Jacob Riis How the Other Half Lives Essay - 1550 Words

Jacob Riis How the Other Half Lives In How the Other Half Lives, the author Jacob Riis sheds light on the darker side of tenant housing and urban dwellers. He goes to several different parts of the city of New York witnessing first hand the hardships that many immigrants faced when coming to America. His journalism and photographs of the conditions of the tenant housing helped led the way of reformation in the slums of New York. His research opened the eyes of many Americans to the darker side of the nations lower class. Though it seems that he blamed both the victims and the board forces of society, I believe that he placed more of the blame on the board forces for the conditions that many immigrants faced. In the first few†¦show more content†¦Most contracts never mentioned the safety and comfort of tenants (p. 10). In addition, many of the tenants were working and needed to be close to where they worked. The costs of living in these tenement houses were ridiculously high for the condition and size o f the rooms. Riis described how some Italians were given board as long as the Italian made enough ash-barrels to feed him, which unfortunately caused many Italians to get use to free rent and thus many were driven to another dump. Riis did not care much for the Italians, because of their lack of focus and life style. One of the well-known tenement housing the Bend was labeled as one of the bad tenement houses, and even the optimists agreed. It was said that the more you had done the less it has seemed to accomplish in the way of real relief (p 46). Also under the pressure of the growing Italian community, the standard of breathing space required for an adult by the health officers was cut from six hundred to four hundred cubic feet. With such increase in population in certain tenement housing the sanitary policeman would locate the bulk of his four hundred, and the sanitary reformer gives up the task in despair (p. 55). I personally think what he is saying is that the communi ty and government waited too long to start helping the lower class. That the problem of overcrowding and of health regulations had gotten too far out of reach for us to help them. I had mentionedShow MoreRelatedHow the Other Half Lives: The Portrayal of Jacob Riis1064 Words   |  5 Pagesportrayal of Jacob Riis’ views through his book ‘How the Other Half Lives,’ is conveyed by storytelling and is largely made of logos, however the key component is actually ethos, like a politician running a campaign, Jacob Riis’s uses logos and pathos to create a persona of authority on the topic of the poor in New York City. I am going to look in depth on how Riis uses different approaches to convey his views to his audience: why does do some of Riis’ key texts contradict each other? Is he consciousRead More The Reality of Jacob Riis How the Other Half Lives Essay1105 Words   |  5 PagesThe Reality of Jacob Riis How the Other Half Lives Jacob Riis’ book How the Other Half Lives is a detailed description on the poor and the destitute in the inner realms of New York City. Riis tries to portray the living conditions through the ‘eyes’ of his camera. He sneaks up on the people flashes a picture and then tells the rest of the city how the ‘other half’ is living. As shocking as the truth was without seeing such poverty and horrible conditions with their own eyes or taking in the experienceRead MoreEssay about Jacob A. Riis - How the Other Half Lives1090 Words   |  5 PagesJacob Riis book How the Other Half Lives is a detailed description on the poor and the destitute in the inner realms of New York City. 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In Jacob Riis’s book, How the Other Half LivesRead MoreMuckrakers- American Journalists932 Words   |  4 PagesSinclair, Samuel Hopkins Adams, and Jacob Riis. The first of the muckrakers to be discussed is Jacob Riis. Riis was born and raised in Denmark, but moved to New York when he was twenty- one years old. He grew up in an impoverished household with fourteen other siblings; therefore, he understood the struggle of the needy that lived in New York (â€Å"Jacob Riis Muckraker†). In 1888, Riis was given a job with the New York Evening Sun as a photojournalist (â€Å"Jacob Riis†). His pictures primarily portrayedRead MoreUrban Poverty in 18th Century America Depicted in Riis, How the Other Half Lives790 Words   |  4 Pagesbook How the Other Half Lives, Riis offers the audience a glimpse into the unsettling and unnoticed reality of the urban poverty in America at the turn of the 19th century. Not only he revealed the dark side of the society, he also showed the urgent need for change. Riis used emotional as well as logical appeal to support his argument in favor of the need for a social reform. By combining powerful pictures and detailed annotations accounting the conditions of life in the New York, Riis made How theRead MoreThe Life Of Immigrants During The Gilded City Of New York954 Words   |  4 Pages Immigrants migrated to the cities because the need for unskilled labor to help the growing economy was high in the cities. In just under thirty-five years, the city that had less than a hundred thousand people boasted a population of at least a half a million individuals, in which housing was limited. Most immigrants were poor when they arrived in New York; they frequently lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where they can able to find crowded apartment buildings, called tenements, forRead MoreHow The Other Half Lives By Edward Bellamy1111 Words   |  5 Pagesof the problems of social equality. In the novel â€Å"How the Other Half Lives† by Jacob A. 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