How the Other Half Lives

Riis traces the history of the New York tenement house to the city’s trade and immigration boom following the War of 1812. The partitioning of large rooms into smaller ones for the purpose of maximizing rent brought the “dark bedroom” and its “untold depravities” into existence. Indeed, in this chapter and throughout the book, Riis makes frequent references to the scarcity of light and fresh air in the tenement houses (8). Landlords built “rear houses” behind the main building and accessible only through dark alleys. Overcrowding led to cholera outbreaks and large death tolls, particularly on the East Side, which is “still the most densely populated district in the world” (10). Riis shares three recent examples of tenement-house tragedies, and he connects these to the broader history of tenements. This first chapter features no photographs, but it does include an 1863 architectural sketch of a 12-family tenement. In the sketch, Riis identifies poorly-lit rooms with the letter “D” for dark and the well-lit rooms with the letter “L” for light. The dark rooms outnumber the light rooms, 19-12.

The “awakening” began with the creation of the Board of Health and the First Tenement-House Act in 1867. Early reforms focused on improving natural light and ventilation. Riis blames greedy landlords for their opposition to improvements, but he also cites as obstacles “the tenants themselves, who had sunk, after a generation of unavailing protest, to the level of their surroundings, and were at last content to remain there” (15). Riis quotes an 1879 official report to show that after 12 years things had scarcely improved. Sanitary conditions are somewhat better, but the Board of Health has been powerless to reverse the overcrowding. Riis provides the legal definition of a tenement as “a house ‘occupied by three or more families, living independently and doing their cooking on the premises’” (17) and includes two side-by-side architectural sketches, “Tenement of the Old Style” and “Birth of the Air Shaft,” which together illustrate that one of the law’s modest reforms has done nothing to alleviate the core problem of too many people living in tight spaces under unacceptable conditions. Riis notes that inspectors found 180 children crammed into a pair of Crosby Street tenements. He concludes by warning New York’s well-to-do inhabitants of the violence that might ensue from the continued neglect of the tenements and the people who inhabit them.