How the Other Half Lives

Content Warning: This chapter discusses death by suicide.

Chapter 4—one of the book’s lengthiest chapters—features an imaginary tour of New York City’s downtown tenements. This chapter also highlights Riis’s photojournalistic approach, for it is the first of 11 consecutive chapters that feature at least one visual depiction of life in the tenements. Whereas the book’s introduction and first three chapters provide background, Chapter 4 represents the beginning of Riis’s quest to expose conditions among the city’s working impoverished.

Riis opens by describing the scene on once-fashionable Cherry Street in downtown, the southernmost part of Manhattan Island, which sports the highest concentration of tenements. Here he finds the children, “the growing generation of the slums” (30). He also finds buildings that once served as homes for New York City’s elite converted into multi-family tenements. An image (“At the Cradle of the Tenement—Doorway of an Old-Fashioned Dwelling on Cherry Hill”) depicts both of these: two children standing on the sidewalk while an older woman looks on from the doorway of a building that looks as if it dates from an earlier century.

Riis next explores the chapter’s main subject: the back alleys of downtown Manhattan. A photograph (“Upstairs in Blindman’s Alley”) shows a woman and three others, at least two of whom are adult men—the third is partially obscured—sitting around a small stove with a small kettle in cramped quarters.