Review Of Jacob Riis How The Other Half Lives

How the Other Half Lives

Jacob Riis, photojournalist and author of How the Other Half Lives depicts the unbearable living conditions of the New York City tenement taken place during the era of the Progression. How the Other Half Lives was written in first person, therefore, Riis’s research and writings came from events he experienced himself living in the tenements. Jacob Riis made photojournalism popular. He was a Danish immigrant along with being a social reformer and pioneer. Migration was one of the main causes to the overcrowding living situations of in New York City. Riis’s goal in composing his data was to inform the middle class and upper class on the living conditions of ones living in the terrible tenements.

Jacob Riis collected his thoughts well in the writing of How the Other Half Lives. The book was very well put together and an engaging read. Although, Riis used numerous offensive words about several of the immigrants, however, years ago it was normal language describing many of the

Their “large rooms were partitioned into several smaller ones, without regard to light or ventilation, the rate of rent being lower in proportion to space or height from the street; and they soon became filled from cellar to garret with a class of tenantry living from hand to mouth, loose in morals, improvident in habits, degraded, and squalid as beggary itself.”(Riis 63-64) With Jacob Riis’s descriptive choice of words you could essentially vision the tenants that were many lived in the city. Crammed in spaces where two families could comfortably live in, ten families would live there instead. These living conditions were not healthy to say the least. The rooms did not see light of day because of lack of windows and the air in these buildings was not healthy air to be inhaling. The tenants living in these conditions believed that this was their only option for