Book Review: "How the Other Half Lives" by Jacob A. Riis

I have always been interested in Irish culture, history, and Irish history in America. The innumerable stories of the immigrants- told or untold- from any nation or soil onto another are fascinating, unignorable, enriching. Immigrants are the bravest people on the planet.

Five Points no longer exists as such in Manhattan. After the riots during the Civil War it moved down a block to the next intersection from its original location. Then it came to mean the entire area covering several blocks of that intersection. Contemporary maps of New York City plainly show the intersection of the post Civil War Five Points, but the original intersection of that name no longer has any resemblence to five fingers. If you want to know which streets were the original Five Points, the movie "The Gangs of New York" starring Leonardo Di Caprio as a first generation Irish immigrant at the time of the Civil War riots lists them explicitly. By the time Jacob A. Riis published "How The Other Half Lives" the shift of a block had already occured. But the conditions, though slowly improving one tenement house at a time, had been made much worse by persistent over-crowding as more immigrants arrived daily from a greater number of countries.

Riis had a very personal stake in his efforts at tenement reform. He himself had come from Five Points, and worked his way out. He had slept on its streets and experienced its miseries first-hand. By the 1890s, he was a police reporter and the technology of flash photography was in its infancy. Riis decided to take flash photography to the Five Points and show the world how the other half of New York City's population lived- the working classes, the desperately poor, the disabled, the homeless, the drunkards and criminals, the insane, and orphaned children with nowhere to go but the warm grates over the city's sewers to sleep. He became one of the first, if not the first, photojournalist. The results scandalised a nation into true reform at last.

I discovered this book after watching the TV show "Dirty Cities- Industrial New York" that mentioned it and featured some of Riis' photos to illustrate the conditions that the show strives to recreate for the education of contemporary viewers. My interest thus peaked, I bought a copy. The copy I bought is a 1971 reprint of the 1890 text with over 100 of Riis' photographs as housed in the Jacob A. Riis Collection at the Museum of the City of New York. This is far more photos than were included in the first edition of 1890. In fact, technology was not yet able to reproduce photographs faithfully in book form via printing press, and so the original edition featured a comparative handful of photographs that had been "translated" into sketches by artists of the time. The process meant that much of the detail was lost. It speaks loudly to the power of Riis' careful documentation that these pitiful reproductions were enough to shock the sleepy classes to real earnest action at last.

This is the sad story of poor, starving, marginalised, persecuted people running from injustice straight into the arms of the same injustices on another shore. And lest we think that the situation is any different today, pick up any newspaper, read any editorial that touches on immigration issues of our time. Don't get me wrong: I do not believe in politics in any sense. I hold to strict neutrality. I am simply making an observation. Riis' photographs open for us a window into a zeitgeist long burned in the fires of world wars and illuminates the present. While he focussed on a city, the view in our time trends to global. How does the other half of the earth's population live today? Could we bear to admit the truth or look upon it in the stark, unforgiving way that Riis made avaliable? Suffering should never be ignored, or swept under the rug. That was what Riis was trying to say.