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
Turning back, we pass a towering double tenement in Ludlow Street,
owned by a well-known Jewish liquor dealer and politician, a triple
combination that bodes ill for his tenants. As a matter of fact, the
cheapest "apartment," three rear rooms on the sixth floor, only one of
which deserves the name, is rented for $13 a month. Here is a reminder
of the Bend, a hallway turned into a shoemaker's shop. Two hallways
side by side in adjoining tenements, would be sinful waste in Jewtown,
when one would do as well by knocking a hole in the wall. But this
shoemaker knows a trick the Italian's ingenuity did not suggest. He has
his "flat" as well as his shop there. A curtain hung back of his stool
in the narrow passage half conceals his bed that fills it entirely from
wall to wall. To get into it he has to crawl over the foot-board, and
he must come out the same way. Expedients more odd than this are born
of the East Side crowding. In one of the houses we left, the coal-bin
of a family on the fourth floor was on the roof of the adjoining
tenement. A quarter of a ton of coal was being dumped there while we
talked with the people.
We have reached Broome Street. The hum of industry in this six-story
tenement on the corner leaves no doubt of the aspect Sunday wears
within it. One flight up, we knock at the nearest door. The grocer,
who keeps the store, lives on the "stoop," the first floor in East
Side parlance. In this room a suspender-maker sleeps and works with his
family of wife and four children. For a wonder there are no boarders.
His wife and eighteen years old daughter share in the work, but the
girl's eyes are giving out from the strain. Three months in the year,
when work is very brisk, the family makes by united efforts as high as
fourteen and fifteen dollars a week. The other nine months it averages
from three to four dollars. The oldest boy, a young man, earns from
four to six dollars in an Orchard Street factory, when he has work.
The rent is ten dollars a month for the room and a miserable little
coop of a bedroom where the old folks sleep. The girl makes her bed
on the lounge in the front room; the big boys and the children sleep
on the floor. Coal at ten cents a small pail, meat at twelve cents a
pound, one and a half pound of butter a week at thirty-six cents, and a
quarter of a pound of tea in the same space of time, are items of their
house-keeping account as given by the daughter. Milk at four and five
cents a quart, "according to quality." The sanitary authorities know
what that means, know how miserably inadequate is the fine of fifty or
a hundred dollars for the murder done in cold blood by the wretches
who poison the babes of these tenements with the stuff that is half
water, or swill. Their defence is that the demand is for "cheap milk."
Scarcely a wonder that this suspender-maker will hardly be able to save
up the _dot_ for his daughter, without which she stands no chance of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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