HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES
[Illustration: GOTHAM COURT.]
HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES
_STUDIES AMONG THE TENEMENTS
OF NEW YORK_
BY
JACOB A. RIIS
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS CHIEFLY FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
TAKEN BY THE AUTHOR_
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1890
COPYRIGHT, 1890, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
TROW'S
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY,
NEW YORK.
PREFACE.
The belief that every man's experience ought to be worth something to
the community from which he drew it, no matter what that experience may
be, so long as it was gleaned along the line of some decent, honest
work, made me begin this book. With the result before him, the reader
can judge for himself now whether or not I was right. Right or wrong,
the many and exacting duties of a newspaper man's life would hardly
have allowed me to bring it to an end but for frequent friendly lifts
given me by willing hands. To the President of the Board of Health, Mr.
Charles G. Wilson, and to Chief Inspector Byrnes of the Police Force I
am indebted for much kindness. The patient friendship of Dr. Roger S.
Tracy, the Registrar of Vital Statistics, has done for me what I never
could have done for myself; for I know nothing of tables, statistics
and percentages, while there is nothing about them that he does not
know. Most of all, I owe in this, as in all things else, to the womanly
sympathy and the loving companionship of my dear wife, ever my chief
helper, my wisest counsellor, and my gentlest critic.
J. A. R.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION, 1
CHAPTER I.
GENESIS OF THE TENEMENT, 7
CHAPTER II.
THE AWAKENING, 15
CHAPTER III.
THE MIXED CROWD, 21
CHAPTER IV.
THE DOWN TOWN BACK-ALLEYS, 28
CHAPTER V.
THE ITALIAN IN NEW YORK, 48
CHAPTER VI.
THE BEND, 55
CHAPTER VII.
A RAID ON THE STALE-BEER DIVES, 71
CHAPTER VIII.
THE CHEAP LODGING-HOUSES, 82
CHAPTER IX.
CHINATOWN, 92
CHAPTER X.
JEWTOWN, 104
CHAPTER XI.
THE SWEATERS OF JEWTOWN, 120
CHAPTER XII.
THE BOHEMIANS--TENEMENT-HOUSE CIGARMAKING, 136
CHAPTER XIII.
THE COLOR LINE IN NEW YORK, 148
CHAPTER XIV.
THE COMMON HERD, 159
CHAPTER XV.
THE PROBLEM OF THE CHILDREN, 179
CHAPTER XVI.
WAIFS OF THE CITY'S SLUMS, 187
CHAPTER XVII.
THE STREET ARAB, 196
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE REIGN OF RUM, 210
CHAPTER XIX.
THE HARVEST OF TARES, 217
CHAPTER XX.
THE WORKING GIRLS OF NEW YORK, 234
CHAPTER XXI.
PAUPERISM IN THE TENEMENTS, 243
CHAPTER XXII.
THE WRECKS AND THE WASTE, 255
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE MAN WITH THE KNIFE, 263
CHAPTER XXIV.
WHAT HAS BEEN DONE, 268
CHAPTER XXV.
HOW THE CASE STANDS, 282
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
GOTHAM COURT, _Frontispiece_
PAGE
HELL'S KITCHEN AND SEBASTOPOL, 6
TENEMENT OF 1863, FOR TWELVE FAMILIES ON EACH
FLAT, 12
TENEMENT OF THE OLD STYLE. BIRTH OF THE
AIR-SHAFT, 18
AT THE CRADLE OF THE TENEMENT.--DOORWAY OF AN
OLD-FASHIONED DWELLING ON CHERRY HILL, 30
UPSTAIRS IN BLINDMAN'S ALLEY, 34
AN OLD REAR-TENEMENT IN ROOSEVELT STREET, 45
IN THE HOME OF AN ITALIAN RAG-PICKER, JERSEY
STREET, 51
THE BEND, 59
BANDITS' ROOST, 63
BOTTLE ALLEY, 66
LODGERS IN A CROWDED BAYARD STREET TENEMENT--"FIVE
CENTS A SPOT," 69
AN ALL-NIGHT TWO-CENT RESTAURANT, IN "THE BEND," 75
THE TRAMP, 79
BUNKS IN A SEVEN-CENT LODGING-HOUSE, PELL STREET, 87
IN A CHINESE JOINT, 98
"THE OFFICIAL ORGAN OF CHINATOWN," 100
A TRAMP'S NEST IN LUDLOW STREET, 106
A MARKET SCENE IN THE JEWISH QUARTER, 111
THE OLD CLO'E'S MAN--IN THE JEWISH QUARTERS, 117
"KNEE-PANTS" AT FORTY-FIVE CENTS A DOZEN--A
LUDLOW STREET SWEATER'S SHOP, 127
BOHEMIAN CIGARMAKERS AT WORK IN THEIR TENEMENT, 143
A BLACK-AND-TAN DIVE IN "AFRICA," 157
THE OPEN DOOR, 160
BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF AN EAST SIDE TENEMENT BLOCK, 163
THE WHITE BADGE OF MOURNING, 166
IN POVERTY GAP, WEST TWENTY-EIGHTH STREET.
AN ENGLISH COAL-HEAVER'S HOME, 169
DISPOSSESSED, 176
THE TRENCH IN THE POTTER'S FIELD, 178
PRAYER-TIME IN THE NURSERY--FIVE POINTS HOUSE
OF INDUSTRY, 195
"DIDN'T LIVE NOWHERE," 200
STREET ARABS IN SLEEPING QUARTERS, 202
GETTING READY FOR SUPPER IN THE NEWSBOYS'
LODGING-HOUSE, 205
A DOWNTOWN "MORGUE," 214
A GROWLER GANG IN SESSION, 223
TYPICAL TOUGHS (FROM THE ROGUES' GALLERY), 228
HUNTING RIVER THIEVES, 231
SEWING AND STARVING IN AN ELIZABETH STREET ATTIC, 238
A FLAT IN THE PAUPER BARRACKS, WEST THIRTY-EIGHTH
STREET, WITH ALL ITS FURNITURE, 245
COFFEE AT ONE CENT, 252
EVOLUTION OF THE TENEMENT IN TWENTY YEARS, 269
GENERAL PLAN OF THE RIVERSIDE BUILDINGS
(A. T. WHITE'S) IN BROOKLYN, 292
FLOOR PLAN OF ONE DIVISION IN THE RIVERSIDE
BUILDINGS, SHOWING SIX "APARTMENTS," 293
"With gates of silver and bars of gold
Ye have fenced my sheep from their father's fold;
I have heard the dropping of their tears
In heaven these eighteen hundred years."
"O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt,
We build but as our fathers built;
Behold thine images, how they stand,
Sovereign and sole, through all our land."
Then Christ sought out an artisan,
A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,
And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin
Pushed from her faintly want and sin.
These set he in the midst of them,
And as they drew back their garment-hem,
For fear of defilement, "Lo, here," said he,
"The _images_ ye have made of me!"
--JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.
_INTRODUCTION._
Long ago it was said that "one half of the world does not know how the
other half lives." That was true then. It did not know because it did
not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles,
and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was
able to hold them there and keep its own seat. There came a time when
the discomfort and crowding below were so great, and the consequent
upheavals so violent, that it was no longer an easy thing to do, and
then the upper half fell to inquiring what was the matter. Information
on the subject has been accumulating rapidly since, and the whole world
has had its hands full answering for its old ignorance.
In New York, the youngest of the world's great cities, that time came
later than elsewhere, because the crowding had not been so great. There
were those who believed that it would never come; but their hopes were
vain. Greed and reckless selfishness wrought like results here as in
the cities of older lands. "When the great riot occurred in 1863," so
reads the testimony of the Secretary of the Prison Association of New
York before a legislative committee appointed to investigate causes
of the increase of crime in the State twenty-five years ago, "every
hiding-place and nursery of crime discovered itself by immediate and
active participation in the operations of the mob. Those very places
and domiciles, and all that are like them, are to-day nurseries of
crime, and of the vices and disorderly courses which lead to crime.
By far the largest part--eighty per cent. at least--of crimes against
property and against the person are perpetrated by individuals who
have either lost connection with home life, or never had any, or whose
_homes had ceased to be sufficiently separate, decent, and desirable to
afford what are regarded as ordinary wholesome influences of home and
family_.... The younger criminals seem to come almost exclusively from
the worst tenement house districts, that is, when traced back to the
very places where they had their homes in the city here." Of one thing
New York made sure at that early stage of the inquiry: the boundary
line of the Other Half lies through the tenements.
It is ten years and over, now, since that line divided New York's
population evenly. To-day three-fourths of its people live in the
tenements, and the nineteenth century drift of the population to the
cities is sending ever-increasing multitudes to crowd them. The fifteen
thousand tenant houses that were the despair of the sanitarian in the
past generation have swelled into thirty-seven thousand, and more than
twelve hundred thousand persons call them home. The one way out he
saw--rapid transit to the suburbs--has brought no relief. We know now
that there is no way out; that the "system" that was the evil offspring
of public neglect and private greed has come to stay, a storm-centre
forever of our civilization. Nothing is left but to make the best of a
bad bargain.
What the tenements are and how they grow to what they are, we shall
see hereafter. The story is dark enough, drawn from the plain public
records, to send a chill to any heart. If it shall appear that the
sufferings and the sins of the "other half," and the evil they
breed, are but as a just punishment upon the community that gave it
no other choice, it will be because that is the truth. The boundary
line lies there because, while the forces for good on one side vastly
outweigh the bad--it were not well otherwise--in the tenements all
the influences make for evil; because they are the hot-beds of the
epidemics that carry death to rich and poor alike; the nurseries of
pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that throw
off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to the island asylums and
workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last eight years a
round half million beggars to prey upon our charities; that maintain
a standing army of ten thousand tramps with all that that implies;
because, above all, they touch the family life with deadly moral
contagion. This is their worst crime, inseparable from the system. That
we have to own it the child of our own wrong does not excuse it, even
though it gives it claim upon our utmost patience and tenderest charity.
What are you going to do about it? is the question of to-day. It was
asked once of our city in taunting defiance by a band of political
cutthroats, the legitimate outgrowth of life on the tenement-house
level.[1] Law and order found the answer then and prevailed. With our
enormously swelling population held in this galling bondage, will that
answer always be given? It will depend on how fully the situation that
prompted the challenge is grasped. Forty per cent. of the distress
among the poor, said a recent official report, is due to drunkenness.
But the first legislative committee ever appointed to probe this sore
went deeper down and uncovered its roots. The "conclusion forced
itself upon it that certain conditions and associations of human life
and habitation are the prolific parents of corresponding habits and
morals," and it recommended "the prevention of drunkenness by providing
for every man a clean and comfortable home." Years after, a sanitary
inquiry brought to light the fact that "more than one-half of the
tenements with two-thirds of their population were held by owners
who made the keeping of them a business, _generally a speculation_.
The owner was seeking a certain percentage on his outlay, and that
percentage very rarely fell below fifteen per cent., and frequently
exceeded thirty.[2]... The complaint was universal among the tenants
that they were entirely uncared for, and that the only answer to their
requests to have the place put in order by repairs and necessary
improvements was that they must pay their rent or leave. The agent's
instructions were simple but emphatic: 'Collect the rent in advance,
or, failing, eject the occupants.'" Upon such a stock grew this
upas-tree. Small wonder the fruit is bitter. The remedy that shall be
an effective answer to the coming appeal for justice must proceed from
the public conscience. Neither legislation nor charity can cover the
ground. The greed of capital that wrought the evil must itself undo it,
as far as it can now be undone. Homes must be built for the working
masses by those who employ their labor; but tenements must cease to be
"good property" in the old, heartless sense. "Philanthropy and five per
cent." is the penance exacted.
[Footnote 1: Tweed was born and bred in a Fourth Ward tenement.]
[Footnote 2: Forty per cent. was declared by witnesses before a Senate
Committee to be a fair average interest on tenement property. Instances
were given of its being one hundred per cent. and over.]
If this is true from a purely economic point of view, what then of the
outlook from the Christian standpoint? Not long ago a great meeting was
held in this city, of all denominations of religious faith, to discuss
the question how to lay hold of these teeming masses in the tenements
with Christian influences, to which they are now too often strangers.
Might not the conference have found in the warning of one Brooklyn
builder, who has invested his capital on this plan and made it pay more
than a money interest, a hint worth heeding: "How shall the love of
God be understood by those who have been nurtured in sight only of the
greed of man?"
[Illustration: HELL'S KITCHEN AND SEBASTOPOL.]
CHAPTER I.
GENESIS OF THE TENEMENT.
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.
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 has 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 smouldering, 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."
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.
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
_pro rata_ 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.[3] 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 uptown, 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 "one room 12 × 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.
[Footnote 3: It was not until the winter of 1867 that owners of swine
were prohibited by ordinance from letting them run at large in the
built-up portions of the city.]
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.
[Illustration: TENEMENT OF 1863, FOR TWELVE FAMILIES ON EACH FLAT.[4]
D, dark. L, light. H, halls.]
[Footnote 4: This "unventilated and fever-breeding structure" the year
after it was built was picked out by the Council of Hygiene, then just
organized, and presented to the Citizens' Association of New York as a
specimen "multiple domicile" in a desirable street, with the following
comment: "Here are twelve living-rooms and twenty-one bedrooms, and
only six of the latter have any provision or possibility for the
admission of light and air, excepting through the family sitting-
and living-room; being utterly dark, close, and unventilated. The
living-rooms are but 10 × 12 feet; the bedrooms 6½ × 7 feet."]
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 house-room
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."
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[5] 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."
[Footnote 5: "A lot 50 × 60, contained twenty stables, rented for
dwellings at $15 a year each; cost of the whole $600."]
[Illustration]