Jacob Riis How The Other Half Lives Summary

"When once I asked the agent of a notorious Forth Ward alley how many people might be living in it I was told: One hundred and forty families, one hundred Irish, thirty-eight Italians, and two the spoke the German tongue(How the Other Half Lives,p.3). There was not one native born american in the court, or in any of the tenements. The irish were the true cosmopolitan immigrant. All-pervadin, he shares his lodging with perfect impartiality with the Italian, the Greek, and the "Dutchman," yielding on to sheer for of numbers, and objects equally to them all. The city maps were colorized for each nationality, if you were to look at a map at that time, Irish were mostly on the West Side and the Germans were mostly on the East Side. Mixed in where Italian, who pushed there way up, where "Little Italy" came to be. The less aggressive, the Russian and Polish Jew, are filling the tenements of the old Seventh Ward to the river front, while disputing with the Italians, over every foot of avaibility on Mulberry St. "The italian and the poor Jew rise only by compulsion. The Chinaman does not rise at all; here, as at home, he simply remains stationary. The Irishman's genius runs to public affairs rather than domestic life; wherever he is mustered in force the saloon is the gorgeous centre of political activity(How the Other half lives,p.25)." The germans

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.

Jacob Riis’ book How the Other Half Lives is a detailed description on the poor and the destitute in the inner realms of New York City. Riis tries to portray the living conditions through the ‘eyes’ of his camera. He sneaks up on the people flashes a picture and then tells the rest of the city how the ‘other half’ is living. As shocking as the truth was without seeing such poverty and horrible conditions with their own eyes or taking in the experience with all their senses it still seemed like a million miles away or even just a fairy tale.

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.

The portrayal of Jacob Riis’ views through his book ‘How the Other Half Lives,’ is conveyed by storytelling and is largely made of logos, however the key component is actually ethos, like a politician running a campaign, Jacob Riis’s uses logos and pathos to create a persona of authority on the topic of the poor in New York City. I am going to look in depth on how Riis uses different approaches to convey his views to his audience: why does do some of Riis’ key texts contradict each other? Is he conscious of if? Is it brilliant?

Upon reading the first few sentences of the paragraph, one can easily assume E. B. White has inhabited New York once before. His capability in drawing three New Yorks established his familiarity with the city and its various versions. This is implied when he states, “There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts for its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter--the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something” (White). Coming from the perspective of the author, it adds an authentic value to his words and description of the types of people who live in New York. The individuals who exist in each of the version contribute to New York’s remarkable essence

Riis wrote about different ethnic groups when he was living in New York. He wrote about greedy Jews, drunken Irish, and sloppy Italians. Riis also wrote with Christian morality. He blamed the faults of the above mentioned people on the poor living conditions that they were in. Like any other photographer or author, Riis’s motive must be figured out. It was already clear that he wanted change for the slums but in his pictures, the authors of the passage describe some pictures having Riis’s Christian morality in play. Riis highlights the needs for stable, wholesome families. The picture of page 191 is an example of a non-wholesome family. The home is supposed to be a resting place but factory work made its way into the home, making the entire family work. Photos like these were examples of Riis’s motives behind his photos. The photo on page 193 called “Room in a tenement flat” showed a family portrait. The room that they were in was very crammed and Riis again shows a family in poor living conditions. Riis also photographed many children, like the ones in “street arabs” on page 195. The photo is heart wrenching and captivates any viewer because of the pitiful place they had to sleep in.

Matthew Lees’ “How many of the Bronx’ dreams?” is different from James McBride's “The city of Gods” because Lee discusses the lost dreams of Bronx’ New York while Mcbride focuses on the racial realities of America. In contrast, Lee discusses the dreams of people in Bronx’ New York “...Bronx’ dreams/...moved from the shadows/ how many of the Bronx’ dreams were even said out loud” (Lee 1). Lee begins by lamenting the number of lost dreams in Bronx’ New York. Lees purpose of persuading readers that Bronx’ New York is a lost city is supported through his diction and tone, by using the word “shadows”, an image of darkness that people feel. This darkness then gives the reader the feeling of hopelessness that the people feel, proving that many of

According to Document 1, Jacob Riis’, “How the Other Half Lives” was a book showing the conditions of the people living in tenements, and showed how the people there didn’t have proper air, and all of it was polluted because of the overcrowding of the small apartments they had to live in. The rooms were also really dark due to the lack of windows, and also

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

New York City’s population is a little over 8.3 million people. 8.3 million people are spread out among five boroughs and each have their own set routine. Each one of those 8.3 million see New York in a different way becuase “You start building your private New York the first time you lay eyes on it” (“City Limits” 4). Some people are like Colson Whitehead who “was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else” (“City Limits” 3). Others may have “moved here a couple years ago for a job. Maybe [they] came here for school” (“City Limits” 3). Different reasons have brought these people together. They are grouped as New Yorkers, but many times, living in New York is their only bond. With on going changes and never ending commotion, it is hard to

How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890) was an early publication of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting 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 classes. This work inspired many reforms of working-class housing, both immediately after publication as well as making a lasting impact in today's society. Vivid imagery and complex syntax establish a sympathetic tone which Riis uses to expose poverty to the general public and calls upon them to take action and make a difference.

As Anderson does a walking tour of Philadelphia, he sees the very divergent aspects of the city by observing the people, places and tension around him. Walking the readers through a very poor area of the city, to Center City and through an upper-middle-class area, he attempys to answer the question of how race is lived and considered in Philadelphia. Although he is most interested in the Cosmopolitan Canopies of the city, he shows that there are parts of the city that are not as diverse including the poor sections and upper-middle-class

In the reading, Jacob Riis described how most magazine editors had no interest in how the other half lived. A reasoning for this could be because the editors didn't want the New York to seem unattractive to future residents, or they simply found the idea uninteresting because no one would really care about how the other half lives, especially Social Darwinists. Real estate owners would not have responded well to Riis's pictures and descriptions of the conditions in the city. First of all, it would bring down property value for the buildings, and second of all, it would make it very unappealing for other people to live there. It wouldn't be surprising if the estate owners were very unhappy after Riis wrote his article under the title "How the Other Half Lives" in the Christmas Scribner's, 1889.

“It got to be easy to look at New Yorkers as animals, especially looking down from some place like a balcony at Grand Central at the rush hour Friday afternoon.” (Tom Wolfe). “O Rotten Gotham” argues that New Yorkers are in a state of behavioral sink. It would not be long before a “population collapse” or a “massive die off”.