Introduction to the Tenements

How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis enlightened the higher class citizens on the standard of living that the other half, or more like the other three quarters, of the city lived in. Riis' work was evolutionary due to his inccorporation of photography to support and bring more life to his journalistic writing style. People can disregard words and stories as false exaggerations of the truth, but "if half the country tried to ignore how the other half lived, let them ignore photographs" such as Riis produced for his tale (vii). His first publishings couldn't reprint the pictures he wanted to include, detracting from the reality of the stories which the pictures tell. A drawing, no matter the ability of the artist, will be biased, unable to portray the exact unsanitary, filthy, and wretched living quarters which the people lived in. To get a better sense of the mess which the people of the time lived in, I thought I would compare my dorm room at it's worse to the best of the tenements in order to help myself realize how far the nation has come in terms of living quarters.

My dorm room at it's best:

Compared to average tenement housing:

The first obvious difference between these two photographs is the incorporation of color. True, color film had yet to be invented seeing as the first black and white photograph had only made its newspaper debut in 1873 compared to the publishing of Riis' book in 1890 (vii). However, even if the photograph of the tenement housing had been in color, I doubt the bed sheet would have been a magenta and orange combination, and had there been posters on the wall, they most definitely would have been a poster advocating for vacation and an endless summer.

Dorm life is the first experience I have ever had sharing my sleeping area with another person; at home everyone has their own bedroom with a spare one for guests. In tenement housing, not only are the residents sharing their entire sleeping area with their entire family, but their sleeping space is also their kitchen, their living room and their dining room and their bathroom is the alleyway in the back of their housing building. I can adjust the amount of light which enters the room with the tug of a shade, but in tenement housing "large rooms were partitioned into several smaller ones, without regard to light or ventilation" (5). The people lived in a world of darkness both physically in the dreary depths of their tenement home and mentally in the ignorance of their lack of resources to receive an education. Here my roommate and I are at Stonehill paying around fifteen thousand dollars to room at the school in addition to the rooms we have at home, and the people of the tenements were struggling to provide five cents to afford the space which they called home.

The next thing which caught my eye in comparison of the two photographs was the difference in the messes of my side of the dorm room and the messes found in and around the tenement housing. My mess consists of sweatshirts, books and other articles of clothes I accumulate on my floor during a busy school week. People of the tenement have no such commodities to make any disarray with. Their messes consist of people's garbage strewn about the streets (3), the rubble of old buildings and decaying homes (7), and the dirt which the people wear on their clothes and faces with no means to wash it off (35), symbolizing their poverty status in the city.

A last differing feature between the two rooms is the idea of sanitation and safety. My laundry basket holds my disgusting sweaty clothes which I have worn once and must wash before I wear them again. I don't even know if the tenants even did laundry, let alone how many times they wore an outfit before they deemed it too dirty to go out in public with. However, with dirt as a common accessory, virtually anything would look fashionable at the Five Points. A couple weeks ago there were about ten people in my hallway who got a cold and spread the germs due to the closeness of the living quarters. Everyone took some NyQuil and recovered in a week. In the tenement housing, someone might get cholera and pass it on to others due to close living quarters. One of the children from each family might die, and everyone would hope that they wouldn't get it. If you open my dorm door, directly to the right is the fire exit, which sets off an alarm if anyone pushes it open. In the tenement housing, while trying to rescue residents of a building "the firemen had to look twice before they could find the opening that passes for a thoroughfare; a stout man would never venture in" (36). The owners were more interested in the profits of the business than the safety of those who provided their income. Luckily for me, Stonehill College is more concerned with my safety than the amount of occupants they can place in O'hara Hall.

The question I still have about the tenement housing is how was this problem fixed? I know that reforms were taken to improve specific aspects such as lighting and sanitation, but hos was tenement housing eliminated and better lives established for the majority of the citizens of New York City?