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
The Irishman is the true cosmopolitan immigrant. All-pervading, he
shares his lodging with perfect impartiality with the Italian, the
Greek, and the "Dutchman," yielding only to sheer force of numbers,
and objects equally to them all. A map of the city, colored to
designate nationalities, would show more stripes than on the skin of
a zebra, and more colors than any rainbow. The city on such a map
would fall into two great halves, green for the Irish prevailing in
the West Side tenement districts, and blue for the Germans on the
East Side. But intermingled with these ground colors would be an
odd variety of tints that would give the whole the appearance of an
extraordinary crazy-quilt. From down in the Sixth Ward, upon the site
of the old Collect Pond that in the days of the fathers drained the
hills which are no more, the red of the Italian would be seen forcing
its way northward along the line of Mulberry Street to the quarter of
the French purple on Bleecker Street and South Fifth Avenue, to lose
itself and reappear, after a lapse of miles, in the "Little Italy" of
Harlem, east of Second Avenue. Dashes of red, sharply defined, would
be seen strung through the Annexed District, northward to the city
line. On the West Side the red would be seen overrunning the old Africa
of Thompson Street, pushing the black of the negro rapidly uptown,
against querulous but unavailing protests, occupying his home, his
church, his trade and all, with merciless impartiality. There is a
church in Mulberry Street that has stood for two generations as a sort
of milestone of these migrations. Built originally for the worship of
staid New Yorkers of the "old stock," it was engulfed by the colored
tide, when the draft-riots drove the negroes out of reach of Cherry
Street and the Five Points. Within the past decade the advance wave
of the Italian onset reached it, and to-day the arms of United Italy
adorn its front. The negroes have made a stand at several points along
Seventh and Eighth Avenues; but their main body, still pursued by the
Italian foe, is on the march yet, and the black mark will be found
overshadowing to-day many blocks on the East Side, with One Hundredth
Street as the centre, where colonies of them have settled recently.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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