How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New YorkRiis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
History
How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York
Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
Poor -- New York (State) -- New York; Tenement houses -- New York (State) -- New York
population of tenement districts, please take note.
With the first hot nights in June police despatches, that record the
killing of men and women by rolling off roofs and window-sills while
asleep, announce that the time of greatest suffering among the poor
is at hand. It is in hot weather, when life indoors is well-nigh
unbearable with cooking, sleeping, and working, all crowded into the
small rooms together, that the tenement expands, reckless of all
restraint. Then a strange and picturesque life moves upon the flat
roofs. In the day and early evening mothers air their babies there,
the boys fly their kites from the house-tops, undismayed by police
regulations, and the young men and girls court and pass the growler.
In the stifling July nights, when the big barracks are like fiery
furnaces, their very walls giving out absorbed heat, men and women lie
in restless, sweltering rows, panting for air and sleep. Then every
truck in the street, every crowded fire-escape, becomes a bedroom,
infinitely preferable to any the house affords. A cooling shower on
such a night is hailed as a heaven-sent blessing in a hundred thousand
homes.
[Illustration]
Life in the tenements in July and August spells death to an army of
little ones whom the doctor's skill is powerless to save. When the
white badge of mourning flutters from every second door, sleepless
mothers walk the streets in the gray of the early dawn, trying to stir
a cooling breeze to fan the brow of the sick baby. There is no sadder
sight than this patient devotion striving against fearfully hopeless
odds. Fifty "summer doctors," especially trained to this work, are
then sent into the tenements by the Board of Health, with free advice
and medicine for the poor. Devoted women follow in their track with
care and nursing for the sick. Fresh-air excursions run daily out of
New York on land and water; but despite all efforts the grave-diggers
in Calvary work over-time, and little coffins are stacked mountains
high on the deck of the Charity Commissioners' boat when it makes its
semi-weekly trips to the city cemetery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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