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Jacob Riis argues that crowded, poorly built New York tenements shaped poverty and vice, and that reform required public attention and stronger housing law. This deck covers his preface, the history and legal definition of tenements, early housing legislation, and his account of why overcrowding persisted.
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Chapter 1 · Question
What belief motivated Riis to begin writing this book?
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Chapter 1 · Answer
Riis states that he began the book from the belief that every man's experience ought to be worth something to the community from which he drew it, so long as it was gleaned along the line of some decent, honest work. He leaves it to the reader to judge whether he was right.
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Riis states that he began the book from the belief that every man's experience ought to be worth something to the community from which he drew it, so long as it was gleaned along the line of some decent, honest work. He leaves it to the reader to judge whether he was right.
Chapter 1
Riis credits Dr. Roger S. Tracy, the Registrar of Vital Statistics, whose patient friendship did for him what he could not do himself. Riis admits he knows nothing of tables, statistics and percentages, while there is nothing about them Tracy does not know. He also thanks Charles G. Wilson of the Board of Health and Chief Inspector Byrnes.
Chapter 1
Riis says the many and exacting duties of a newspaper man's life would hardly have allowed him to bring the book to an end but for frequent friendly lifts given him by willing hands. He presents the book as the result of that borrowed help, not solo effort.
Chapter 1
Riis says that most of all, in this as in all things else, he owes to the womanly sympathy and loving companionship of his dear wife, whom he calls ever his chief helper, his wisest counsellor, and his gentlest critic. The dedication closes the preface before the contents list.
Chapter 1
The first tenement was the "rear house," built in the gardens behind existing homes. Earlier tenant-houses were not built for that purpose; they were the decorous homes of the old Knickerbockers, Manhattan's early aristocracy. The rear house, by contrast, bore "the mark of Cain from its birth," though a generation passed before its significance was understood.
Chapter 2
The author attributes it to the stir of trade and the tremendous immigration after the War of 1812. In thirty-five years the city grew from under a hundred thousand to half a million souls needing homes. The old residents moved away, and their dwellings along the East River fell to real-estate agents and boarding-house keepers, who partitioned large rooms into smaller ones.
Chapter 2
The author argues that estate owners and agents saw greater profits in converting houses and blocks into barracks with smaller divisions. Blocks were rented, purchased on time, or taken at a percentage and held for under-letting. With the middleman—wholly irresponsible, reckless, and unrestrained—began the tenement era that produced Gotham Court and other notorious blocks.
Chapter 2
The author cites three recent cases: a Mott Street rear house fire that made ten families homeless though the owner profited and considered himself pitied; a young immigrant couple who took poison together in a Crosby Street attic because they were "tired"; and a Black family paying $8.50 for a single tiny West Third Street room. He uses these to insist the evils persisted.
Chapter 2
Spurred by fear of cholera and a smallpox outbreak, a citizens' movement produced the Board of Health and the Tenement-House Act of 1867, the first remedial legislation. In 1869 the Board ordered over 46,000 windows cut in interior rooms, chiefly for ventilation, since air-shafts were unknown. Nearly all orders were carried out by early fall, despite opposition from owners and tenants alike.
Chapter 3
The author reports that owners saw every repair or cleanup order as added expense cutting into rental income, while tenants, after a generation of unavailing protest, had sunk to the level of their surroundings and were content to stay. Curiously, the basis of opposition was the same at both extremes: each side considered official interference an infringement of personal rights and a hardship.
Chapter 3
The law defines a tenement as a house occupied by three or more families living independently and cooking on the premises, or by more than two families on a floor so living and cooking with a common right in halls, stairways and yards. The author notes this legal meaning also includes flats and apartment-houses, with which, he says, the book has nothing to do.
Chapter 3
The author argues that overcrowding is characteristic of the tenements: poverty, their badge and typical condition, invites and compels it, and all efforts to abate it yield only temporary relief. Old houses cannot be summarily torn down, though authorities may order extreme cases cleared. He concludes that as long as the tenements exist overcrowding will exist with them, and that tenements will exist in New York forever.
Chapter 3
The author argues that a distinctively American community cannot be found in the chief city of America, and certainly not among the tenements. Instead, lower New York is a cosmopolitan mix of Italian, German, French, African, Spanish, Bohemian, Russian, Scandinavian, Jewish, and Chinese colonies, each with its own preserves.
Chapter 4
Riis argues the Irishman, once unwelcome, was followed by the Italian, Russian Jew, and Chinaman, and opposed them as bitterly and ineffectually as he had been opposed. Yet he is victorious in defeat: he dictates the politics of both old and new foes, holds the offices, and collects rents from Italians whose houses he bought with saloon profits.
Chapter 4
Riis cites the German rag-picker of thirty years earlier, now a thrifty tradesman or prosperous farmer; the Sheriff Street colony that saved and bought a Western township and moved out together; the Italian scavenger graduating into fruit-stands; the Irish hod-carrier's son becoming a bricklayer or alderman; and the Chinese coolie holding the laundry trade.
Chapter 4
Riis awards the palm to the Teuton (German). The Italian and poor Jew rise only by compulsion, the Chinaman does not rise at all, and the Irishman's genius runs to public affairs and the saloon. The German lives at home, makes a home independent of surroundings, and leaves the tenement as soon as he saves enough money.
Chapter 4
The author presents Ellen Collins's Water Street experiment as decisive proof that improving the worst tenement property can still pay. She bought three old tenements at Water and Roosevelt Streets, later leasing three more, let in light, added proper plumbing, and employed a janitor. Her poorest tenants mostly stayed and conformed. She reported earning five and a half to six and three-quarters percent on capital, and refused to rent the corner store as a saloon.
Chapter 5
The author argues that to succeed, reform by law must aim at making it unprofitable to own a bad tenement. He notes law moves at a snail's pace while the problem advances quickly. He suggests possible measures: licensing tenements to a fixed number of tenants, or state regulation of rents, and mentions tax rebates to encourage model tenement building, while admitting the rent suggestion is open to attack.
Chapter 5
The author argues the Philadelphia cottage plan is impracticable in New York because the working masses must live on Manhattan Island, where land is too costly for small houses. He contends this is actually an argument for the model tenement's success, since the drift in tenement building is toward concentration. He adds that larger-scale planning around a central yard gives more air and sunlight, and reduces the cost of expert superintendence.
Chapter 5
The author cites letters from both managers declaring their enterprises eminently successful. The Improved Dwellings Association built thirteen houses in East Seventy-second Street, costing about $285,000 after contractor troubles, with rents from $14 to $6.25 monthly and rooms for 218 families. President W. Bayard Cutting reports five percent dividends paid since the first six months, with surplus spent on roofs, painting, and fire-escapes, despite the no-liquor provision.
Chapter 5
The padrone, described as a "banker," persuades immigrants with false promises to mortgage their homes and wages for passage, takes a commission en route, then profits again as the immigrant's employer and landlord—collecting from both employer and laborer when hiring him out, and subletting cramped tenement space at extortionate rents. The author argues the immigrant's ignorance and suspicion of strangers leave him dependent on this middleman.
Chapter 7
Earlier, the city paid gangs $1.50 a day to trim ash-scows, and they let Italians do the heavy work in exchange for first pick of the loads. Eventually Italians contracted for the work themselves, paying large sums for the privilege; the city received not less than $80,000 last year from selling it. The author argues this gave the padrone or contractor exclusive control, reducing the Italian to living under the dump.
Chapter 7
The author states the Italian is ordinarily easily governed except on Sunday, when card games unleash his passions. He calls the Italian a born gambler, like the Chinese, and says no Sunday has passed since "the Bend" became a suburb of Naples without murderous affrays reaching police notice. Wounded men often refuse to inform, saying "I fix him myself," and settle the score later.
Chapter 7
The author argues the Italian is as honest as he is hot-headed: no Italian burglars appear in the Rogues' Gallery, and the ex-brigand works peacefully with pickaxe and shovel. Women are faithful wives and devoted mothers whose costumes color the slums. He calls the Italian gay, light-hearted, and inoffensive as a child if not provoked—though his worst offence is keeping stale-beer dives profiting from the wretched.
Chapter 7
In the block between Bayard, Park, Mulberry, and Baxter Streets, the Commission counted 155 child deaths in 1882, or 68.28 percent of total mortality in the block, compared with 46.20 percent for the whole city. The author argues infant mortality is a good barometer of a place's general sanitary condition.
Chapter 8
Dr. Roger S. Tracy's figures show a general death rate of 35.75 for Baxter and Mulberry Streets between Park and Bayard, versus 26.27 for the whole city that year. The under-five rate in those blocks reached about 140 per thousand, far above the adult rate.
Chapter 8
The model tenement housed 161 of the same class of people under good management, yet the hearse came only twice that year, once for a baby. The author argues this shows conditions, not tenants, drive the difference—though the alley owner calls Italians the worst tenants and the model's agent calls them good.
Chapter 8
In sunshine the whole population lives outdoors: women sell stale bread, salads, and suspect oranges from ash-barrels; hucksters form rows of booths; hallways become three-by-four shops with patron saints. Women do all the carrying and work, while men smoke clay pipes and talk. The author notes the health officers once called the stale bread 'not unwholesome.'
Chapter 8
The raid targeted the stale-beer dives in "the Bend," near Mulberry Street. After midnight roll-call at the Elizabeth Street station, the reserves were ordered "To the Bend!" Squads were sent to descend simultaneously on the known tramps' burrows in the block. The chapter notes that 275 tramps were jammed into cells to be arraigned for vagrancy, with the certain prospect of six months "on the Island."
Chapter 9
Known in "the Bend" as the "two-cent restaurant," it is usually a cellar off a back alley. Its chief ware is doctored, unlicensed beer collected from kegs left on the sidewalk and touched up with drugs to create froth. A cup of "coffee" and a stale roll may cost two cents. Men pay; women drink free. The privilege to sit or sleep there goes with each round.
Chapter 9
The author argues there is no escape once on that level: "no one ever rose from it." He compares one night in a dive to putting on the uniform of a caste, and says once that stile is crossed the lane has no turn. He also argues ill-applied charity and idleness are the chief causes of tramping, and that accepting alms brands an able-bodied man.
Chapter 9
The author offered a ragged tramp ten cents to sit for a picture. The tramp accepted and sat patiently, but then put his clay pipe—of the two-for-a-cent kind—in his pocket, declaring it was not included in the contract and worth a quarter to appear in the picture. The author had to give in, noting the man had gone on strike and knew his rights.
Chapter 9
Inspector Byrnes called them nurseries of crime, and one police court justice said ten-cent lodging-houses more than counterbalance the good done by free reading-rooms, lectures, and other reform agencies, causing more destitution, beggary, and crime than any other agency he knew. The author says neither official overstates the fact, though they referred to two different grades of lodging-house.
Chapter 10
Young men, often fresh from good homes with honest hopes, are drawn by cheap lodging and crowds to the Bowery's twenty-five-cent houses. There they meet adventurers, poor clerks, and thieves seeking recruits. When money runs out they descend to fifteen-cent houses, meeting ex-convicts, and Byrnes says nine in ten turn out thieves or burglars, if not murderers.
Chapter 10
Smith met fourteen-year-old runaway Edward Mulhearn on the Bowery, gave him supper and a bed, and taught him to steal purses. When the boy proved a poor thief, Smith burned his arm with a hot iron and applied acid, then sent him out begging daily, threatening to burn his arm off if he did not bring back enough money. Smith was convicted through the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
Chapter 10
Police figures show 4,974,025 lodgings furnished by two to three hundred dormitories, plus 147,634 station-house lodgings, averaging over fourteen thousand homeless men nightly, with an increase of over three hundred thousand over the previous year. More than half the houses are in the Bowery district. Around elections, lodging-houses recruit voters for the political boss with the biggest 'barrel,' and both parties commit frauds.
Chapter 10
Riis argues that since the tenement cannot be eliminated, all talk of getting rid of it is idle, and the practical question becomes what to do with the tenement. He insists the tenement has come to stay and must itself be the solution to the problem it presents.
Chapter 11
The landlord owns a row of barracks that troubled health authorities for twenty years. His solution was to give the wretched pile a coat of paint and add a gorgeous tin cornice bearing the year 1890 in yard-long letters. Riis notes the same dirty crowds still camped on the roof, including an Italian mother with two naked children. Riis calls this a landlord's way that will not get us out of the mire.
Chapter 11
Riis argues the flat is not a model but a modern tenement, and rather than solving the problem it extends it. It may remove some nuisances of the low tenement, especially overcrowding, but only at a cost that puts it outside the category of homes for the poor, while imposing some of those evils on people who ought to escape them.
Chapter 11
The author argues that all attempts to make an effective Christian of the Chinese immigrant will remain abortive in this generation, and he has even less hope for the next. He claims ages of idolatry left them without the qualities to appreciate the faith, and that when they adopt Christianity it is with an ulterior motive, for some near gain. He concedes exceptions may exist but says his hope lacks lively faith.
Chapter 12
Chinatown as a spectacle is disappointing to Riis. Mott Street is clean to distraction, with the laundry stamp on it, and the houses are conventional tenement types. Red and yellow signs and streamers announce herb medicines, washing, tea and groceries, but the colors seem to sink to the general dullness. Whatever activity occurs happens behind closed doors, and the people are stealthy and secretive, receiving strangers with annoyance and distrust.
Chapter 12
Riis says it is a mistake to assume Chinatown is honeycombed with opium joints; there are many more outside it than in it, and the Chinese do not monopolize the pipe. Nearly every Chinese home or burrow has its bunk and lay-out where opium can be enjoyed safe from police interference. The Chinaman smokes opium as Caucasians smoke tobacco, apparently with little worse effect on himself, but the white victim suffers badly.
Chapter 12
Riis writes that Chinatown's 'wives' are mostly white women and girls drawn from the surrounding tenements, victims of vice and the drug. They rarely or never return home, and Mott Street gives up its victims only to the Charity Hospital or Potter's Field. He notes their scrupulous neatness and calm indifference when discussing their fall, and disputes authorities' claims that no girls under age are involved.
Chapter 12
Asked why poverty existed in such a colony of workers, a charitable pawnbroker told Riis that immigration brings about twenty-five thousand a year, over seventy percent staying in New York, and half require Hebrew Charities aid from the start. He added a second class: those who worked and hoarded until worn out, then saw their savings exhausted. Riis says he knew this was true.
Chapter 13
The managers of the Eastern Dispensary, located in the heart of the district, told Riis the diseases these people suffer from are not due to intemperance or immorality, but to ignorance, want of suitable food, and the foul air in which they live and work. Riis cites their 1889 report and ties this to crowded tenement workshops.
Chapter 13
Health officers called the Tenth the typhus ward because typhus and small-pox, both filth diseases, were bred in the crowded tenements. In the death-registry office it passed as the 'suicide ward,' for reasons Riis says are not hard to understand, and police knew it as the 'crooked ward' for its petty thieves and fences.
Chapter 13
The author argues the sweater is simply the middleman and sub-contractor—a workman like his fellows, distinguished only by knowing a little English or owning or renting two or three sewing machines. He drums up work from clothing-houses, drives his hands hard, and makes a small profit per dozen; harsh criticism should apply to the system, not the man.
Chapter 14
The learners earn two to five dollars a week. The shop turns out 120 dozen knee-pants weekly at seventy cents a dozen, a clear profit of five cents a dozen; with the couple's own work, family earnings reach twenty-five dollars a week when work is steady, though often half the time goes to looking for work. Rent is twenty dollars a month.
Chapter 14
The family of six plus two boarders lives on eight dollars a week: bread at fifteen cents a day, two quarts of milk at four cents a quart, one pound of meat for dinner at twelve cents, and a pound of butter weekly. Riis says they probably hoard about thirty dollars a month and eventually buy a tenement, the usual investment of Jewtown savings.
Chapter 14
The Court of Appeals decided the law passed a few years earlier to prohibit cigarmaking in tenements was unconstitutional, ending the struggle. The author notes that during the fight, stories circulated about shocking sanitary conditions, but the Board of Health's careful canvass did not find them so. The author's own later inspections, guided by union cigarmakers to the worst tenements, found the accounts greatly exaggerated.
Chapter 15
The author argues the landlord draws it, exercising a despotism he compares to the Czar of all the Russias: where he permits colored tenants they live, where he shuts the door they stay out. The landlord calls it business, and Riis agrees it is, since he profits from the prejudice he traffics in.
Chapter 16
The stated reason is that white people will not live in the same house with colored tenants, or even one recently occupied by them, so the building's selling value is said to be injured. Riis notes agents reinforce this with the maxim "once a colored house, always a colored house," and that the prejudice exists but is not lessened by agents.
Chapter 16
Agents were practically unanimous in endorsing the negro as a clean, orderly, and profitable tenant. One large firm said they preferred negro tenants to lower-grade foreign whites in their poorest tenements, finding them cleaner and less destructive, and cited rents rising from $7.50 to $10 for two rooms. Another saved fifteen to twenty percent on gross rentals.
Chapter 16
The author argues poverty, abuse, and injustice are accepted with imperturbable cheerfulness, and that home surroundings reflect this blithesome temper, with bright prints of Lincoln, Grant, and Garfield, plus flowers and singing birds. He says the negro has no equal at making a little go a long way, and that ambition to rise socially is pursued even when only the shadow is available.
Chapter 16
The law treats all flats as tenements without distinction, but Riis says the health officer draws the line by observation. The clearest sign is a locked door, which shows privacy has been secured; behind it the hoodlum is not at home. Riis argues there may be a tenement behind a closed door, but never a flat without one. The open hall is the tenement's badge.
Chapter 17
Riis argues the idea that Fourteenth Street fences off good from bad is erroneous. He says nothing below that line outdoes Hell's Kitchen, the Rag Gang's home near Thirty-ninth Street, Battle Row in East Sixty-third Street, or Frog Hollow across the Harlem River. He also notes skilled, well-paid labor can improve a tenement, while gas-houses, slaughter-houses, and docks form slum-centres.
Chapter 17
Riis says turning Tompkins Square from a sand lot into a beautiful park ended the Bread and Blood riots and transformed a nest of dangerous agitators into a harmless, beer-craving band of Anarchists, scarcely heard of since. He offers this to opponents of the small parks system as a means of relieving congested tenement districts, urging them to take note.
Chapter 17
Riis argues that in tenements it is practically impossible to isolate the patient, so an epidemic that the well-to-do make light of becomes excessively fatal among poor children. Measles, ordinarily harmless, kills right and left. He cites an outbreak across three Elizabeth Street blocks after the grippe, with up to eight children dead in one house in five months, and attributes deaths to poverty and wretched home conditions.
Chapter 17
The author argues that the rescue of the children is the key to the problem of city poverty, because character may be formed in the young where reforming it later would be hopeless. He notes that the young are naturally neither vicious nor hardened, only weak and undeveloped, except by the bad influences of the street, which makes the duty urgent and hopeful.
Chapter 18
The author argues that in nine cases out of ten a tenement boy would make an excellent mechanic if trained early at a trade, since he is neither dull nor slow. But he claims the short-sighted despotism of the trades unions has practically closed that avenue to him, and trade-schools, however excellent, cannot supply the opportunity thus denied.
Chapter 18
Riis reports that in thirty-seven years the Children's Aid Society sheltered nearly three hundred thousand outcast, homeless, and orphaned children in its lodging-houses and found homes in the West for seventy thousand that had none. He adds that the five and a half million dollars spent was, as a stroke of finance, wiser than letting them grow up thieves and thugs.
Chapter 18
Riis describes coming upon two youngsters in a Mulberry Street yard chalking their first lesson in writing. What they wrote was 'Keeb of te Grass.' He says they had it by heart, for there was not, he verily believed, a green sod within a quarter of a mile, illustrating how the tenement world shaped their young lives.
Chapter 18
The mother brings her child inside and places it in the crib, seen by the sister on guard. She is not questioned about the child's antecedents, but is asked to stay and nurse her own and another baby. If she refuses, she may leave unhindered. In twenty-one years the asylum gathered as many thousand homeless babies.
Chapter 19
Riis argues it is a mistake to think of the Street Arabs as helpless little creatures to be pitied for being alone in the world. He says anyone who approached them with that sort of pity would be mercilessly "guyed" and might wrongly conclude they were hardened scoundrels beyond missionary effort—which he calls a second mistake.
Chapter 20
The author argues the Street Arab has all the faults and virtues of his lawless life: he acknowledges no authority, owes no allegiance, and raises his fist against society when coerced, yet is bright and sharp as a weasel. Riis credits him with sturdy independence, love of freedom, self-reliance, and a rude sense of justice that governs his little community.
Chapter 20
A notice over the door reads: "Boys who swear and chew tobacco cannot sleep here," with an unwritten condition that the boy be genuinely homeless—though managers do not insist too strictly. Boys pay six cents each for bed, breakfast, and supper; ten-cent beds with locker and curtains exist for earners. They come and go freely if they behave, and loans for boot-black kits or papers are charged and repaid.
Chapter 20
Riis argues self-help is the key-note: boys are treated as independent traders expected to pay for bed and food, may ask trust or a loan for a boot-black's kit or papers when trade goes against them, and every cent is charged and repaid. He says no pauper was ever bred there, and thrift and ambitious industry grow up in most cases.
Chapter 20
Riis counted 111 Protestant churches, chapels, and places of worship of every kind below Fourteenth Street, against 4,065 saloons. He notes this district held the worst half of the tenement population and, in his account, the worst half of the saloons. Uptown the ratio was somewhat better, but he estimates roughly ten saloons to every church.
Chapter 21
Riis reports that not quite two years earlier the Excise Board ruled that no three corners of any street-crossing, not already so occupied, should thereafter be licensed for rum-selling. He states the tardy prohibition was intended for the tenement districts, since nowhere else was there need of it.
Chapter 21
Riis argues the sign announcing that no beer or liquor is sold to children is a cruel joke in practice. He describes following a barefoot boy into a Mulberry Street saloon after 1 A.M. and being told to mind his business while the pitcher was filled. He concludes the law against selling beer to minors is about as respected as the ordinance against swearing.
Chapter 21
Riis argues the saloon's worst offence is the corruption of the child, for which there is no restitution. He says its harm to thieves at least undoes them when rum steals their brains and betrays them to the law, but the child corrupted through the growler has no hope of escape and follows a beaten track to a bad end.
Chapter 21
The author argues the "growler"—the beer can the boy first carries as almost a baby—stands at the tough's cradle. The saloon is the only thing that takes kindly to the lad, since honest play in the streets is forbidden and the policeman arrests ball-tossers. This partnership, Riis says, lasts through life, with the saloon filling the place of home and play.
Chapter 22
Every corner has its gang, often feuding with rivals, but all share a programme of defiance of law and order and a common ambition: to get "pinched"—that is, arrested—so as to pose as heroes before their fellows. A successful raid on a grocer's till counts as a good mark, and "doing up" a policeman is cause for promotion. Riis calls the gang an institution in New York.
Chapter 22
The author argues the New York tough is an arrant coward, fierce only when hunting with the pack, like a wolf rather than a tiger. Inordinate vanity, fed by flash literature and penny-dreadfuls, makes him forget fear before his fellows. Yet Riis also calls him a bundle of contradictions: brutal to his mother, he may still save a drowning child or woman at peril of his own life.
Chapter 22
Riis says the boy's first long step is usually robbing a "lush"—a drunken man who has strayed his way, perhaps asleep in a hallway. Before that he apprentices on copper-bottom wash-boilers and like articles lying around loose, converted to cash for the growler. The first robbery moves him into full fellowship: he is no longer a "kid" but a tough.
Chapter 22
The Working Women's Society reported that men's wages cannot fall below a subsistence limit, but women's wages have no limit because "the paths of shame are always open to her." It stated it is impossible for a woman to live on a saleswoman's low salary without losing real necessities, and that many must inevitably resort to evil.
Chapter 23
Wages of $2 to $4.50 a week were reduced by excessive fines, with employers valuing time lost above service rendered. One girl earning two dollars a week was fined sixty cents for a trivial mistake. In some stores fines were split between superintendent and time-keeper, reaching $3,000 in one case. In one store, sitting down was a finable offense despite legally required seats.
Chapter 23
Riis argues that despite their rough road and near-hopeless battle, only in the rarest instances does the working girl go astray. He calls the class brave, virtuous, and true, and says New York's profligate women are not recruited from her ranks as in some foreign cities. She is proud, plucky, and accepts her lot uncomplainingly, holding independence cheap at the cost of a meal.
Chapter 23
A woman doctor found a widow with two children in an East Side attic making paper-bags. She received only five cents for six hundred bags, earning twenty-five to thirty cents a day with swift fingers. She paid four dollars a month for her room, with the rest going to food. The physician's purse, rather than her skill, provided healing for their complaint.
Chapter 23
Of 5,169 cases investigated in one year, 327 (6.4%) were worthy of continuous relief, 1,269 (24.4%) of temporary relief, 2,698 (52.2%) needed work rather than relief, and 875 (17%) were unworthy of relief. The author notes a similar Boston investigation produced almost identical proportions of those crippled for want of work or unworthy.
Chapter 24
For the five years ending with 1888, burials in the Potter's Field averaged 10.03 percent of all deaths; in 1889 it was 9.64 percent. The author cites this as proof of pauperism, calling the Potter's Field the sign of utter, hopeless surrender, since a decent burial is the last thing the poor will let go.
Chapter 24
The Irish led with fifteen percent, native Americans followed with twelve percent, Germans eight percent, and Italians under two percent. The author argues the tenement itself is the chief cause: it cannot corrupt the Italian, who comes to work, but has a peculiar affinity for the worse nature of the Celt, and the native twelve percent represents hereditary beggars of the second or third generation.
Chapter 24
The author says the blind beggar is winked at because authorities do not know what else to do with him; no provision exists once he is old enough to strike out alone. The city's annual thirty or forty dollars mainly keeps his landlord happy, and until the city offers systematic work, as Philadelphia has done, banishing him would mean death by starvation.
Chapter 24
Riis calls the workhouse the "hell-box" rather than the repair-shop of the city, borrowing the printing-office term for broken, worn-out type thrown in to be recast. He reports the 1889 registry at 22,477, with some inmates there as many as twenty times before, and describes it as the slums' popular summer resort, busy year-round.
Chapter 25
The warden, snappish from years among a thousand cross old women, assumes Riis wants to take the inmates away and enthusiastically offers the whole thousand. When Riis explains he only wants a photograph of the old women, the warden turns away in speechless disgust, and Riis believes he remembered the visit as the champion fool's call.
Chapter 25
Riis describes women in gray hitched to a gaudy little wagon, one strapped in the seat and forty tugging the rope. He explains the name was coined in scoffing ignorance: these are patients with suicidal mania who cannot be left near the river but must have daily exercise, so a doctor invented the wagon to provide both exercise and amusement.
Chapter 25
Riis reports 1,419 admissions to city asylums for the insane in 1889, with 4,913 remaining at year's end and about two hundred added yearly, forcing a farm on Long Island. The author argues the strain of hurried, over-worked life contributes, but poverty contributes more, since these are all of the poor—the harvest of generations of weakness, vice, and moral darkness.
Chapter 25
The author argues there are two possible solutions to the problem of ignorant poverty versus ignorant wealth: the solution of violence, represented by the man with the knife, and the solution of justice. He frames the choice as strictly between these two, asking which it shall be.
Chapter 26
The author argues that because the worst New York tenements do not look bad, this delays recognition of their true character by well-meaning but uninstructed people, who are always in the majority. He compares them to an apple with a fair skin and rotten core, insisting one must look beneath the surface.
Chapter 26
The author cites the Registrar of Vital Statistics that the tenement death-rate fell below the city's general rate and is lowest in the biggest houses. He reads this two ways: sanitary attention over twenty years has borne fruit and newer tenements are better; and dwellers have been bred down to their conditions, gaining power to resist corruption.
Chapter 26
The author presents it as the practical programme of far-seeing business men who built model tenements expecting a modest return. He calls it the gospel of justice and the alternative to the man with the knife, though he notes such examples are few and scattered. He also insists you must first put a man where he can respect himself.
Chapter 26
The author states the law did what it could, though seldom more than barely sufficient for the moment. The Health Department received almost autocratic powers but exercised them with slow conservatism, preferring to educate rather than force the community. Barracks covering a whole lot became unlawful, air and sunlight gained legal claim, rear tenements were being torn down, and the dearth of summer water was expected to be remedied.
Chapter 27
The author argues the business of housing the poor must be business, as it was business that put them there. Charity, pastime, or fad will miserably fail, turning the workman into a pauper and drowning him in the mire it meant to pull him from. The workman has a just claim to a decent home and the right to demand it, and the exchange must be fair. Expert management succeeds where amateur management fails.
Chapter 27
The 'Big Flat' was originally built as a model tenement but became a hot-bed of thieves and peace-breakers, troubling the police. Its open access to two streets let thieves and 'toughs' exploit an arrangement intended for ventilation, driving honest tenants away. When the author returned, it had vanished, replaced by a six-story carriage factory. It illustrated why some well-meant tenement efforts failed.
Chapter 27
Tenements numbered 14,872 with 468,492 residents in 1869; about 21,000 with over half a million in 1879; 32,390 with 1,093,701 in 1888; and 37,316 including 2,630 rear houses with over 1,250,000 by the time of writing. The author calls the unceasing increase of tenement population and consequent crowding the chief obstacle to solution.
Chapter 27
The Secretary of the Prison Association testified before a legislative committee that by far the largest part—at least eighty per cent—of crimes against property and against the person were perpetrated by individuals who had lost connection with home life, never had any, or whose homes had ceased to be sufficiently separate, decent, and desirable to afford ordinary wholesome influences of home and family.
Chapter 28
A sanitary inquiry found that more than one-half of the tenements, with two-thirds of their population, were held by owners who made keeping them a business, generally a speculation. Owners sought a percentage on outlay that rarely fell below fifteen per cent and frequently exceeded thirty; a footnote adds that witnesses before a Senate Committee called forty per cent a fair average, with instances of one hundred per cent and over.
Chapter 28
Though a recent official report attributed forty per cent of distress among the poor to drunkenness, the first legislative committee to probe the matter concluded that certain conditions and associations of human life and habitation are the prolific parents of corresponding habits and morals. It therefore recommended the prevention of drunkenness by providing for every man a clean and comfortable home.
Chapter 28
Dr. Seaman, cited as speaking from years of observation, argues that anyone 'sent up' to the colonies never returns to the city scot-free. A lien, visible or hidden, rests on their present or future and often proves stronger than good intentions or social rehabilitation. The under world holds in rigorous bondage anyone who has once 'served time,' and would-be fugitives are flung back into crime and poverty.
Chapter 29
Seaman argues the ministry must begin at the sources and be prophylactic, nutritive, and educational. On the islands there are no flexible twigs, only gnarled, blasted, blighted trunks insensible to moral or social influences. So the moralist or scientist can do very little by way of resuscitation; the flotsam and jetsam are mere shreds and fragments of wasted lives.
Chapter 29
Riis reports the alcoholic cells at Bellevue held 3,694 prisoners last year, considerably more than one-fourth of the 13,813 patients who entered through the hospital gates. The daily average of 'cases' in this hospital of the poor is over six hundred. He calls the cells a way-station for many of those traveling back and forth across the East River.
Chapter 29
Riis computes the first cost by direct taxation at $7,156,112.94 for 1889. This combines $2,343,372 expended by the commissioners on all their wards, a police appropriation of $4,409,550.94, and $403,190 for the criminal courts and their machinery. He notes 138,332 were admitted to all jails and institutions that year.
Chapter 29
Text used: Project Gutenberg eBook #45502 (Public domain in the United States). Generated from the full text; cards paraphrase the source.
Version: Public domain edition. Retrieved 2026-10-26. Cards reviewed 2026-10-26.
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