Having gone to the LES Tenement Museum was fairly supplemental to Riis’s description of tenement life in How the Other Half Lives. One of the big messages that I took away from this reading is that tenement owners were truly evil people. It is insane to expect families to be able to survive in some of the tenements described. They were terribly cramped, there was little to no ventilation, and the hope for sanitary conditions left many soon after they moved in. The owners didn’t seem to care as long as the net cash flow was into their pockets and not out. The aristocrats that lived in these very tenements prior to their being inhabited largely by immigrants had the equivalent of several of these apartments all to themselves. This is clear indication that the partitions of the formerly large apartments were not nearly spacious enough to provide a comfortable amount of living room. What I also drew from this was that having been built to make up one apartment, the smaller one or two room apartments were not equipped properly to serve as separate entities, this going back once again to the lack of ventilation and the like. With these conditions, it’s no wonder that a family that Riis described committed suicide because its members were exhausted and simply couldn’t keep fighting.
Putting this information into a broader and more modern perspective, we should be both pleased with how far we have come and disappointed with our shortcomings. The living conditions for immigrants coming to NYC tend to be better today than ever prior. Both I and many of my friends can attest to that, drawing from personal experience and that of a number of acquaintances. However, we mustn’t forget that New York City is very different from much of the U.S., in terms of standard of living, rate of modernization, etc. As the GDP per capita and the median household income in NYC indicate, New Yorkers have it much better than the vast majority of the country, so although we have made much progress in this city, much of the nation hasn’t and until it does, we can’t truthfully say that we’ve broken away from the ugly past Jacob Riis details.
