How the Other Half Lives

Buyer beware. Not all editions of "How the Other Half Lives" contain the photographes that made such an impact on the public when first released. Unfortunately, the version of the book I received contained no photo's. Nothing in the write-up, that I could see, would indicate that this book was text only.

This book really opened my eyes to the trials and tribulations of poor children in the USA. Many children suffered from a lack of money, education, and healthy food. Things that are taken for granted now like clean drinking water and indoor plumbing were lacking in the 1800s slums. A must read book.

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.

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

Riis's work is an amazing picture of life in the New York slums. While the text in itself is quite interesting, the photos are perhaps the most gripping aspect of the book. To see the tiny, crowded rooms populated by unreal numbers of people and the eyes of hungry children that stare out of the picture and are still imploring a century later is a powerful experience; Riis's book allows one to get very close to the misery these people felt. This book is not for the soft-hearted, as it is a very grim depection of life, such as it was for these immigrants.

This is an extremely important work that is often difficult to find at local libraries. At the turn of the century the Danish immigrant, Jacob Riis, took pictures, and wrote, of the the NYC ghettos where many of the immigrants lived. It is very powerful, depressing and shocking; a must read for anyone interested in the study of urban human behavior/housing and photo journalism. Beware: Avoid some paperback editions that do not contain the pictures Riis took of the dismal living conditions in NYC.