Analysis Of The Novel ' City Of Orphans '

These “newcomers” did not deserve to come here and steal their jobs. Mike Trudic’s account from his childhood referred to his father’s hunt in America to desperately find work, “At the end of a week he was taken ill and died. It said he died of a broken heart”(Mike, 188). There were just too many workers and not enough jobs to be filled. Another first hand source provided by Rose Cohen, called Out of the Shadow, depicts the story of a jewish girl in New York and the experiences her family goes through in order to reach a sustainable lifestyle. The struggles included descriptions of harsh working conditions and anti-semitism, which created difficulty for immigrants who were trying to assimilate into the American culture.

Riis covers many aspects of the poverty that has stricken the tenement lodgers but when talking about one end of the spectrum (poor) you also need to discuss the other (rich). With out telling people how the other half of the other half lives he’s leaving out a crucial part of how people live in New York. By avoiding, that topic he’s giving the illusion that all people in New York live in such cramped housing as tenements. When in reality New York was and is presently not composed of strictly tenement housing. There was a ‘rich’ part of town where the thought of not having any money was never even contemplated. In addition, where the industrial revolution only touched higher societies on positive outcomes such as economics the industrial revolution only made it harder for the immigrants to get ahead. By this, meaning, that they worked harder, got paid little to nothing, and still had to compensate for the short comings that where being pressed against them because they were in fact immigrants.

In How the Other Half Lives, the author Jacob Riis sheds light on the darker side of tenant housing and urban dwellers. He goes to several different parts of the city of New York witnessing first hand the hardships that many immigrants faced when coming to America. His journalism and photographs of the conditions of the tenant housing helped led the way of reformation in the slums of New York. His research opened the eyes of many Americans to the darker side of the nation's lower class. Though it seems that he blamed both the victims and the board forces of society, I believe that he placed more of the blame on the board forces for the conditions that many immigrants faced.

Jersey Street is now gone and it was where Italians lived in the the worst slums. The floor is uneven, the buildings are broken and there are pieces of wood all over the place. What seems to be a family in this picture, shows that everyone is in the low class because of the condition they are living in and also the formal type of clothes they are wearing. Continuing with tenements, A tenement House commissioner, Robert W. de Forest wrote a letter to the Mayor of New York addressing that, “the Tenement House Department is an entirely new department, and as a large part of its work during these eighteen months had been that of organization, I have deemed it due to the city’s interest… to set forth fully the organization of the department and some of the chief reasons for the form which has been given to it.” This was in the “First Report of the Tenement House Department of the city of New York” and this report points out that the tenements weren’t in good condition. “Tenement conditions in many instances have been found to be so bad as to be indescribable in print; vile privies and privy sinks; foul cellars full of rubbish, in many cases of garbage and decomposing fecal matter; dilapidated and dangerous stairs; plumbing pipes containing large holes emitting sewer gas throughout the houses; room so dark that one cannot see the

Many of the families in Kozol’s book live in central Manhattan in drug-infested buildings, falling apart from the brick in, whereas in earlier periods of New York’s history were fine hotels. One of such buildings is the Martinique Hotel, where Kozol afforded much of his time to the families that dwelled there, as referenced in his book. Those who inhabit the Martinique Hotel are symbolically affected by New York’s renown valor in their conscious, further placing them in the class as “less-fortunate” within a city that does not afford them many opportunities. Many homeless neighborhoods find themselves victim to substandard medical and education facilities. The families, as Kozol describes were shipped by the masses to communities that already suffer from the city’s highest rates of HIV, drug addiction, pediatric asthma and psychiatric illness (Kozol 11). There is the idea, as Kozol says, that the homes that these families find themselves in are “closed systems”, “where rules of normal law and normal governance did not apply” (Kozol 8), whereas the people are detached from the rest of society, confined to the community all in itself. The families he works with are sectioned off by society because they live in poor areas and confined within a capitalistic economy, have nowhere to go. In a way, Kozol describes these areas as the capital of homeless people, surrounded by a city built for the wealthy, by

Throughout the story, Lost in the City by Edwards P. Jones there are many different ways the city influences the different characters. Lost in the City takes the reader through some difficult times of many African Americans in Washington. The different characters form bond that cannot be broken in order to handle what life throws at them. In the stories "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons" and "The First Day" the city influences the different main characters in different ways, to help them come of age.

This book described the horrifying conditions in the stockyards and meatpacking industry. The story depicts a young man and woman who have recently immigrated to Chicago from Lithuania. They have a wedding feast at a bar in Packingown. The couple and some of their relatives go to Chicago for a better life but Packingtown, the center of the city’s meatpacking industry, is dangerous, filthy, and hard. It was also difficult to find a job. The couple become a hundred dollars in debt to the saloonkeeper and Jurgis has faith in the American dream that he could just work harder to make more money. They go through struggles with hard laboring jobs such as digging freight tunnels (which resulting in him going to the hospital), getting arrested because of attacking a man for not giving him correct change, he starts to commit crimes such as burglaries and soon gets recruited to work for a corrupt political boss. His spirit soon gets crushed by misery and wanders into a socialist political rally which fills Jurgis with inspiration through a speech. He finds a job as a porter at a socialist run hotel and later reunites with wife. This story is filled with signs of corruption and immorality. A big symbol in this story was the animals and slaughterhouses of Packingtown which represent the working class. Just like the animals were killed with impunity, made to suffer and had no choice about their fate, so were thousands of immigrant workers who lived in poverty. They were forced into capitalism. Waves of animals pass through Packingtown, just as the generations of immigrants continue to eventually be replaced by a new

When it was published in 1890, the novel How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis astonished the middle and upper class Americans. Riis revealed to the world the horrific living conditions of New York City’s tenement housing. He did this by the use of graphic photographs (that he himself took) and detailed written descriptions which are all first-hand accounts, as he was a witness to whatever he wrote. After reading the novel one might question how are the poor subjected to such harsh living conditions and also how the environment affects them. Riis reveals the hardships each ethnic group faces as he investigates each tenement to draw out some kind of solution. In doing so, many of his fears and prejudices are revealed as well.

In Riis’ novel “How the other half lives”, Riis intends to expose the harsh conditions that the families of New York were being housed in. While doing so, he rights all of what he finds in his journal. Riis first fills in some informational background about the history of New York tenements, which once belonged to some of the city’s most luxurious families. As industrialization increased over the course of the nineteenth century, the rising rates of immigration of both rural and urban areas that ensued caused these families to move out of the city all of which occured in the 1890’s . The buildings’ owners then began to subdivide them into windowless apartments for the new arrivals streaming in. Riis describes these tenements as increasingly

1. In New York, a group of Hatians live in a building and a hole in the wall is their door. The sqautters have dirty clothes and smoke crack. All of them truly beileve that they are all extended family. They all came to America because they thought it would be so easy to get a job and start making money.

Poor and middle class society occupied 3-4 storey, rundown apartments called insulae, which had extremely close living quarters and were unsafe due to their unsanitary conditions and haphazard construction. Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis, known to us as “Juvenal”, was a satirical poet who eloquently described the life in an insula as follows: “We live in a city supported mostly by slender props, which is how the bailiff patches cracks in old walls, telling the resident to sleep peacefully under roofs ready to fall down around them”. (Bird, 2016)

The London slums grew out of the rising population in urban areas. Individuals working extended hours in Victorian times had to live close to their employment. Fully taking advantage of the fact, available housing became scarce and highly priced. Residents of the slums would sometimes rent their rooms for 2 pence to 4 pence a day to other laborers to be able to afford it. They were often unsanitary, overcrowded and neglected. Not much has changed however, projects all over the world continued to be disregarded. The late nineteenth century found an unfortunate attraction to the economic, social and cultural deprivation of slum by various groups of the middle and upper classes (Diniejko, 2013). Missionaries, social investigators, writers, and simply wealthy people would visit the neighborhoods of the poorest citizens seeking scandalous entertainments. The New York Times published an article about this practice dubbed slumming which spread from London to New York,

Darkness...Hurt...Pain...Suffering...Sickness... These things all come to mind when one thinks of a Squatters camp. People from all walks of life, gathered in this wretched place because they have nowhere else to go. The sun rises over the meadow to reveal temporary homes made from mud, cardboard, blankets, and anything else that the owners could find. Out of one establishment, a mud hill with cardboard walls and a blanket roof, steps a man. Jonathan Hillsdale is his name, and he has lived in this camp for a year, but in a situation this bad, must've felt like an eternity. As he pushes away the blanket, a small glimpse of his world can be seen. He had four daughters: Lucy, Susan, Mary, and April. Disease has spread quickly all throughout the camp, and the children, the most innocent and hopeful of them all, felt it the most. Jonathan Hillsdale's crying could be heard at night, tears dripping down his face. He had no job, no food, and it seemed every other week one less daughter. Nobody could do anything about it. These were hard times for everyone, and with conditions so poor, there was no light at the end of the tunnel. Those who are more fortunate sleep on mattresses, or have a radio. There were very few of people that lucky. To be lucky is to survive, and in a time of such hardship many people were struggling to just do that.

Living in public housing wasn't the best thing in the world. The projects in New York would have poor living conditions like the elevators smelled like weed and people would have gotten stuck on the elevator. You have to push the emergency 911 button and the firefighters will come. The stairs are really dirty and filled with pee, it also smelled like weed. One time i actually saw do-do on the stairs from a human. The delivery people would get robbed all the time and at times stabbed or killed. You would hear police sirens every single day and most of the time they were in the building. My dad had gotten robbed before and my brother got shot. Gang members all hanged out downstairs in front of the building, they sold drugs

In the early 1900s, housing was much different, and far poorer in quality than today. For poorer immigrants in particular, good and affordable housing was difficult to come by. Proving this is a series of photographs by Jacob Riis entitled “How The Other Half Lived”. The photographs show just how poor the housing situation was for most families at that time. Usually the cheapest option for an immigrant family was to rent a tenement or apartment in the city and share it with another family. This meant that most homes were small and crowded. In addition, the lack of sanitation standards meant that filth and disease were quick to spread, especially in big cities such as New York and Philadelphia. These big cities also lacked proper fire departments, meaning that fire was quick to spread between the wooden buildings making up most cities at that time.