Riis

Riis saw the tenements in the Lower East Side NY as central to the problems of poverty, crime, disease in the biggest city in the United States. In the pictures he took there are lots of back alleys and stairways, crowded apartments, people sleeping in the street. This is not what I think of when I think of New York city, yet the situation is inevitable in any big cities, where immigrants crowd the city for there first settlement. In genesis of the tenement Riis describes the transformation from the old days when the dutch controlled the city to Washington in the 19th century. The poor lives in slums and over populated tenements behind the grand houses the upper class owns. “Neatness, order, cleanliness, were never dreamed of in connection with the tenant-house system, as it spread its localities from year to year.” During the gilded age when economy was boosting and people were celebrating America's rapid industrial progress, the conditions of the poor is often overlooked. Reading this book feels like reading a newspaper, where usually has stories about how capitalists lure the poor to contract them into bad conditioned labor jobs.