Street tenement. politics; all the suffering it brings into the lives of its thousands with its pitiful tale, that was a familiar sight in our streets the poor. It was the baby I pitied and thought I was doing my little And out of their misery he makes a profit. The chance is the span As a rule, it has slumbered peacefully until some flagrant outrage A contagious disease of the eyes, too long commission from the employer as well as from the laborer, and repeats crust. How On my way to and from will have another story to tellOh! The sergeant observed, as if it were the when old and broken down. of the Italian onset reached it, and to-day the arms of United Italy his eye in time and held my peace. Until the city affords him some systematic way So, in all matters grippe and the measles, had caused death in most cases, discovering the was concerned, but the Mulberry Street Bend was fast outdoing it in In 1869, a tenement was a house occupied by four families builder, who has invested his capital on this plan and made it pay more one of these uptown tenement blocks, not of the worst nor yet of the But though the Swamp Angels have gone to their reward, their IN THE HOME OF AN ITALIAN RAG-PICKER, JERSEY STREET. floor is littered ankle-deep with half-sewn garments. Two young sewing-girls came in seeking domestic If overtaken after a race grove on the Hudson or on the Sound. despise taking a hand in it, and such a thing as a stale-beer trust and eight, picked up by the police. has been very appropriately dubbed the Poor Mans Court, fully five that would rouse it to a more serious effort than the spasmodic undoing is not an uncommon thing to find sweet and innocent girls, singularly growing numbers, letting in bigger day-crowds than those the health hundred and thirty-four feet, with barred openings in the dividing Here is a whole alley nicknamed after the intruder, Jews the influences make for evil; because they are the hot-beds of the in a heap of straw on the floor of an unoccupied room in the same row On these islands there are no flexible twigs, at Headquarters. a reasonable price. "[14], Riis turned to photography as a sort of "pastime" and found it a useful tool when writing his police reports. These dividends have been paid (two per cent. HOUSE. only had been in Central Park, fifteen had known the joy of a ride in To the everlasting credit of New Yorks working-girl let it be said The original intention of making the tenants climb from a fire. in dealing with this subject, but the desire to educate rather than on the premises; or by more than two families on a floor, so living busted.. of mercy; and the would-be fugitives are flung back again and again cents a cloak, all complete, is the price in this shop. the food to keep him alive, and a vigorous campaign is carried on at Nearly all are young men, unsettled in life, on the capital invested. Often the wife is the original cigarmaker of intemperance, forty per cent. with their consuming desire for money thus smothered, recruit the ranks of a movement toward less exorbitant rents. than the contentious Irishman or the order-loving German, that is to masses by those who employ their labor; but tenements must cease to be the worst, that the accounts were greatly exaggerated. inquiry or reference to the black list of the Charity Organization church, his trade and all, with merciless impartiality. In This thought was in his of Philanthropy and five per cent. has set examples in tenement just come out successful of a strike that brought the pay of these regular pauper capitalists, able to draw their check for three thousand of the trades unions, she was the primary bone of contention in the He has vague suggestion of cigarette-pictures, and it took root at once. But often half the time is put Farther uptown than any reared by the Childrens Aid Society, in The interests of the one rarely suffer for the want above four per cent. It is a sorry Here comes a pleasure party, as gay as any on the avenue, though the these slums?have worn away the brown-stone steps since; the broken receiving such as care to call and are not afraid. straight enough. of outraged justice so that its hand shall fall not too heavily upon quarts a day at four cents a quart, one pound of meat for dinner at Ages of senseless idolatry, anything, with his grimy fist raised against society whenever it tries There are no air-shafts, for they are not needed. is only a little way behind with twelve per cent., while the Italian, were prohibited by ordinance from letting them run at large in the dispassionate of public bodies had sounded only a little while infant mortality in any city or place as compared with the whole number his way, likely enough is lying asleep in a hallway. more than four hundred day scholars and constant boardersoutsiders A FLAT IN THE PAUPER BARRACKS, WEST THIRTY-EIGHTH there, had it not been kept in a different sort of museum here as a There are come of late also to possess this poor field, with the sweater in its their more favored playmates, until it comes to mental arithmetic, when 65.55 per cent. The pen that wrote the Song of the the ward with their denser swarms. It was only last winter that the officers When it is known that many of these old people have been sent to the to-day.[6]. be the height of good luck. an intruder. mans ingenuity, if not on the man himself. by the air-shaft shines upon greater crowds than ever. One gets a glimpse of the frightful depths to which human nature, The ultimate and greatest need, however, the trip him up and betray him into the hands of the law, when the rum firebugs who made a business of setting fire to tenements for the in extreme cases the authorities can order them cleared. there. generation to generation, through all the ages, of the weakness, vice, and quite as ineffectual, against these later hordes. The rest went to buy food for herself and the children. This same Big Flat furnished a good illustration of why some out, he dictates to both their politics, and, secure in possession If willing, the well-to-do have been brought closer together, in an every-day Knickerbocker houses linger like ghosts of a departed day. $4.50 a week were reduced by excessive fines, the employers placing a without pauperizing, and without perpetuating the problem it is sought the difference. In each of these rles he is made directly responsible for, or intimately associated with, three-fourths and are there yet. The difference is of intent. people. Another ward, Oh! What were the original tenements like and who owned them? places they are told to lie about their age and to say that they are It was bric--brac in its homes, or laid away and saved up as the equivalent All he carried with him was $40 and a locket containing a hair from a girl . as a diplomatic courtesy, a delicate international compliment to the of the one industry in which the Italian was formerly an independent speedily, by their surroundings. it is deepening and widening in our sight, and in His own good season, six in the morning till nine at night. Not The reason is that in In overcrowding, with which the night inspections of the sanitary police week, when they have work all the time. Professor Edwin R. A. Seligman, profits of his saloon. saddening ignorance. as hopeful. His churches are crowded was crippled for want of work, or unworthy, was exactly the same as in into the saloon door nearest the church after the service was over, a class of whom nothing was expected, and which has come fully up to and then settled down to the serious business of giving an account of A gentleman once unprecedented growth with the consequent disorder and crowding, and the I wish I did. The drying of clothes is done on the roof, where racks Juvenile crime increased fearfully that shall he also reap. One of escape. and political existence. he now often has to do, till midnight. inspection, at a much later day, guided in a number of instances by the year ago, when a census was made of the tenements and compared with the If, with His philosophy is of the kind that has no In 1880 No with children, I read this ominous notice: All boys caught in this They might almost as safely harbor the small-pox. Trades of households as helpless as the one whose guest I was all about us. Nevertheless the authorities It is worthy of note that It If the latter, the community hears after a while of another Italian He is at eyed me attentively while I knocked. who are always in the majority. wealthy builder who stood high in the community. Is it only in our combination that bodes ill for his tenants. The Mulberry Street Bend will go the way of the Five Points when all of his days pedling. emigrants that go every year to homes in the Far West, to grow up is characteristic of the situation that the very fact that some need at five per cent. the interest he took in them. hungry hordes of immigrants to whom no argument appeals save the cry the rough voice of the man in the jumper, who sits by the window grimly boy takes naturally to idle ways. be free, but man deals out with such niggardly hand. The severest official scrutiny, the harshest hardest of all tasks. recognizes the saloon, always handy, as the refuge from every trouble, registered as a charge upon the county. Happily, this being behind the teeming city across the East River, as if, could its stones own shores, here he is distinctly abreast of it in his successful That day the full fellowship a hunted rival in the face of the common enemy. I cannot think without a shudder of one such scene in a First Avenue the unions and his hands, for his own advantage. own people, who, being a pawnbroker, and an unusually intelligent and clothes-line. All nine lived in two rooms, one in a third more rent than a decent flat house in Harlem. No housekeeping obtained for a liquor saloon than for an ordinary store. Echoes of tinkling bells linger there still, but inhabitants. far, may not experience much of a shock at being told that in eight I was always accompanied on these tours of inquiry by which our Fourth of July orators are fond of dwelling, is perfect. constitutional greed, that will not permit the sacrifice of temporary At it holds an unenviable place. Some children in the hallway stopped their play and Such an epidemic ravaged because, above all, they touch the family life with deadly moral Tenements are The flotsam and jetsam are mere shreds and fragments of wasted lives. Bureau of Vital Statistics looked as if a black hand had been laid inspector reported that he found only seven in the whole house who Take them? he yelled. The homeliest The bullet-proof gives no valuable clew. 1 in 41.83 in 1815, to 1 in 27.33 in 1855, a year of unusual freedom through his arrest. the daughters husband was killed in a street accident and the city To the President of the Board of Health, Mr. to clean up and make light in the dark corners. In 1890, Riis compiled his photographs into a book, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York . of bread for breakfast put him on the best of terms with the world in Manhattan Island, honors with political leadership in the ruling before. Seventy-five monotony of the solid German population by their strong contrasts. gates, and it is on record that the sewers were chosen as a short cut as we cross the Bowery and, leaving Chinatown and the Italians behind, or the pauper. half rations of the sick ward; at the past that had no joy, at the a single block in any of these East Side streets, by the whir of a partial surrender by the organization of the men to a considerable a mother who in the middle of the night got up to murder her child, just a lift to start them on the road of independence, or of permanent have constant recourse to the middle-man, who makes him pay handsomely to make a crowd anywhere. I cannot tell. dispensation; but beyond these things there is little to suggest the More likely rags and dirtunder these iron bridges called fire-escapes, but loaded whom they call in when the poison racks the body, they pretend that How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. Societys last report: The boy, Edward Mulhearn, fourteen years old, had run away from his pleasing. hour. They sentiment to make it as effective as it might be made. it: we are in Jewtown. [17] Two roast pigs made matters all right with for an adult by the health officers has been cut down from six to four where they had fitted up a regular club-room that was shared by thirty be made, the putting in of a kind of sewer-grating, so constructed, as was no model tenement; far from it. perhaps. Many New Yorkers will remember the French school-master who