Jacob A. Riis ([1890] 2004) How the Other Half Lives, Studies Among the Tenements of New York.

There is little point in thinking about tenements and New York and putting the two together and imaging you have some kind of understanding as I did. Like me, you’ll probably be on the wrong continent. To make comparisons you need to think of other continents like the slums of Calcutta or pre-Communist Peking. 330 000 audited tenants per square mile in New York tenements of the 1890s.  In The Bend between Broadway and the Bowery for example, were 4300 ‘apartments’. The notice is standing room only is up and nearly 150 ‘lodgers’ were driven from Mulberry Street. Through the long summer days carts patrol The Bend scattering disinfectant in streets and lanes, sinks and cellars and hidden hovels In a room not thirteen feet either way slept twelve men and a woman. There’s little natural light. No water. Poor sanitation Nine deaths in No. 59 (a half-sized tenement) in 1888; five in baby coffins. Most common cause of deaths for adults-falling off the roof whilst sleeping outside. Temperatures measured inside one and fifteen degrees Celsius. This is rudimentary existence and not life. Riis was a social reformer and he blamed rapacious landlords for this failing, but he also blamed poor people for having some innate deficiency in being poor and this was connected to their race.

            ‘The Italians comes in at the bottom, and in the generation that comes over the sea he stays there. In the slums he is welcomed as a tenant “who makes less trouble” than the contentious Irishman or the order-loving German, that is to say: is content to live in a pig-sty and submit to robbery at the hands of the rent-collector without murmur’.    

            ‘Thrift is the watchword of Jewtown, as of its people the world over. It is at once its strength and fatal weakness, its cardinal virtue and its foul disgrace. Become an overmastering passion with these people who come here in droves from Eastern Europe to escape persecution from which freedom could  be bought only with gold, it has enslaved them in bondage worse than that from which they fled. Money is there God. Life itself is of little value compared with even the leanest of bank accounts.’

            Riis is a great admirer of thrift, but not too much thrift. He’s not an admirer of the inscrutable Chinaman with his pigtails, inscrutable face and opium pipe. Nor is he an admirer of the hundreds of ale houses, rum joints or stale beer dives in every tenement block because that’s wasted money and wasted lives. Roll on Prohibition and the poor man shall be freed from such inequities. Fling in a few World Wars and it might happen. But you know something Mr Riis the rich still get richer and the poor get poorer. The rich man’s god is money. The poor man takes whatever he can get. How the other half lives is a missed opportunity in which there is nothing more crooked than the truth. Rich people cannibalise poor people. That’s not communism. That’s fact.