Rehmat Sakrani

Prof Hoffman

IDC 1001H

Due 12/13

Seminar Theme Paper

Throughout the semester, we not only learned about, but also got the opportunity, to experience what the conditions were like for the urban poor in New York City’s past. Although New York City still has a problem of poverty plaguing its streets, at the time of rapid industrialization and immigration, New York carried everyone’s burdens. During the nineteenth twentieth centuries, many artists and writers went from discussing the aesthetics of New York, to the hardships and reality of everyday life in the city. As immigration increased took over much of the labor force, there was an increase in poverty and a decrease in the quality of life. People began to realize that they could no longer ignore the harm they were seeing in the streets every single day. Jacob Riis was the first of many to show the impoverished lives of the urban poor in New York City. In How the Other Half Lives, Riis documents the lives of those living in slums and exposing their conditions to all, especially upper classes that chose to ignore these conditions. Many of these people were suffering around the time of the Panic of 1873 when roughly 25% of New York City was out of work and the laboring class (full of immigrants) was affected the most. After his debut of photographs in the 1800s, writers like Stephen Crane and Lola Ridge, and painters like Reginald Marsh, decided to document and discuss the harsh conditions as well. In Crane’s Maggie: Girl of the Streets (1893), the audience is shown the bleakness of tenement life in 19th century New York City. In Ridge’s poem The Ghetto (1918), attention is brought to the urban realities faced by immigrants of the Lower East Side tenements. Reginald Marsh also depicted life of the poor in his paintings, like Bread Line (1929), especially during the time of the Great Depression. All these artists and writers’ works came to life when our class went to visit the Tenement Museum. We were able to see up close, how tiny the living spaces were and how families suffered. Discussing the life of the urban poor is an important lesson that I took away from the course, as it still is an existing problem today.

In Maggie: Girl of the Streets, by Stephen Crane, we as the reader, get to see the raw nature of the problems many American and immigrant families were plagued with. Crane portrays how this young adolescent girl is not only born into poverty, but how she cannot get out of it. His portrayal of her horrible experiences and her wretched family life, show the harsh reality of how most people did not get to achieve the American Dream. For those who only knew the dark world of poverty, filled with drunkards, prostitutes, and death, we see that many of them are doomed from the beginning. Many of the immigrants who came thinking that their hard work would eventually pay off into the American Dream, they were wrong. Their dreams are crushed by the punches of New York City and they find themselves in the gutter, struggling to make ends meet. It’s this same metaphorical gutter that we find our main character, Maggie, in. The novella starts off with a fight between hoodlums of Devil’s Row versus the neighborhood of Rum Alley, in which Maggie’s family lives. Her brother Jimmie and soon-to-be lover Pete are involved, already portraying how dangerous the lives of these young adolescents were. Unfortunately, Maggie’s home was a zone of danger as well. Her mom being a raging alcoholic and her dad being a violent father, Maggie and her two brothers are targets of not only poverty but abuse as well. We see that a few years later, Maggie has lost her brother Tommie and her dad is dead as well. However, her brother Jimmie has now taken a violent nature and when Maggie tries to escape the conditions of poverty with Pete, she is scrutinized and kicked out of her own house. To Maggie, Pete is a prime opportunity to get away from her terrible life in the tenements. Not only does her character have a terrible family life, but Crane’s portrayal of Maggie shows that women during this time of extreme poverty had no chance for upward social mobility. Unless of course they married well.

By the end, although Maggie has escaped her tenement life, her life has gone even more downhill. She ends up on the streets (hence the title) and since Pete has left her, with no man she resorts to prostitution. Crane shows how women in this time period were deemed as worthless if they were poor. Before industrialization, women were not seen as useful and the harsh reality of their poverty was that they would not be able to escape it. Maggie’s tragic end becomes the raw portrayal of Crane’s point. The urban poor were born into a hopeless state and sadly the American Dream is a nonexistent concept for them.

Also during the late nineteenth century, many tenements housed immigrant families. What is now known as the Tenement Museum, was once home to nearly 7000 working class immigrants. These families were very much living the urban poor lifestyle on the Lower East Side. They faced challenges of not only navigating a new land, but providing for their families within limited means and working towards a better future. Unlike Crane’s depiction, many of these families who faced the harsh reality of being poor, stayed optimistic. Their first restored apartment was of the German-Jewish Gumpertz family that lived there around 1878. The Gumpertz family struggled as they were hit by the Panic of 1873 like many others as well. Natalie and Julius Gumpertz were lucky and eligible to receive assistance from the United Hebrew Charity. They received a $5 donation that would come occasionally whenever assistance was needed extremely. However, Natalie was soon widowed around the height of the Panic and it was up to her to provide for her daughters. When she heard of her father-in-law leaving money to his son, she needed to provide proof that Julius was dead. If she could then gain the money instead, it could help her to raise her daughters. The problem with this family was that they were women. It’s sad to say but going out and working was not an option. I did say, however, that unlike the character of Maggie, the people in this building were optimistic to get through the tough times. Natalie, as an immigrant, did not even speak proper English but she managed to start her own business and became a dressmaker in her little tenement. The family’s living headquarters soon became a workshop so that Natalie could fit her customers right there. By knowing that her family survived and made it through the rough patches, we can figure out that Natalie must have been good at her job. Not only was dressmaker one of the few jobs that a woman could do at the time, it was a way of basic entrepreneurship. This tenement experience was not something that was seen by many. Poet Lola Ridge describes a quite opposite experience with Lower East Side tenements than what many hardworking, poor families experienced, like the Gumpertz.

We see this idea of the suffering urban poor and their brutal conditions once again in the poem, The Ghetto, by Lola Ridge. Ridge herself lived in the ghetto on the Lower East Side where overcrowded tenements shaped living conditions. Although her work is at the start of the twentieth century, we still see the theme of “harsh urban reality” being portrayed. Her poem describes a hot summer day in the Ghetto where “Bodies dangle from the fire escapes // Or sprawl over the stoops…” and faces are “Herring-yellow…spotted as with mold.” Ridge does a great job of painting a visual reality in which the audience can be engrossed. Her descriptions show how the tenements being so small, cause the residents to be ridden with disease and try to find breathing room. The heat that they face just makes the conditions even more unbearable.

Again, the idea of the streets comes up in Ridge’s poetry. Although there is no reference to prostitution like there was in Maggie: Girl of the Streets, Ridge describes the street (specifically Hester street) filled with a “hot tide of flesh” that “thickens” and she compares it to a river or a sea where people crowd the street like a surf. Her comparison is just one literary element but it is used to tell so much more. She displays how the streets, just like the tenements were full of people. Ridge goes on to describe her own conditions as she has lived in the Ghetto by Hester street. She herself only has a bare little green room that has “coppery stains // Left by seeping rains…” and where roaches come out during the nighttime. Some people saw these works of literature and poetry and stated that people like Crane and Ridge exaggerated conditions to gain attention. Ridge however lived in the world she describes. She is able to pinpoint every detail from a sick child whining to a door screaking on its hinges. Her poetry showed the American people in the beginning of the 1900s that living in confined tenements wasn’t just difficult, it was deadly to many.

Painters also saw the lifestyle of the urban poor in New York City as a discussing point. When the Great Depression hit, painters like Reginald Marsh depicted the streets once again. Although the idea of overcrowded tenements does not follow here, he showed how many people ended up homeless and in need of food, shelter, and a source of income. The 1930s ended up being an era of hurt and backlash from the roar that the 1920s created. After an era of prosperity, the Great Depression was one of the worst economic states that the United States has even been in. Terrible economic conditions only meant terrible news to the urban poor. Those who were low income became families with no income and faced levels of poverty that were beyond “poor”. In Marsh’s one painting called Bread Line, we see all the men waiting to get food for their families or themselves. Their expressions range from gloomy and miserable, to impatient and angry. The line continues off the canvas giving off an image that it was everlasting and long. The painting is also mixed with light and darkness to show the emotions of the time. All throughout, we see the men are covered in their own shadows, especially the man in the foreground. He is covered in shadows so much so that his facial expressions cannot even be seen. Yet one can tell that the man is ashamed as he shies his face away from the painter’s point of view. Going back to the light and dark, there is a strip of light seen between the line in the background and the man in the foreground, however, no one is really standing fully in the light. I think what Marsh was trying to portray was the dark times that these people were in. Some may have been hopeful in the beginning but as the line gets longer and they get hungrier, they begin to lurk in the shadows as well.

The Great Depression itself was an extremely hard time for many Americans. As Marsh showed us, many New Yorkers, especially the urban poor were in tough times. They would wait in bread lines for very long and many couldn’t afford living in their tenements anymore as many lost their jobs. One photographer named Russell Lee captured unemployment workers gathered in front of a shack with a small little Christmas tree. All the men in the photo, “Christmas tree” look like they’re sitting in some kind of abandoned plot. What caught my attention the most is that all of the men have their heads down and somewhat hidden in their hats as if they don’t want anyone to see them or they are ashamed. One man, has his back to the circle of men sitting on crates, and is looking off into the distance. Although we can’t see his face, audiences can tell his despair and can notice his shoulders hunched over as if the hope is slowly sucked out of him.

Another photographer during the Depression named “Tenant on 61st Street” by Walker Evans, took a photo of a ‘tenant’ in the year of 1938. This time, we can see the man’s face very clearly and up close. However, the man isn’t looking at the camera. His head is tilted downwards as he sits on the steps of what viewers can only assume is where he lives. I think the reason this photograph resonates with audiences even today is because the man’s eyes are not there with the rest of him. Just by looking at his expression we can tell that he is living in a world where hope does not exist. His expression isn’t stressed or worried but rather exhausted and sad. He also has somewhat of a scruffy beard giving clues as to him maybe not having enough money to shave. What strikes me as interesting is that this man is dressed very nicely with suspenders and a top hat but has no indication of happiness or wealth. Like many other Americans, he truly looks depressed during the Great Depression.

As a whole, the urban poor struggled no matter what time period they were in. Whether it was the Panic of 1873 or the Great Depression, they lacked their basic needs and lost the most jobs. During times like these, photographers and painters were able to grasp the harsh realities extremely well. People felt not only removed from themselves but also removed from a purpose in life. Many did not know when their next meal was or when they would get a job again. Bread lines ran longer than a person’s eye could estimate, as shown by Reginald Marsh. People like Jacob Riis, Russell Lee, Walker Evans, and Stephen Crane depicted how injustice was occurring every day with the people living in New York City’s slums and poverty. They portrayed real matters into the light and gave the urban poor a voice they may not have had before. Crane also made a good point about how women were barely given opportunities at all when it came to supporting themselves or their families, thus making economic conditions worse. When times were better for America as a whole, the urban poor were still living impoverished. Many lived in overcrowded and disease-ridden tenements like Ridge described. It was time for them not to be ignored by the upper classes. These artists and writers, as well as museums today, give those poor people a voice and a place in society for oncoming generations to remember their struggles.