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How The Other Half Lives

In How The Other Half Lives New Yorkers read with horror that three-quarters of the residents of their city were housed in tenements and that in those tenements rents were substantially higher than in better sections of the city. In his book Riis gave a full and detailed picture of what life in those slums was like, how the slums were created, how and why they remained as they were, who was forced to live there, and offered suggestions for easing the lot of the poor.

Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? Jacob Riis was one of the very few men who photographed the slums of New York at the turn of the twentieth century, when as many as , people per square mile were crowded into the tenements of New York's Lower East Side.

Thoroughly Modern Millie: 5 How The Other Half Lives

The filth and degradation made the area a hell for the immigrants forced to live there. Riis was one of those immigrants, and, after years of abject poverty, when he became a police reporter for the New York Tribune, he exposed the shameful conditions of life with which he was all too familiar. Today, he is best remembered as a compassionate and effective reformer and as a pioneer photo-journalist. In How the Other Half Lives, New Yorkers read with horror that three-quarters of the residents of their city were housed in tenements and that in those tenements rents were substantially higher than in better sections of the city.

Riis originally documented all his studies with photographs. However, since the half-tone technique of photo reproduction had not been perfected, the original edition included mainly reductions in sketch-form of Riis' photographs. These could not begin to capture what Riis' sensitive camera caught on film. The anguish and the apathy, the toughness and the humiliation of the anonymous faces is all but obliterated in the sketches.

This Dover edition includes fully photographs, many famous, and many less familiar, from the Riis collection of the City Museum, and their inclusion here creates a closer conformity to Riis' intentions than did the original edition.

33 Jacob Riis Photographs From How The Other Half Lives And Beyond

Read more Read less. Add both to Cart Add both to List. Buy the selected items together This item: How the Other Half Lives: Ships from and sold by Amazon. Customers who bought this item also bought. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. Studies Among the Tenements of New York. On the Surveillance of Blackness.

Out of This Furnace: A Novel of Immigrant Labor in America. Here's how restrictions apply. From the Back Cover In How The Other Half Lives New Yorkers read with horror that three-quarters of the residents of their city were housed in tenements and that in those tenements rents were substantially higher than in better sections of the city.

Dover Publications; Revised ed. Don't have a Kindle? Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. See all customer images. Read reviews that mention new york half lives york city jacob riis living conditions east side lower east luc sante men and specifically women women and children hundred years benjamin franklin kindle edition life in the tenements years ago late 19th century united states theodore roosevelt writing style tenement museum. Showing of reviews.

Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. I have seen the photographs of Jacob Riis in the real and was very disappointed to see them so poorly reproduced in this book. Once he began using magnesium flash powder , he was able to capture the dark and dingy conditions of the tenements. How the Other Half Lives was only one book in Riis' bibliography of highlighting the conditions in the slums of New York.

Some of his other works that highlighted more in depth views into slum life were Children of the Tenements , The Battle with the Slums , and Out of Mulberry Street. In January , Riis bought a detective camera and went on an expedition to gather images of what life was like in the slums of New York City.

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How It Lives and Dies in New York" using his images on a projection screen and taking the viewer on a journey by describing the images. In February , Riis wrote a magazine article based on his lectures in Scribner magazine , which was a resounding success. Studies among the Tenements of New York. Studies among the Tenements of New York explained the living conditions in New York slums as well as the sweatshops in some tenements, which paid workers only a few cents per day.

The book explains the plight of working children; they would work in factories and at other jobs.

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Some children became garment workers and newsies newsboys. Riis describes the system of tenement housing that had failed, as he claims, because of greed and neglect from wealthier people. He claims a correlation between the high crime rate, drunkenness, and reckless behaviour of the poor and their lack of a proper home. While Riis treats many of the ethnic groups he dedicates whole chapters with slurs and numerous stereotypes, he still keeps his general hypothesis that the reason for the poverty in these communities is caused by the conditions surrounding them.

Riis ends How the Other Half Lives with a plan of how to fix the problem. He asserts that the plan is achievable and that the upper classes will not only profit financially from such ventures, but have a moral obligation to tend to them as well.

Heartbreaking Jacob Riis Photographs From How The Other Half Lives And Beyond

How the Other Half Lives follows a general outline for the charity writings of the nineteenth century: Riis finally convinced the average reader of newspapers that the poor were not so by choice; that the dangerous and unhygienic conditions in which they lived were imposed by society, rather than the result of loose moral standards; that the slums were something that needed to be fixed rather than gaped at or shunned.

The article proved to be popular, and Riis spent the better part of a year expanding it into the book published by Scribner's Books in It offered more illustrations and halftones than the magazine articles could offer. The book was successful. Lodgers rest in a crowded Bayard Street tenement that rents rooms for five cents a night and holds 12 people in a room just 13 feet long. Guns, knives, clubs, brass knuckles, and other weapons, that had been confiscated from residents in a city lodging house. An Italian rag picker sits inside her home on Jersey Street.

Children attend class at the Essex Market school. A man sorts through trash in a makeshift home under the 47th Street dump. Members of the Growler Gang demonstrate how they steal. Children stand in Mullen's Alley. Workers toil in a sweatshop inside a Ludlow Street tenement. Inside a "dive" on Broome Street. Lodgers sit on the floor of the Oak Street police station.


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Rag pickers in Baxter Alley. A shoemaker at work on Broome Street. A Bohemian family at work making cigars inside their tenement home.


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  • Lodgers sit inside the Elizabeth Street police station. Children sit inside a school building on West 52nd Street. A woman works in her attic on Hudson Street. A man observes the sabbath in the coal cellar on Ludlow Street where he lives with his family.