Tenement Living in NYC
Apartment living in the Big Apple often conjures up images from film and television that denote glamour and ridiculously large living quarters that low-level blue-collar workers can actually afford. Of course, occasionally Hollywood presents a slightly more realistic vision of what stacked living in New York is like, but even then the dimensions and affordability are way beyond the boundaries the possible. For an honest and authentic and unpleasant look at what life in NYC apartments is really like, this book offers a history takes things back to where such abnormal living began: the spread of low-cost, cheaply produced and inefficiently run tenements. It is not a pretty picture and that is meant literally because the book is loaded with photographs detailing the harshness of these conditions.
Immigrant Culture
We don’t really think much of it when a section of a town is referred to as Chinatown. One of the chapters in this book is titled “Jewtown” and the next is “The Sweaters of Jewtown.” Still others called “The Italian in New York,” “The Street Arab,” and “The Color Line in New York.” That last is a reference not to immigration between nations, but to the Great Migration of the era which saw big urban population centers becoming the destination for hundreds of thousands of African Americans fleeing the South after Reconstruction. As one might suspect, there is ample amounts of casual racism on display throughout these chapters and while it is certainly offensive to the modern, enlightened sensibility, keep in mind that Riis is not here necessarily espousing a profound Aryan contempt. That’s just the way people talked back then and the book is written in a vernacular that speaks to of its era.
Progressive Reform
The book is not mere history. It is social activism in action. The photographs, the personal stories, the exposure of corruption at all levels all work together for a single and very definite purpose. That purpose is to provoke public outrage, stimulate anger which transforms into political action and change the state of tenement living in New York. Did it work? Not necessarily—certainly not as much as its author would have liked. Which is probably why he followed this volume up with several more exposes of the rotten living conditions of millions of residents of what was already on its way toward becoming the city that determines whether or not you one has the ability to make it anywhere else. Changes did come and for a small fraction of the population those changes were substantial, but the leverage of power was just too heavily in favor of the business interests over the social interests.
