How the Other Half Lives: Chapter 19 Summary & Analysis

Riis continues discussing the influence of the “growler,” which can easily accompany a child through life. There are few other options for play and leisure for children of the tenements. Instead, they fall in to the life of gangs, another New York institution, made up of the American-born sons of immigrants. Gangs, too, reflect the conditions of the tenements that formed them.

Riis characterizes the purpose of the gangs as one of bravado and robbery. In one week last spring, six murder-assaults were recorded by the newspapers in the streets—and Riis imagines that the police probably suppressed more stories. Gang violence usually breaks out in sporadic pockets, rising up first in one neighborhood, then in another.

Riis describes the typical gang member as cowardly rather than fierce, only able to hunt in a pack. Eager to drink and curse, he is as likely to attack a policeman as to try to save a drowning child or woman. Riis acknowledges that his degradation might well have been turned to nobleness if he had been raised in different conditions. Riis describes one famous New York tough, McGloin, who murdered an unarmed saloonkeeper one night, but then refused to run for it and instead was arrested and sent to the gallows.

Riis once tried to photograph a group of young gang members passing the growler around after some kind of raid. “Toughs” love to pose for pictures, he says, and they soon were staging the photographs themselves. Not long after he took the photos, he called at the police station and found a few of the boys under arrest for robbing a Jewish peddler just after Riis had left them. Not far from their haunts, a young boy was recently beaten to death by the “Alley Gang”; Riis found some members of the gang asleep the next morning in same row of rear tenements home to the murdered boy. The other residents seemed terrified of the young boys. In other neighborhoods, though, all the residents collude in the gangs’ crimes and help them avoid the police. As a result, the police leave them alone, unless they come within swinging distance and can hit them with their clubs.

Riis has heard of one “Murderers’ Alley” that had become a well-trodden lair for gangs. The Board of Health suggested that the owner build a brick wall so that it would be impossible to reach the small passage from the streets; in a few months, the entire character of the tenement house changed.

This area was also the home of Whyo Gang, finally disbanded a few years ago when its leader was caught and hanged for murder; but other gangs have sprung up in its place. Inspector Byrnes has told Riis that the younger members are tougher and cleverer than the more seasoned criminals. Indeed, over 10,000 of the more than 82,000 people arrested in 1889 were under 20 years old.

Riis lists the names of some of the most well-known groups, including the Rock Gang, the Rag Gang, and the Stable Gang. They hide along the streets late at night, rarely bothering the quiet, dutiful worker but instead pouncing on the tipsy or otherwise vulnerable. They keep up the pretense of belonging to a social “club” in order to blackmail local politicians or storekeepers during their annual “thieves’ ball.” They ask for “voluntary” contributions for this affair, though under threat of a late-night visit from the gang if no contribution is forthcoming.

Eventually, thieves usually do end up being caught, the most serious among them hanged. Only a few manage to be reformed; the rest return to their old ways after prison. There’s only one silver lining that Riis can find in this situation: he and others have learned that any anti-gang initiative must start with the economic conditions that gave rise to such groups.