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 How the Other Half+ Still Lives September 21, 2008
Essential classic to refresh past and current thinking on urban development and inequality. History is repeating itself all too comfortably.
Photojournalism: The original and the best September 3, 2008
As others have noted, this book was the beginning of photojournalism, and remains an accurate but depressing look into the lives of poor New Yorkers in the early part of the 20th century.
This book never fails to amaze me. I read it in college, then ordered it for someone else recently.
If you have never read it - or, if you have not read it recently, give it a look.
In these times when the rich are increasingly wealthier than they've been since the 19th Century - the middle class is shrinking - and the poor are becoming poorer, it is wise to look and remember how socially aware and socially responsible we must be.
 A classic work that still holds power May 13, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Few books in American history have had the social impact that Jacob A. Riis's How the Other Half Lives had. Riis spent years crawling through the slums of New York's Lower East Side in the later half of the nineteenth-century, always with a local guide sympathetic to his cause. He hoped, through the evolving technological advances of photography and his published, emotional plea, to rouse the well-to-do citizens of New York into helping the millions of poor and impoverished, native and immigrant alike, which continued to swell the city's population. In order for them to have had the chance of becoming productive American citizens, they must first have been given the opportunity at a fair start, which the abject state of the tenement buildings were unable to provide.
The first problem was the tenement itself. Usually a building, four to six stories high, intended for the occupancy of just a few families, soon had over a hundred people packed into every nook that could fill a human body. Most interior rooms never saw the light of day. Fresh air was a rare commodity, leaving most residents to breathe the same stale air day and night. The maze of tight, blind passageways created to fit each family made it impossible for firemen to reach helpless victims trapped on the upper floors, compounded by the fact that most fire escapes were blocked with residents' furniture, trapping more even still. Overall, the filth of the structures proved most offensive to the senses. One such building was so dubbed the "Dirty Spoon" because the grime on the walls had effectively made it fire proof (Riis 30). Rear tenements, built in empty courts behind the street buildings, were usually worse, little more than dilapidated hovels cut off from light by the surrounding structures.
Despite this vision of abject poverty, and indeed starvation was prevalent, many in the tenements were not what would have been considered poor. Some, in fact, earned a decently living for the era. So why didn't they move? The real question to be asked is, to where would they move? Tenement houses were the norm in New York, each as good (or lousy) as the next. Additionally, the rents paid by most of these residents (especially blacks) were very high, often amounting to more than a week's wage. Only the abundantly wealthy could afford better, while the middle and lower classes were left to the stink of places like "The Bend" on Mulberry Street, which Riis considers the heart of slum depravity.
Predictably, these conditions bred all types of criminal activity. Faced with constant hunger and only the streets to call home, many resorted to gang violence or controlled substance dependency. Children, who sometimes never saw beyond their squalid block, with a family that could not provide for their basic needs, soon created gangs of their own, making their way as they could. Other children toiled with their families in the sweatshops, for which the tenements were the main housing. Perhaps the most regrettable victims of the tenements were the infants, who were regularly victims of abandonment, left on wealthy doorsteps with vain hopes by desperate parents, or given up to "Baby-farms" where they were left to starve to death (Riis 148). These conditions Riis blames squarely on tenements: "The product is our own" (Riis 171).
However, all hope was not lost to Riis. Already airshafts had been implemented in new building designs to allow ventilation (to what effect can be debated) and new windows punched into walls, so that "air and sunlight" could "have a legal claim" (Riis 211). Rear tenements, too, were quickly disappearing. He felt that by writing How the Other Half Lives, the wealthy and influential of the city would come to the aid (Riis 131). In this respect he was correct, when through his book he found an ally in Theodore Roosevelt, who began implementing many of the suggestions that Riis proposed. He urged people to look beyond the building facades (which were admittedly nice on some buildings) to the teeming filth that they masked (Riis 209). Perhaps the most intimidating argument for his more fortunate peers was the possibility of spreading disease, for to him public sentiment had "slumbered peacefully until... a dreaded epidemic knocked at our door" (Riis 212). He called for laws to be imposed against the current tenement conditions, for the buildings to be renovated or new "model tenements" built in their place (Riis 223). Likewise, tenants should have received the quality accommodations their high rents were entitling them to. Riis endorsed the park system (City-Beautiful influence?) as a way of relieving crime in congested districts, for reasons such as this elegant observation: "I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club, seen instincts awaken under their gentle appeal" (Riis 138). Children, Riis felt, were the "key" to rescuing the city from poverty and corruption (Riis 143).
The other contribution for which Riis has been immortalized, and no doubt thanked repeatedly by modern historians, is the treasure trove of photos he took while on his outings, one hundred of which are found in the Dover edition. (His original publication did not include the photos for technological reasons). The impact of the strikingly bleak images caught on film far outweighs any of the emotional condemnations he wrote. The reader, thankfully, is also treated to many of the stories behind these images, adding yet another dimension, such as the young paupers on page 157 who claimed that they "Didn't live nowhere." Another, probably unintentional, effective element to the photos is the pained grimace on many faces (like the "Street Arab" on page 152), as though they are writhing in agony from hunger, although it is no doubt just a reaction from the camera's blinding flash in dark quarters. The street dwellers and criminals, even those presumably embarrassed by their situations, seem willing to have their pictures taken. Perhaps it is the only such opportunity many had.
Despite Riis's commendable crusading and fight for the underprivileged, he was still in many ways a man of his time. The modern reader cannot help but be struck by the prejudices running through his commentary. The groups that receive the most of the brunt are the Italians and Polish Jews. The Chinese also pay a price for their differences, and Riis tells us that his "senseless idolatry, a mere grub-worship" have made nothing strong about him, except his passions when aroused" (Riis 77) and speaks of opium addiction as a form of white slavery (Riis 80). At least he commends them for being clean. Surprisingly, however, he looks fondly on African-Americans (along with Bohemians), who he treats with sympathetic respect. He sees their hardships, and the causes (ironically), that "the blame is born by prejudice and greed that have kept him from rising under a burden of responsibility to which he could hardly be equal" under those circumstances. That after only twenty-five years of freedom, he "may be seen to advance much farther and faster than before suspected, and to promise, with fair treatment, quite as well as the rest of us, his white-skinned fellow-citizens" (Riis 119). When he wished, it seems, Riis was quite able to see beyond differences.
Riis, through How the Other Half Lives, awakened a society that had once turned a blind eye to the hardships prevalent in the tenements. He showed them effectively that the struggle was not theirs alone, but that its reach was felt for many miles in ways not readily apparent. His photographic images, forever capturing the lowest moments in people's lives, begged for intervention. Whatever Riis's shortcomings, future generations in New York and cities around the country would be better off because of what he did, and benefit from the experiences of those who did not live long enough to see those changes occur. Unfortunately, the images in Riis's work are still a common sight in many developing countries, making his century-old ideas of relevant, present power.
 NOT the right edition - get the DOVER March 20, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Riis was before all else a photojournalist, and this his major body of work. As such, the fact that there even exist editions which do not contain quality reproductions of the photos astounds me. This edition only contains a few, and they are small, pixelated, two-tone reproductions. The Dover edition is the one to get.
horrendous edition November 19, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
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.
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