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
Enough of them everywhere. Suppose we look into one? No. -- Cherry
Street. Be a little careful, please! The hall is dark and you might
stumble over the children pitching pennies back there. Not that it
would hurt them; kicks and cuffs are their daily diet. They have little
else. Here where the hall turns and dives into utter darkness is a
step, and another, another. A flight of stairs. You can feel your way,
if you cannot see it. Close? Yes! What would you have? All the fresh
air that ever enters these stairs comes from the hall-door that is
forever slamming, and from the windows of dark bedrooms that in turn
receive from the stairs their sole supply of the elements God meant to
be free, but man deals out with such niggardly hand. That was a woman
filling her pail by the hydrant you just bumped against. The sinks
are in the hallway, that all the tenants may have access--and all be
poisoned alike by their summer stenches. Hear the pump squeak! It is
the lullaby of tenement-house babes. In summer, when a thousand thirsty
throats pant for a cooling drink in this block, it is worked in vain.
But the saloon, whose open door you passed in the hall, is always
there. The smell of it has followed you up. Here is a door. Listen!
That short hacking cough, that tiny, helpless wail--what do they mean?
They mean that the soiled bow of white you saw on the door downstairs
will have another story to tell--Oh! a sadly familiar story--before
the day is at an end. The child is dying with measles. With half a
chance it might have lived; but it had none. That dark bedroom killed
it.
"It was took all of a suddint," says the mother, smoothing the
throbbing little body with trembling hands. There is no unkindness in
the rough voice of the man in the jumper, who sits by the window grimly
smoking a clay pipe, with the little life ebbing out in his sight,
bitter as his words sound: "Hush, Mary! If we cannot keep the baby,
need we complain--such as we?"
[Illustration: AN OLD REAR-TENEMENT IN ROOSEVELT STREET.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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