Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [938]
In January 1888 Riis gave a two-hour lecture at the Society of Amateur Photographers, illustrated with a hundred lantern slides of homeless people, street children, and crowded tenements, ending with images of Bellevue Hospital, the New York Morgue, and the pauper graveyard on Hart’s Island. He spoke again in February at the Broadway Tabernacle, and among the deeply impressed audience was the Rev. Parkhurst, who helped Riis to other engagements at churches in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Jamaica. In May, Lyman Abbott asked him to contribute two articles to the Christian Union.
In 1889 Riis began writing more pieces that played on the theme of two New Yorks, one prosperous and respectable, the other “uneasy, suffering, threatening anarchy and revolt.” He named one such essay in Scribner’s “How the Other Half Lives,” a phrase often used before, notably by Dr. Griscom back in 1845. The following year, he bundled the pieces together into an illustrated book of the same title. Hove the Other Half Lives (1890) was an instant success, so much so that Riis abandoned regular newspaper work and became a free-lance journalist, reformer, and lecturer.
Part of the book’s popularity was fortuitous: it appeared the same year as Ward McCallister’s Society as I Have Found It, which touted the Four Hundred’s opulence and was compared, devastatingly, with Riis’s work by many reviewers. The Other Half also fit neatly into the established sunshine-and-shadow tradition; indeed Riis’s literary strategy came straight from Dickens’s American Notes, one of his favorite books. The narrator offers the reader an armchair guided tour of the underworld.
“Leaving the Elevated Railroad where it dives under the Brooklyn Bridge at Franklin Square,” Riis wrote, “scarce a dozen steps will take you where we wish to go. . . . We have turned the corner from prosperity to poverty.” Suppose we look into a Cherry Street tenement, he continued. “Be a little careful, please! The hall is dark and you might stumble over the children pitching pennies back there. Not that it would hurt them; kicks and cuffs are their daily diet. They have little else. Here where the hall turns and dives into utter darkness is a step, and another, another. . . . Here is a door. Listen! That short hacking cough, that tiny, helpless wail—what do they mean?” (A dying infant, of course). “With half a chance it might have lived but it had none. That dark bedroom killed it.” The slum was death to virtue as well, though Riis was always amazed at finding “sweet and innocent girls” there; he theorized they survived only because “inherent purity revolts instinctively from the naked brutality of vice as seen in the slums.”
To a critical Christianity, Riis married the progressive scientism of photographic proof and statistical data. An Other Halftenement room was never just stiflingly hot; it was 115 degrees. The Elizabeth Street lodging station had enough cubic air space for ten men but crammed in forty-eight. Where sixteen or seventeen people out of every thousand died from cholera in the uptown wards, 195 per thousand so perished in the slums. Over nine thousand homeless young men lodged nightly along Chatham Street and the Bowery, between City Hall and Cooper Union. One of every ten New Yorkers ended up in the potter’s field.
Riis’s book obviously sympathized with the poor, but he never tumbled over into too alarming (or too radical) an identification with his subjects. He remained a detached gentleman,