How the Other Half Lives

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1890

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Chapters 11-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 11 Summary and Analysis: “The Sweaters of Jewtown”

In the Jewish-dominated tenements, “sweaters” manufacture cheap clothing. They are called “sweaters” because they run operations that would be recognized as sweatshops in any time or place. Tenant-laborers speak little or no English and are treated as enslaved people on “starvation wages” (122). Both sweaters and laborers are Jewish. Sweaters evade factory law by conducting work inside the tenement buildings. In the sweatshops, there is no need to treat tenant-laborers with dignity or to raise their pay because new immigrants are always arriving. Here and elsewhere, Riis connects events in Europe—in this case the persecution of Jews—to New York City’s tenement problem. He argues that the problem will not go away, in part because New Yorkers cannot control the circumstances that drive immigrants to the United States, so the city and its well-to-do leaders must make the best of it. Riis visits a Ludlow Street tenement and finds “dark stairs,” “smells of cabbage,” “frying fish,” and especially “whirring sewing machines behind closed doors” (125). A photograph (“‘Knee-Pants’ at Forty-Five Cents a Dozen—A Ludlow Street Sweater’s Shop”) shows six laborers, two of whom appear to be teenage boys, sitting around tables and making garments, fabric strewn everywhere. Outside the windows, the adjacent tenement building appears to be only a few feet away, which highlights Riis’s observations regarding cramped spaces. The same scene greets Riis behind every door: entire families making clothes to pay their “extortionate rents” (133). On Hester Street, cloak-makers work from 6:00am to 11:00pm It is here in these tenement-sweatshops that the discontented “recruit the ranks of the anarchists,” which should serve as a warning to the city’s more fortunate residents (129).

Chapter 12 Summary and Analysis: “The Bohemians—Tenement-House Cigarmaking”

Riis visits the Czech quarter and finds sweatshops even worse than the ones he saw in “Jewtown.” Here the tenant-laborers make cigars. Whereas the victims here are Czech, the “sweater” is “almost always a Jew, is frequently of the thrifty Polish race” (136). Riis’s sympathy for the people of the tenements sometimes softens his characteristic racist expressions, but it never eradicates them. The Czech immigrants live in close proximity to the Germans, whom they generally loathe thanks to deep historical animosities. Riis describes the Czechs as sanitary and proud but also isolated and too addicted to beer to consider saving their money—if they had much. In the cigar-making sweatshops, families work together 17 hours per day, 7 days per week. A photograph (“Bohemian Cigarmakers at Work in Their Tenement”) shows a man and woman, presumably husband and wife, along with their three children, seated inside a tenement. The youngest child, too young for work, sits on his mother’s lap, but the eldest—perhaps eight or nine years old—appears to be rolling tobacco leaves. Riis notes that Czech immigrants have an undeserved reputation as troublemakers. Most, he observes, are not. They are families simply trying to survive. He argues, however, that in light of the conditions they face, they would have every reason to be anarchists. Riis characterizes the Czech community as having a love of freedom and antipathy to landlords, stating the “Czech is the Irishman of Central Europe,” always going “‘agin [sic] the government’” (146). Again, Riis builds his case for the potential dangers to social order brewing inside the tenements.

Chapter 13 Summary and Analysis: “The Color Line in New York”

Riis laments the extreme prejudice and ill-treatment endured by New York City’s Black population. In fact, the “Czar of all the Russias is not more absolute upon his own soil than the New York landlord in his dealings with colored tenants” (148). The problem is not just racial generalization, as Riis himself engages in that. It is that the Black tenants are mischaracterized and therefore underappreciated. Riis insists, for instance, that “[t]here is no more clean and orderly community in New York than the new settlement of colored people that is growing up on the East Side from Yorkville to Harlem” (150). Furthermore, he states that Black individuals are “loyal to the backbone, proud of being an American,” and “at least as easily moulded for good as for evil” (155). Riis uses racial generalizations to defend Black tenants and even elevate them above several groups of European immigrants, as one might expect given Riis’s own Northern European origins and prejudices unique to the northern part of that continent.

Riis’s primary objective in this book, however, is to expose the dreadful conditions in which New York’s exploited impoverished population is compelled to live and to shift the blame for this problem on greedy landlords. While the Black population has improved its lot by moving (or being driven by foreign immigrants) further and further from the worst of the tenements in downtown, they nonetheless experience a particular form of oppression from landlords who justify extortionate rent on grounds that Black tenants devalue property. As he does elsewhere, Riis highlights temptations that become vices for the more impoverished. In the case of the Black tenants, these include gambling and alcohol. Riis especially decries the “notorious” establishment known as the “black-and-tan saloon,” where “the utterly depraved of both sexes, white and black,” meet and mingle in what he calls “no greater abomination” (156). Riis’s admiration for the Black tenants does not extend to those who violate customary segregation. A photograph (“A Black-and-Tan Dive in ‘Africa’”) shows a Black man, his feet resting on an overturned barrel, seated next to a light-skinned woman.