Due tomorrow: vocabulary test on words from "Outcasts"
In class today: we are beginning to read excerpts from Jacob Riis' pioneering work of social criticism, which was published in 1890. In this work of non-fiction, Riis wanted to make the upper classes aware of the poverty around them. Riis was a Danish immigrant, who worked as a reporter for the New York Tribune, who was given the job of investigating the horrors of tenement life in the slums of New York. His report How the Other Half Lives was written with no detachment, that is Riis report is full of judgments, reflecting Riis' own biases. However, the book had a major impact and helped to change people's way of thinking about the poverty around them and what they could do to change it. Today we are reading first chapter: "The Genesis of the Tenement."
There is an accompanying set of discussion questions. You will work with an assigned partner. It is not necessary to write out the responses, as long as everyone stays on task. However, if you are absent, you will need to complete the responses. class handout / copy below
Below are some of Jacob Riis' photographs taken in the New York slums
Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914).
How the Other Half Lives. 1
I. Genesis of the
Tenement
HELL’S KITCHEN AND
SEBASTOPOL.
THE first tenement
New York knew bore the mark of Cain from
its birth, though a generation passed before the writing was deciphered. It
was the “rear house,” infamous ever after in our city’s history. There had been
tenant-houses before, but they were not built for the purpose. Nothing would
probably have shocked their original owners more than the idea of their
harboring a promiscuous crowd; for they were the decorous homes of the old Knickerbockers, the proud
aristocracy of Manhattan in the early days. 1
It was the stir and
bustle of trade, together with the tremendous immigration that followed upon
the war of 1812 that dislodged them. In thirty-five years the city of less than
a hundred thousand came to harbor half a million souls, for whom homes had to
be found. Within the memory of men not yet in their prime, Washington had moved
from his house on Cherry Hill as too far out of town to be easily reached. Now
the old residents followed his example, but they moved in a different direction
and for a different reason. Their comfortable dwellings in the once fashionable
streets along the East River front fell into the hands of real-estate agents
and boarding-house keepers; and here, says the report to the Legislature of
1857, when the evils engendered had excited just alarm, “in its beginning, the
tenant-house became a real blessing to that class of industrious poor whose
small earnings limited their expenses, and whose employment in workshops,
stores, or about the warehouses and thoroughfares, render a near residence of
much importance.” Not for long, however. As business increased, and the city
grew with rapid strides, the necessities of the poor became the opportunity of
their wealthier neighbors, and the stamp was set upon the old houses, suddenly
become valuable, which the best thought and effort of a later age have vainly
struggled to efface. Their “large
rooms were partitioned into several smaller ones, without regard to light or
ventilation, the rate of rent being lower in proportion to space or height from
the street; and they soon became filled from cellar to garret with a class of tenantry living from hand to mouth, loose in
morals, improvident in habits, degraded, and squalid as beggary itself.” It was
thus the dark bedroom, prolific of untold depravities, came into the world. It
was destined to survive the old houses. In their new rôle, says the old report,
eloquent in its indignant denunciation of “evils more destructive than wars,”
“they were not intended to last. Rents were fixed high enough to cover damage
and abuse from this class, from whom nothing was expected, and the most was
made of them while they lasted. Neatness, order, cleanliness, were never
dreamed of in connection with the tenant-house system, as it spread its
localities from year to year; while reckless slovenliness, discontent, privation, and ignorance were left to
work out their invariable results, until the entire premises reached the level
of tenant-house dilapidation, containing, but sheltering not, the miserable
hordes that crowded beneath moldering, water-rotted roofs or burrowed among the
rats of clammy cellars.” Yet so illogical is human greed that, at a later day,
when called to account, “the proprietors frequently urged the filthy habits of
the tenants as an excuse for the condition of their property, utterly losing
sight of the fact that it was the tolerance of those habits which was the real
evil, and that for this they themselves were alone responsible.” 2
Still the pressure
of the crowds did not abate, and in
the old garden where the stolid Dutch burgher grew his tulips or early cabbages
a rear house was built, generally of wood, two stories high at first. Presently
it was carried up another story, and another. Where two families had lived ten
moved in. The front house followed suit, if the brick walls were strong enough.
The question was not always asked, judging from complaints made by a
contemporary witness, that the old buildings were “often carried up to a great
height without regard to the strength of the foundation walls.” It was rent the
owner was after; nothing was said in the contract about either the safety or
the comfort of the tenants. The garden gate no longer swung on its rusty
hinges. The shell-paved walk had become an alley; what the rear house had left
of the garden, a “court.” Plenty such are yet to be found in the Fourth Ward,
with here and there one of the original rear tenements. 3
Worse was to follow.
It was “soon perceived by estate owners and agents of property that a greater
percentage of profits could be realized by the conversion of houses and blocks
into barracks, and dividing their space into smaller proportions capable of
containing human life within four walls. … Blocks were rented of real estate
owners, or ‘purchased on time,’ or taken in charge at a percentage, and held
for under-letting.” With the appearance of the middleman, wholly irresponsible,
and utterly reckless and unrestrained, began the era of tenement building which
turned out such blocks as Gotham Court, where, in one cholera epidemic that
scarcely touched the clean wards, the tenants died at the rate of one hundred
and ninety-five to the thousand of population; which forced the general
mortality of the city up from 1 in 41.83 in 1815, to 1 in 27.33 in 1855, a year
of unusual freedom from epidemic disease, and which wrung from the early
organizers of the Health Department this wail: “There are numerous examples of
tenement-houses in which are lodged several hundred people that have a prorate
allotment of ground area scarcely equal to two square yards upon the city lot,
court-yards and all included.” The tenement-house population had swelled to
half a million souls by that time, and on the East Side, in what is still the
most densely populated district in all the world, China not excluded, it was
packed at the rate of 290,000 to the square mile, a state of affairs wholly
unexampled. The utmost cupidity of other lands and other days had never
contrived to herd much more than half that number within the same space. The
greatest crowding of Old London was at the rate of 175,816. Swine roamed the
streets and gutters as their principal scavengers. 1 The death of a child in a
tenement was registered at the Bureau of Vital Statistics as “plainly due to
suffocation in the foul air of an unventilated apartment,” and the Senators,
who had come down from Albany to find out what was the matter with New York,
reported that “there are annually cut off from the population by disease and
death enough human beings to people a city, and enough human labor to sustain
it.” And yet experts had testified that, as compared with updown, rents were
from twenty-five to thirty per cent, higher in the worst slums of the lower
wards, with such accommodations as were enjoyed, for instance, by a “family with
boarders” in Cedar Street, who fed hogs in the cellar that contained eight or
ten loads of manure; or a one room 12 x 12 with five families living in it,
comprising twenty persons of both sexes and all ages, with only two beds,
without partition, screen, chair, or table.” The rate of rent has been
successfully maintained to the present day, though the hog at least has been
eliminated. 4
Lest anybody flatter
himself with the notion that these were evils of a day that is happily past and
may safely be forgotten, let me mention here three very recent instances of
tenement-house life that came under my notice. One was the burning of a rear
house in Mott Street, from appearances one of the original tenant-houses that
made their owners rich. The fire made homeless ten families, who had paid an
average of $5 a month for their mean little cubby-holes. The owner himself told
me that it was fully insured for $800, though it brought him in $600 a year
rent. He evidently considered himself especially entitled to be pitied for
losing such valuable property. Another was the case of a hard-working family of
man and wife, young people from the old country, who took poison together in a
Crosby Street tenement because they were “tired.” There was no other
explanation, and none was needed when I stood in the room in which they had
lived. It was in the attic with sloping ceiling and a single window so far out
on the roof that it seemed not to belong to the place at all. With scarcely
room enough to turn around in they had been compelled to pay five dollars and a
half a month in advance. There were four such rooms in that attic, and together
they brought in as much as many a handsome little cottage in a pleasant part of
Brooklyn. The third instance was that of a colored family of husband, wife, and
baby in a wretched rear rookery in West Third Street. Their rent was eight
dollars and a half for a single room on the top-story, so small that I was
unable to get a photograph of it even by placing the camera outside the open
door. Three short steps across either way would have measured its full extent. 5
TENEMENT OF 1863, FOR TWELVE FAMILIES ON EACH FLAT 2 D. dark
L. light. H. halls.
There was just one
excuse for the early tenement-house builders, and their successors may plead it
with nearly as good right for what it is worth. “Such,” says an official
report, “is the lack of houseroom in the city that any kind of tenement can be
immediately crowded with lodgers, if there is space offered.” Thousands were
living in cellars. There were three hundred underground lodging-houses in the
city when the Health Department was organized. Some fifteen years before that
the old Baptist Church in Mulberry Street, just off Chatham Street, had been
sold, and the rear half of the frame structure had been converted into
tenements that with their swarming population became the scandal even of that
reckless age. The wretched pile harbored no less than forty families, and the
annual rate of deaths to the population was officially stated to be 75 in
1,000. These tenements were an extreme type of very many, for the big barracks
had by this time spread east and west and far up the island into the sparsely
settled wards. Whether or not the title was clear to the land upon which they
were built was of less account than that the rents were collected. If there
were damages to pay, the tenant had to foot them. Cases were “very frequent
when property was in litigation, and two or three different parties were
collecting rents.” Of course under such circumstances “no repairs were ever
made.” 6
The climax had been reached. The situation
was summed up by the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor
in these words: “Crazy old buildings, crowded rear tenements in filthy yards,
dark, damp basements, leaking garrets, shops, outhouses, and stables 3 converted into dwellings, though scarcely
fit to shelter brutes, are habitations of thousands of our fellow-beings in
this wealthy, Christian city.” “The city,” says its historian, Mrs. Martha Lamb,
commenting on the era of aqueduct building between 1835 and 1845, “was a
general asylum for vagrants.” Young vagabonds, the natural offspring of such
“home” conditions, overran the streets. Juvenile crime increased fearfully year
by year. The Children’s Aid Society and kindred philanthropic organizations
were yet unborn, but in the city directory was to be found the address of the
“American Society for the Promotion of Education in Africa.” 7
Accompanying handout.
Name(s) ____________________________________________________________
“Genesis of the Tenement” from Jacob Riis’ report How the
Other Half Lives published in 1890
Directions You are
working in pairs (or individually, if you were absent from class). The reading
material is the chapter “Genesis of the Tenement.” One person should begin reading to the other,
stopping at a designated line break with a number. At that point, both people
are to discuss the corresponding numbered question, after which the other person
reads aloud to the next break. You do
not need to write out the response, as long as you successfully stay focused
and complete the assignment. You are responsible for being able to share
out the responses with the class.
1. What
is the mark of Cain and why does Riis apply this to tenements?
2. Why
had the original residents, the old Knickerbockers (these were the original
settlers from the Netherlands in the 17th century) left their homes?
3. Why
were these homes “in the beginning…a blessing…to the industrious poor?”
4. Why
did these former homes of the old Knickerbockers become valuable?
5. From
the context of the sentence, define garret.
6. No
question…keep reading
7. What
was the attitude of the real estate agents to their tenants?
8. What
happened to the old houses when “the pressure of the crowds did not abate?”
9. What
else did the estate owners do to realize “a greater percentage of profits?”
10. What
was the population of the Lower East Side?
11. Give
one example of the cupidity (extreme greed) of the real estate agents.
12. On
average, how much did people pay for a “mean little cubby hole?”
13. How
did the family on Crosby Street die?
14. Why
couldn’t Riis even take a photo of the single room on the top-story?
15. What
was the excuse given by “early tenement house builders” for crowding people
into such tiny places?
16. What
was the annual rate of death for those who lived in the tenements?
17. What
happened to the children of the families who lived in the tenements?
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