Riis How The Other Half Lives

In Riis’s novel, How the Other Half Lives, Riis illustrated the lifestyles of the poor underprivileged citizens, and immigrants living in New York. Riis used techniques such as hard facts, photographs, and specific evidence to achieve his overall goal to show the reader how “the other half lives”. During the nineteenth century, immigrants and impoverished families primarily lived in tenements. Tenements were originally decorous houses that evolved to overpopulated houses, and finally to tenement-factories. Not only did poverty increase as more immigrants migrated to New York, but various problems also appeared. Throughout the novel, Riis identified numerous problems such as saloons, children on the streets and corrupt landowners along with

The first problem that Riis identified was the saloons. Saloons provided alcohol, especially rum, to people and immigrants that primarily lived in tenements. Immigrants, children, and people that lived in tenements would constantly go to the saloons to get drunk. The saloons persuaded the workingman to drink and thus relieved them of their hard and stressful days in the tenement factories. Though drinking in saloons brought relief, men were spending money on alcohol and thus causing more poverty to themselves. Eventually, saloons were a major problem in New York. Saloons heavily outnumbered the amount of churches in New York. “I tried once to find out how the account stood, and counted to 111 Protest churches, chapels, and places of worship of every kind below Fourteenth Street, 4,065 saloons” (Riis 1997, 159). Not only did saloons outnumber churches, the saloons also brought evil to tenement lives. “All the evil the saloon does in breeding poverty and in corrupting politics, all the suffering it brings into the lives of its thousands of innocent victims, the wives and children

Throughout New York and tenement living, many children were homeless and lived a tough life on the street. Not only did they live on the streets, children appeared missing and unattended for that eventually lead to death. “While moving a pile of lumber…found under the last plank the body of a little lad crushed to death, no one had missed a boy” (Riis 1997, 135). Missing children was not an uncommon thing during the harsh times in New York for impoverished families. Moreover, without a home, children had an increased risk of joining gangs. “With no steady hand to guide him…he runs the risk of being sent to a reformatory, where contact with vicious boys older than himself soon develop the latent possibilities for evil”(Riis 1997, 136). Riis stated that the children would become the future of the society. They would grow up and live how they were raised. If raised poorly or left in the streets, they will grow up with no opportunity and thus contribute to more poverty, which ultimately increases the disparity of wealth. Secondly, if the children continued to live on the streets and “develop the latent possibilities for evil”, crime and violence would increase. The crimes and violence would thus affect the general population and cause fear and danger throughout New York, as the formation of more “growler gangs” would occur. The only hope that Riis identified for children on the streets was the