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How the Other Half Lives

Jacob A. Riis

Book Overview: 

How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York was a pioneering work of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting the squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. It served as a basis for future muckraking journalism by exposing the slums to New York City’s upper and middle class. The title of the book is a reference to a phrase of François Rabelais, who wrote in Pantagruel: "one half of the world does not know how the other half lives". (Summary by Wikipedia)

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Book Excerpt: 
. . .I will pay thee for that, friend Alderman,” and went his way. His manner of paying was to put up the big building in the rear of 34 Cherry Street with an immense blank wall right in front of the windows of Alderman Mullins’s tenements, shutting out effectually light and air from them. But as he had no access to the street from his building for many years it could not be let or used for anything, and remained vacant until it passed under the management of the Gotham Court property. Mullins’s Court is there yet, and so is the Quaker’s vengeful wall that has cursed the lives of thousands of innocent people since. At its farther end the alley between the two that begins inside the Cherry Street tenement, six or seven feet wide, narrows down to less than two feet. It is barely possible to squeeze through; but few care to do it, for the rift leads to the jail of the Oak Street police station, and therefore is not popular with the growing youth of the dis. . . Read More

Community Reviews

I have heard about this book and the impact it had on housing laws for years and have always meant to read it for the historical and social context. It is a very detailed overview of the neighborhoods of late 1800s NY. A interested even if dated read. Recommended

Millions of immigrants came to the United States during Jacob Riis’s lifetime, and a great many of them landed on an island: Manhattan. Sadly, thousands of these hopeful souls ended up on another island: Hart Island, New York City’s potter’s field, where the indigent dead are buried.

This island is

This book was published in 1890 and gives a detailed view of poverty and tenement living in New York City in the 1880s. I experience the book as both an e-book and an audible book. But I feel like I barely scratch the surface of the e-book because there are so many footnotes that through highlighte

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