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
From the teeming tenements to the right and left of it come the white
slaves of its dens of vice and their infernal drug, that have infused
into the "Bloody Sixth" Ward a subtler poison than ever the stale-beer
dives knew, or the "sudden death" of the Old Brewery. There are houses,
dozens of them, in Mott and Pell Streets, that are literally jammed,
from the "joint" in the cellar to the attic, with these hapless victims
of a passion which, once acquired, demands the sacrifice of every
instinct of decency to its insatiate desire. There is a church in Mott
Street, at the entrance to Chinatown, that stands as a barrier between
it and the tenements beyond. Its young men have waged unceasing war
upon the monstrous wickedness for years, but with very little real
result. I have in mind a house in Pell Street that has been raided no
end of times by the police, and its population emptied upon Blackwell's
Island, or into the reformatories, yet is to-day honeycombed with
scores of the conventional households of the Chinese quarter: the men
worshippers of Joss; the women, all white, girls hardly yet grown to
womanhood, worshipping nothing save the pipe that has enslaved them
body and soul. Easily tempted from homes that have no claim upon the
name, they rarely or never return. Mott Street gives up its victims
only to the Charity Hospital or the Potter's Field. Of the depth of
their fall no one is more thoroughly aware than these girls themselves;
no one less concerned about it. The calmness with which they discuss
it, while insisting illogically upon the fiction of a marriage that
deceives no one, is disheartening. Their misery is peculiarly fond of
company, and an amount of visiting goes on in these households that
makes it extremely difficult for the stranger to untangle them. I came
across a company of them "hitting the pipe" together, on a tour through
their dens one night with the police captain of the precinct. The girls
knew him, called him by name, offered him a pipe, and chatted with
him about the incidents of their acquaintance, how many times he had
"sent them up," and their chances of "lasting" much longer. There was
no shade of regret in their voices, nothing but utter indifference and
surrender.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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