American History II A Reflection on "How the Other Half Lives" by the Other Half The author of "How the Other Half Lives", Jacob Riis, inscribes on the deplorable living conditions of the Progressive Era from a first-person perspective. Riis, an immigrant, police reporter, photojournalist and most importantly: a pioneer and social reformer, tells a very captivating yet appalling experience of the lower class life in New York City beginning in the 19th century. Migration and the standardization of establishments are the attributing factors to overpopulation distribution and overcrowding of living arrangements in the city. With the ever growing craze of coming to America and starting a new and better life many immigrants had to start from the bottom, and many stayed there. Ethnic groups tended to stick together and in result "claimed" their own territory; many worked low-wage jobs and were poverty-stricken. The only affordable shelter in close proximity to work and their community were overcrowded housing tenements, overcrowded being an understatement. From 1869 to 1890 tenement housing almost tripled to over 37,000 tenements in use.(p204 Riis) Houses and blocks were turned into barracks, giving a whole new meaning to overcrowding, and the expense unjust compared to living conditions. Tenements were the equivalent of coal mines; in early developments there were no safety standards, just the quickest way to make the most amount of money, with lack of sunlight and air ventilation. The epitome of poor management regarding the lack of attempt of turnabout in the nature of tenements by landlords were shown through model tenements; the care and up-keeping focused mainly in the facade of buildings rather than continual care within the walls of confinements. Mortality rates in the city rose to one-in-twenty-seven persons in 1855 due to the severe lacking living conditions and negligence of owners, landlords and agents.(p11, Riis) Any case of disease that arose within the walls of a tenement was a formula for disaster. Typically the disease-stricken tenants were a lost cause, and the source of plague throughout other blocks. The mortality rate didn't lie, but the landlords did not see that because of the ill-paced illnesses, which led to a citizen movement that resulted in the organization of the Board of Health. The Health Department began to educate the public more than help the public; however, in years to come they ordered tenements to be ventilated by way of air shafts and ordered the installation of windows, which slowly led to the declination, and soon thereafter extinction of the "dark room".
A law was made, saying that once someone was ill with the plague they were to stay in their house. Anyone who happened to live in the same house as the unfortunate soul was also locked in, with fear that they could spread the disease. Beggars were not allowed to wonder the streets at anytime, and were executed immediately for doing so without a given reason. All of these, although sensible ideas (apart from the execution..) would not contribute towards public health, as the disease was not contagious in the human community. It was in fact passed on from fleas living on black rats, but this knowledge had not yet been developed.
From the beginning of the story, a dreary gray New York is painted in one's mind with a depressing saddened tone of the bustling metropolis. It is a city flooded with immigrant workers hoping to better their lives and their c...
Where do you go when you have no home to go to? During the great depression, thousands of Americans were asking themselves this question. America’s economy was at an all time low, most people were laid off, and the few who weren’t had a major decrease in their salary. A large portion of America’s population was unable to afford their houses anymore. Lots of people went to live with family, but not everyone had a family who was able to take care of them. So where do these people go? The answer is hoovervilles, hoovervilles are groups of random makeshift shacks and any other things people were able to throw together for shelter. Most hoovervilles were in large cities because there were more job opportunities. Since there were so many people living in these camps, it was harder to control them. There was so much crime going on in hoovervilles that officials couldn’t stop it, and sometimes even made it worse. Hoovervilles were not very desired places to live.
... lived in New York tenements. In Riis’s book, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, he uses prolific prose coupled with emotionally powerful illustrations that paint a vivid picture of immigrant families living in tenements in the late 1800s. Throughout Riss’s book, exposes how immigrant children were forced to work in factories and sweatshops. As a result, Riss successfully achieves his goal of educating the middle class regarding the challenges that urban immigrants faced. Lastly, although Riss tact regarding racial epithets of the immigrants he wrote on and photographed are offensive, the importance of Riss’s photographs outweighs the racial insults because his pictures lie not only in their power to enlighten but also to move his readers regarding how immigrant families were forced into making their children work.
...rked as unskilled laborers in the new factories. Most were poor, disgruntled, and found that America was not what they had expected when they left their native countries. The city bosses provided aid to these immigrants and then gained their political support. They unfairly took advantages of the immigrants to gain power, which helped them to gain the money they were seeking. The immigrants had a difficult life because most of them were crowded into ghettos and slums. They received low wages and faced dangerous and unhealthy working conditions daily. Concentration increased and living quarter size proportionately decreased. The immigrants experienced poor sanitation and contagious diseases and most did not have any plumbing or ventilation. They had a difficult and sad life, and many were more happy in their oppressive homelands than industrialized America.
Dumenil, Lynn, ed. "New York City." The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Social History. N.p.: Oxford UP, 2012. Oxford Reference. Web. 8 Apr. 2013.
Immigration is a very important part of the history of the United States and continues to be today. Immigrants during the 1900’s had many hardships to face and sometimes the “golden land” was not so golden. Many immigrants had very high hopes about what their lives could have been like here in the U.S., and unfortunately only very few got to experience that great life. Although each of the readings had their differences, the theme of hardship seemed to prevail throughout.
The book asks two questions; first, why the changes that have taken place on the sidewalk over the past 40 years have occurred? Focusing on the concentration of poverty in some areas, people movement from one place to the other and how the people working/or living on Sixth Avenue come from such neighborhoods. Second, How the sidewalk life works today? By looking at the mainly poor black men, who work as book and magazine vendors, and/or live on the sidewalk of an upper-middle-class neighborhood. The book follows the lives of several men who work as book and magazine vendors in Greenwich Village during the 1990s, where mos...
American towns industrialized all throughout the nineteenth century, irresistible ailments developed as a genuine danger. The presentation of new workers and the development of vast urban zones permitted already confined sicknesses to spread rapidly and contaminate larger populations. As industrialization occurred, towns developed into cities, and people relocated to them. The expanded interest for shoddy lodging by urban vagrants prompted ineffectively assembled homes that poorly accommodated individual cleanliness. Outside laborers in the nineteenth century frequently lived in cramped dwellings that consistently lacked fundamental comforts, for example, running water, ventilation, and toilets. These conditions were perfect for the spread
Homelessness in the United States has been a problem for at least 200 years. “In the early 1800s, the rank of homelessness increased for many reasons such as; Migration to the frontiers, displacement caused by the Civil War, immigration from Europe, seasonal employment patterns in agriculture, construction and mining, and severe economic slumps in the 1870s and 1890s” ( Macmillan). This shows that homelessness started to become a huge problem in the 19th century. To help the situation, “Cities developed shelt...
Jacob Riis is clearly a trained historian since he was given an education to become a change in the world-- he was a well-educated American newspaper reporter, social reformer, and photographer who, with his book How the Other Half Lives, shocked the conscience of his readers with factual descriptions of slum conditions in New York City. In 1870, Jacob Riis immigrated to the United States without any economic resources and unable to find a source of income to help him. This leads to his perceptions about the topic because he also states in the book that the various jobs he occupied were low paying and he experienced poverty in the city of New York as well, yet for a short period of time. Riis mentions the injustice of unsanitary and dangerous living conditions and when he became a journalist, he constantly frequented neighborhoods and managed to capture the alarming environment in these urban areas using journalism as a platform.
Noticing the influx of immigration and population boom in Manhattan at the end of the 19th century, a man named J. Clarence...
American employers who were short of workers often promoted jobs so that the immigrants could come and work for them, they even published a guide book called “Where to Emigrate and Why”, steamship companies advertised for passengers and told them about how much faster it would be and that it is healthier/safer. Once the immigrants were down here they would write to their families and friends and describe just how good it is in the United States, which brought even more immigrants into the United States. However when some immigrants arrived they realized that it isn’t what people described nor what they expected/hoped for; the immigrants were going to be the ones doing all of the dirty work. They didn’t have the best of housing either, the bathrooms were at the end of the hall and they shared their apartment. They were filled with families in one small room; 50% of families slept three or four people to a room and 25% had five or more people per room. Each different ethnic immigrant found a different type of
In Jane Jacobs’s acclaimed The Life and Death of Great American Cities, she intricately articulates urban blight and the ills of metropolitan society by addressing several binaries throughout the course of the text. One of the more culturally significant binaries that Jacobs relies on in her narrative is the effectively paradoxical relationship between diversity and homogeneity in urban environments at the time. In particular, beginning in Chapter 12 throughout Chapter 13, Jacobs is concerned greatly with debunking widely held misconceptions about urban diversity.
One's dream and aspirations to supersede in life must be stronger and greater than limitations set forth by others. The experience that were bestowed to me during my short life has elevated me to the woman I am today. Please walk with me as I give you the opportunity to see the world from my eyes: