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Summary Of How The Other Half Lives By Jacob Riis

1048 Words5 Pages

Middle and upper class Americans were shocked by the novel How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis. Riis depicted the true grit of immigrant life when he depicted, mixing in depth written imagery and raw photography, the horrendous conditions of New York City\'s tenement housing. Many questions were raised in America by How the Other Half Lives, including: how and why the poor are condemned to these bad living conditions and how this atmosphere affects them.
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Furthermore, Riis unveils his opinion toward other ethnicities as he searches each tenement in order to find some kind of solution. The unsettling environment Riis discusses within the length of this entire novel focuses on the tenement. The tenement is a building, which due to the immigration boom was modified by its landlord so that bigger rooms “were partitioned into several smaller ones, without regard to light or ventilation.”(Pg. 69) These rooms were entirely …show more content…

too small for a whole family and much too dark and still too reside in, however it was not uncommon to have up to three or even four families living in one of these apartments. Tenements are the putrid, sweltering, dank and laden with disease. Often an entire building was wiped out by a disease such as cholera. Riis describes the tenants as being so cramped that babies would die of “foul air” due to
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