Liberty
University HIUS 222 Reading comprehension quiz 1 solutions answers right
Jacob Riis (1849–1914) was a New York City
journalist and reformer, who in the late 1880s, began—through lectures,
articles, and flash photography—conveying to the wider public the unacceptable
nature of living conditions endured by the city’s urban poor. The selection
below is an excerpt from his 1890 book (with pictures) How the Other Half
Lives. From How the Other Half Lives (1890), by Jacob Riis The first tenement
New York knew bore the mark of Cain from its birth though a generation passed
before the writing was deciphered. It was the “rear house”, infamous ever after
in our city’s history. There had been tenanthouses before, but they were not
built for the purpose. Nothing would probably have shocked their original
owners more than the idea of their harboring a promiscuous crowd; for they were the decorous homes of the old Knickerbockers, the
proud aristocracy of Manhattan in the early days. It was the stir and bustle of
trade, together with the tremendous immigration that followed upon the war of
1812 that dislodged them. In thirtyfive years ,the city of less than a hundred
thousand came to harbor half a million souls for whom homes had to be found.
Within the memory of men not yet in their prime, Washington had moved from his
house on Cherry Hill as too far out of town to be easily reached. Now the old
residents followed his example; but they moved in a
different direction and for a different reason. Their comfortable dwellings in
the once fashionable streets along the East River front fell into the hands of
realestate agents and boardinghouse keepers; and here, says the report to the Legislature of 1857, when the
evils engendered had excited just alarm, “in its beginning, the tenanthouse
became a real blessing to that class of industrious poor whose small earnings
limited their expenses, and whose employment in workshops, stores or about the
warehouses and thoroughfares, render a near residence of much importance.” Not
for long, however. As business increased, and the city grew with rapid strides,
the necessities of the poor became the opportunity of their wealthier
neighbors, and the stamp was set upon the old houses, suddenly became valuable,
which the best thought and effort of a later age have vainly struggled to
efface. Their “large rooms were partitioned into several smaller ones, without
regard to light or ventilation, the rate of rent being lower in proportion to
space or height from the street; and they soon became
filled from cellar to garret with a class of tenantry living from hand to
mouth, loose in morals, improvident in habits, degraded, and squalid as beggary
itself.” It was thus the dark bedroom, prolific of untold depravities, came
into the world. It was destined to survive the old houses. In their new role,
says the old report, eloquent in its indignant denunciation of “evils more
destructive than wars,” “they were not intended to last. Rents were fixed high
enough to cover damage and abuse from this class, from whom nothing was
expected, and the most was more of them while they lasted. Neatness, order,
cleanliness, were never dreamed of in connection with the tenanthouse system,
as it spread its localities from year to year; while reckless slovenliness, discontent, privation, containing, but
sheltering not, the miserable hordes that crowded beneath mouldering, waterrotted
roofs or burrowed among the rats of clammy cellars.” Yet so illogical is human
greed that, at a later day, when called to account, “the proprietors frequently
urged the filthy habits of the tenants as an excuse for the condition of their
property, utterly losing sight of the fact that it was the tolerance of those
habits which was the real evil, and that for this they themselves were alone
responsible.” Still the pressure of the crowds did not abate, and in the old
garden where the stolid Dutch burgher grew his tulips or early cabbages a rear
house was built, generally of wood, two stories high at first. Presently it was
carried up another story, and another. Where two families had lived ten moved
in. The front house followed suit, if the brick walls were strong enough… Worse
was to follow. It was “soon perceived by estate owners and agents of property
that a greater percentage of profits could be realized by the conversion of
house and blocks into barracks, and dividing their space into smaller
proportions capable of containing human life within four walls… Blocks
were rented of real estate owners, or ‘purchased on time,’ or taken in charge
at a percentage, and held for underletting.” With the appearance of the middleman,
wholly irresponsible, and utterly reckless and unrestrained, began the era or
tenement building which turned out such blocks as Gotham Court, where, in one
cholera epidemic the scarcely touched the clean wards, the tenants died at the
rate of hundred and ninetyfive to the thousand of population; which forced the general mortality of the city up from 1 to 41.83
in 1815, to 1 in 27.33 in 1855, a year of unusual freedom from epidemic
disease, and which wrung from the early organizers of the Health Department
this wail: “There are numerous examples of tenementhouses in which are lodged
several hundred people that have a pro rata allotment of ground area scarcely
equal to two square yards upon the city lot, courtyards and all included.” The
tenementhouse population had swelled to half a million souls by that time, and
on the East Side, in what is still the most densely populated district in all
the world, China not excluded, it was packed at the rate of 290,000 to the
square mile, a state of affairs wholly unexampled. The utmost cupidity of Old
London was at the rate of 175,816. Swine roamed the streets and gutters as
their principal scavengers. The death of a child in a tenement was registered
at the Bureau of Vital Statistics as “plainly due to suffocation in the foul
air of an unventilated apartment,” and the Senators, who has come down from
Albany to find out what was the matter with New York, reported that “there are
annually cut off from the population by disease and death enough human being to
people a city, and enough human labor to sustain it.” …
Question 1 What happened to the comfortable
dwellings in the once fashionable streets along the East River front over the
course of the 1800s?
Question 2 Which of the following best
conveys why these conditions described by Riis were allowed?
Question 3 According to this excerpt from
Riis, what was one of the biggest problems facing these overcrowded areas?
Question 4 According to Riis, what is
characteristic of the tenanthousing system in New York during the 1800s?
Question 5 Why did the original, wealthy
residents of the city leave their decorous Manhattan homes and relocate far
outside the city?
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