How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. Jacob August Riis

Ward tenement.

2

Forty per cent. was declared by witnesses before a Senate Committee to be a fair average interest on tenement property. Instances were given of its being one hundred per cent. and over.

3

It was not until the winter of 1867 that owners of swine were prohibited by ordinance from letting them run at large in the built-up portions of the city.

4

This “unventilated and fever-breeding structure” the year after it was built was picked out by the Council of Hygiene, then just organized, and presented to the Citizens’ Association of New York as a specimen “multiple domicile” in a desirable street, with the following comment: "Here are twelve living-rooms and twenty-one bedrooms, and only six of the latter have any provision or possibility for the admission of light and air, excepting through the family sitting- and living-room; being utterly dark, close, and unventilated. The living-rooms are but 10 Ã 12 feet; the bedrooms 6½ Ã 7 feet.“

5

“A lot 50 Ã 60, contained twenty stables, rented for dwellings at $15 a year each; cost of the whole $600.”

6

The Sheriff Street Colony of rag-pickers, long since gone, is an instance in point. The thrifty Germans saved up money during years of hard work in squalor and apparently wretched poverty to buy a township in a Western State, and the whole colony moved out there in a body. There need be no doubt about their thriving there.

7

The process can be observed in the Italian tenements in Harlem (Little Italy), which, since their occupation by these people, have been gradually sinking to the slum level.

8

The term child means in the mortality tables a person under five years of age. Children five years old and over figure in the tables as adults.

9

See City Mission Report, February, 1890, page 77.