How the Other Half Lives

In 1890, Jacob Riis opened his book with a quotation from Rabelais: “one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.” It was a confession and a challenge. Riis then described the New York City tenement as a “poison” spreading through the city, and introduced his radical approach—a new kind of photojournalism that would make the unseen finally visible. The book included more than forty visual supplements, nearly all photographs, and pioneered the use of flash photography to capture the interiors of tenement buildings that had never been documented before. What Riis was about to show his readers was not just a problem. It was a system of greed, despair, and hidden suffering that had been allowed to fester for generations.

The problem began simply enough. After the War of 1812, New York City experienced a surge in trade and immigration. Landlords saw an opportunity. Instead of building decent housing for the arriving workers, they partitioned large rooms into smaller ones to maximize rent. This created the “dark bedroom”—a room with no windows, no light, no fresh air. They built “rear houses” behind the main buildings, accessible only through narrow, garbage-filled alleys. The result was a housing system designed by greed, not necessity. Cholera outbreaks followed, and the death toll on the East Side became staggering. Riis traced this history not as an abstract lesson but as a forensic investigation: the tenement’s physical design itself was the crime scene.

Reform efforts arrived, but they were too little and too late. The Board of Health was created in 1866, and the Tenement-House Act of 1867 set basic requirements for light and ventilation. Yet after twelve years of these reforms, an official report showed that conditions had scarcely improved. Inspectors found 180 children crammed into a pair of Crosby Street tenements. The laws had focused on air shafts and windows, but they had failed to address the core problem: overcrowding driven by landlord greed. Riis blamed not just the landlords but also the tenants themselves, who had sunk to the level of their surroundings after a generation of hopelessness. The “awakening” had been a false lead. The real culprit—scale and apathy—remained at large.

Riis then took his readers on a tour. It was not a pleasant one. He walked through downtown Manhattan’s back alleys, describing claustrophobic spaces where light barely reached and garbage piled up. In one narrow passageway known as Bottle Alley, a recent inspection found 47 families living in a single building with only two toilets, both broken. The death rate in nearby Gotham Court during a cholera epidemic was 195 per 1,000. Riis described a fire on Madison Street that killed 10 women and children who could not reach the fire escapes. He concluded the tour with the story of a mother of six who, in despair, threw herself out of a tenement window. The emotion was devastating, but Riis’s purpose was clear: this was not an abstract problem. It was happening to real people, and the cost was measured in lives.

To heighten the sense of alarm, Riis turned to the ethnic composition of the tenement communities. He created an imaginary color-coded map of the city: Italian red, Jewish gray, Chinese yellow. He described the “Pig-market” in Jewtown on Thursday nights, where everything but pork was sold, and where health officials regularly raided to confiscate rotten food. He reserved his harshest words for Chinese immigrants, calling them “unassimilable” and a “menace to society.” Modern readers will find this language uncomfortable, and it should be understood as an artifact of its era. But Riis’s strategy was deliberate: he weaponized the racial prejudices of his audience to make them see the tenement problem as urgent and dangerous to the social order itself.

The economics of exploitation became even clearer when Riis accompanied police on a raid of illegal stale-beer dives in the Mulberry Bend. Officers arrested 275 “tramps” that night. But the real story was not the raid—it was the business behind it. Riis described a seven-cent lodging house on Pell Street, where a photograph showed no beds at all, only cots of thin fabric hung between boards. The owner of three such houses cleared $8,000 a year—over $250,000 in today’s money. This was not poverty. This was profit extracted from human misery. Riis distinguished between the “honest poor,” who worked for starvation wages, and the “tramps” who believed the world owed them a living. But even the tramps, he argued, were products of a system that offered no alternatives.

The worst exploitation happened inside the tenements themselves. In “Jewtown,” Riis found the “sweater” system of sweatshops. “Sweaters” paid laborers—many of whom spoke little English—starvation wages to make clothing. Both the sweaters and the laborers were Jewish, and the system was fueled by a constant stream of new immigrants fleeing persecution in Europe. Riis visited a Ludlow Street tenement and found six laborers, including two teenage boys, sitting around tables making “knee-pants” for 45 cents a dozen. The adjacent tenement was only a few feet away. On Hester Street, cloak-makers worked from 6:00am to 11:00pm. Riis warned that these exploited laborers would “recruit the ranks of the anarchists.” The threat of social revolution was not abstract—it was being forged in these dark rooms.

Then came the children. Riis counted 128 children in a single Bayard Street tenement before giving up. In the last 20 years, 25,000 infants had been abandoned, and the mortality rate for those found on the streets was close to 90%. Yet Riis argued that even the “tough” boys—the ones who seemed savage and unreachable—were products of their surroundings. He proposed a simple experiment: take a handful of flowers into a tenement block and watch the brightened faces. The children were redeemable. The system was not.

Despair bred vice. The saloons were the only bright and cheery spots in the tenements, but they were “omens of evil.” Over 40% of the city’s saloons were located in tenement districts. Riis followed a young child into a bar after 1:00am and personally forbade the barkeeper from serving him. The barkeeper was indignant. From the saloons came the street gangs—the “ripe fruit of tenement-house growth.” In Poverty Gap, the Alley Gang murdered a young boy for the crime of trying to earn an honest living. One of every eight people arrested in New York City was under 20. The chain was clear: the tenement led to despair, despair led to the saloon, the saloon led to the gang, and the gang led to murder.

But Riis did not end with despair. He ended with a solution—and it was not charity. It was business. He called it the “gospel of justice”: philanthropy combined with a 5 to 6 percent return on investment. He cited Miss Ellen Collins, who owned three old tenements. She remodeled them to let in light, adopted a policy of fair play between tenant and landlord, and realized a consistent 5.5% annual profit. The model tenement, Riis argued, could be made to pay—if the owner would be content with a reasonable return. The alternative was violence. The tenement population had more than doubled in a generation, to over a million people. Riis warned that if landlords did not act, the only choice would be between justice and violence. The gospel of five percent was not just moral. It was practical. And it was urgent.