Jacob Riis How The Other Half Lives Summary

Jacob Riis in “How the Other Half Lives” is about the squalor that characterizes New York City’s working class immigrant neighborhoods. He describes deplorable conditions of these immigrants by providing specific examples, relaying them through quotation and images alike. Riis comments on the injustices that the residents of the tenements faced on a regular basis. So, with his attention to detail, Riis provided the contemporary reader with unsettling images of the poor and marginalized along with a few examples of the benefits of reform and reorganization in the poorer communities, to the benefit of residents. Another observer, Richard T. Ely, in “Pullman: A Social Study” writes about the community of Pullman, Illinois located in the suburbs of Chicago. Pullman is seen as a success in that it is a solid example of the benefits of progressive city planning and sanitation in an industrialized urban America where shoddy tenement housing and lack of

He talks of the future stating, “The day is not far distant when the greatest of all evils that now curses life in the tenements—the dearth of water in hot summer days—will have also been remedied.” Riis’s mention of the fact that many of the working class have no water when it is most needed likely provided the contemporary reader with a sense of urgency to ensure things such as the running water for all working class New Yorkers, and would be in itself “a long step taken toward the moral and physical redemption of the tenants” (Riis 660). For a comparison, this “long step” seems to have been taken by President of Pullman Palace Car Company, George M. Pullman, and his belief in the “commercial value of beauty” in the description provided by Richard T. Ely in “Pullman: A Social