How the Other Half Lives

How the Other Half Lives (1890).Jacob A. Riis's How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York was illustrated by seventeen halftones of photographs from Riis's extensive collection (now held by the Museum of the City of New York) and twenty‐six drawings, some copied from photographs. The book aimed to awaken Progressive Era, middle‐class readers to the urgent need for tenement house reform and regulation. A Danish immigrant police reporter, Riis was frustrated that his accounts of New York slum life stirred little interest. As he commented in his 1901 autobiography, The Making of an American, “I wrote, but it seemed to make no impression.” Accordingly, Riis in 1888 turned to photography—his own and others’—to show scenes in the tenements, saloons, and sweatshops of lower Manhattan's Mulberry Bend, Jewtown, and Chinatown.

The book originated in illustrated lectures in which Riis used slides to dramatize his stories of appalling conditions endured by the immigrant “hordes” flooding into New York City. Against the contrast of “the other half,” his text forcefully affirmed the worth of middle‐class identity and values in new urban circumstances, proposing ultimately no more than that wealthy citizens invest in tenements as a form of philanthropy.

Generally favorably reviewed, the book sold well, remained in print until 1947, and was subsequently republished several times. Although poorly reproduced in early editions, Riis's innovative photographic work was a key to the book's success. It marked the inception of a distinctive American social documentary tradition that continued through the 1930s. In both word and image, How the Other Half Lives initiated ideological perspectives and representational strategies that remained current in social thought and public sentiment for much of the twentieth century.
See also Gilded Age; Immigration; Philanthropy and Philanthropic Foundations; Slums; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Jacob A. Riis , How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, ed. David Leviatin, 1996.

Maren Stange