How the Other Half Lives: Chapter 14 Summary & Analysis

Riis describes another “boundary line” that really defines the Other Half: the line that distinguishes the “flat” from the tenement. Legally these are lumped together—but in reality they’re quite different. First, flats are usually locked, a sign that there is some gesture toward privacy. Below Houston Street there is barely a doorbell to be seen, as well as East of Second Avenue and west of Ninth, and anywhere close to work shops. Gas-houses, slaughter-houses, and docks lead to clusters of tenements, not flats, around them.

Riis adds that, incredibly, many thousands of people do manage to make a living here: wives and mothers are faithful and daughters are innocent even in the worst slums. But these stories are relatively rare, and only serve to show how further many could go if the smallest opportunity were offered to them. He asks readers to enter even “respectable” tenement areas full of hard-working Irish and German immigrants and their descendants, and to learn their way of life, their aims, and ambitions. Then the reader will agree with him that life doesn’t seem “worth living” even there.

Riis then asks his readers to accompany him uptown to the tenement blocks recently built after the last cholera scare: these are set at every which angle, and while there is air here, there is little to see other than rows of board fences and hard brown soil without a single blade of grass. There are no “aesthetic resources” in these tenement houses, only the drab, dreary halls, air shafts, and pumps that characterize what cannot quite be called a home.

Riis says that the Irish have been most vulnerable to the degrading influences of such spaces. The Germans have tried to mitigate these by planting flowers—which, on a tenement block, do the work of many police clubs, Riis argues. The less green there is to be found, the more policemen have to do: the transformation of Tompkins Square from a sand lot into a park got rid of the riots that used to happen there, for instance.

In hot weather, when life indoors is unbearable, the tenement expands outside and onto the roofs, with residents even sleeping up there. July and August are also the months of heightened infant mortality, despite the Board of Health’s work to send “summer doctors” into the tenements and organize fresh-air excursions out of the city. Any epidemic unduly affects the children of the poor, including diseases like the measles that are mere annoyances for the wealthy. It was recently discovered, Riis notes, that the highest tenements have the lowest death rates: this is because these were built in the last decade since sanitary reform, and have followed its laws in everything except overcrowding.

Riis recounts a recent visit to a Mott Street tenement where a child was dying: the “charity doctor” pronounced the cause as improper nutrition, that is, starvation. The father was unable to work as a result of lead poisoning, while the mother and another son were nearly blind from a contagious eye disease. For months, the family had lived on two dollars a week from the priest. The doctor gave directions for treatment, knowing that it would be impossible for them to do more than alleviate the child’s suffering.

While rare cases of starvation cause an uproar in the newspapers, Riis notes that in truth death from starvation is much more common than people know, though also more insidious, taking place over a length of time. Sometimes this happens because of drunkenness or carelessness on the part of the parents; but Riis says that in his experience, the condition of the tenements is far more to blame. Scarcity of water contributes directly to drunkenness among the poor, he says. In addition, when people are struggling each day for the bare necessities of life, nothing encourages them to look far ahead; instead, they do whatever they can to get through each day. Children soon learn to live this way as well.

Riis notes the popular myth that there are more evictions in New York each year than in all of Ireland—in fact, he thinks it would be a good thing to be put out of a tenement. But he does argue that the civil courts are among the few places that uphold tenants’ rights, making it difficult for landlords to kick out tenants.

If the poor live while paying a premium for shoddy services and lodging, Riis says, then they continue such a practice in death. He questions the “habit” of expensive funerals among the tenement-residents, which only adds to debt and poverty. Though such expense is some consolation to relatives, it is mitigated by the undignified burial in the common trench of the City Cemetery’s Poor Burying Ground (or Potter’s Field), “saving space” by being crowded as they were in life.