After the Civil War, Five Points went through some changes, yet stayed the same in some aspects. Even though many immigrants moved into better neighborhoods, overcrowding and dirtiness persisted. Even with the building codes that included tenement regulations and the new dumbbell tenement design, the Five Point residents still lived in detestable conditions that worsened in aspects of noise and stench.
Even though the media exposed horrible conditions like small rooms being full of people, the conditions remained years later. Although the media’s sensationalization of the gruesome conditions that the immigrants were facing did not seem to help the immigrants in any way, the chapter does not mention the impact of Riis’ muckraking; his photojournalism helped make small parks. His book How the Other Half Lives was the inspiration behind Theodore Roosevelt’s closing the police lodging houses. In an application to modern day 2013, I can see Senator Elizabeth Warren as a muckraker confronting the banks regulators about ugly problems many U.S. citizens are facing.
However, this chapter made me feel as though there was no hope for the immigrants to enjoy life during the late 1800s. This chapter and Christ in Concrete gave me a sense of the vices being immutable; I can’t imagine being an immigrant that had to deal with the vices of the Lower East Side: dissipation, crime rate, death rate, detestable working conditions, and abhorrable filthiness. It seems like the immigrants would never be able to achieve the American Dream, although Riis certainly seemed to have done so. Thankfully, there was a considerable amount of change from the tenements in the late 1800s to the ones in the twenty-first century. I wonder what were the changes that greatly lessened these dangerous living conditions.
If the immigrants’ voices and thoughts about their living experiences in America were captured, I would see a bigger picture.
