SOURCE: An introduction to How the Other Half Lives, by Jacob Riis, edited by Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of HarvardUniversity Press, 1970, pp. vii-xix.

[In the following essay, the editor's introduction of How the Other Half Lives, Warner discusses Riis's classic work.]

This is one of the great books of American journalism. Published in 1890, early in the era of muckraking, How the Other Half Lives stands with Lincoln Steffens' Shame of the Cities (1904) and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) for its impact on its own generation and for its lasting ability to secure a reader's emotional assent to the vision of the author. Today the book is in continuous use by historians seeking evidence of our urban past and by all students of America's reform tradition.

With this book Riis succeeded in doing what every newspaperman dreams of. At just the right moment in our history—when the tide of immigration was reaching its flood, and many Americans had grown fearful of foreigners; when the new rings of growth of the American metropolis first fully separated city dwellers into a core of poverty and suburbs of success; when a generation of health and charity studies of poverty filled a bookshelf with neglected expertise; and when American cities themselves had grown huge and ominous—Jacob Riis fashioned a portrait of our largest city's largest slum that captured the public imagination.

The portrait was at once a confirmation of popular belief and a call to action. Riis affirmed the humanity of the poor immigrant; he assured middle-class Americans that most slum dwellers sought the same kind of life that the mainstream possessed; he painted a colorful landscape of the Lower East Side, so that poverty became an interesting subject for social tourism; and, finally, he presented the slum as a social problem for which there were specific public remedies.

Before Riis there was no broad popular understanding of urban poverty that could lead to political action. A long tradition of charitable writing existed, a line stemming from John Woolman's A Plea for the Poor (1793) and Mathew Carey's pamphlet of the same name (1837) to Charles Loring Brace's The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years' Work Among Them (1872), but such works were merely calls for more private charitable effort. They did not urge public action of a magnitude that could give the public confidence in the city's ability to cope with the tide of immigrant poor. Sweeping reforms had been proposed in the years just previous to the appearance of Riis's book. Henry George (Progress and Poverty, 1877) and Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward, 1888) had published popular attacks on the capitalist system, a system which was in part responsible for American poverty, but few Americans wanted to abandon or radically alter capitalism. Riis's work entered the space between these two lines of thought. It proposed remedies which could permanently improve the everday life of the poor, and it followed the general American tradition by staying well to the right of any call for socialism.

Armed with the muckraker's confidence that publicity can solve problems by creating an intelligent public opinion,¹ Riis set out to fuse his personal experiences into a generalized statement and a call for reform. For his evidence he used his own daily experience as a police reporter stationed for twelve years in the Lower East Side. To this he added the reports of health and charity workers. His synthesis was an ecological definition of the slum. The slum was a special environment which bore in special ways upon the men, women, and children dwelling within it.

In the subtitle of the book Riis called his study "Life Among the Tenements," thereby suggesting his frequent use of the physical objects, the decaying old homes, the back alleys, and the tall tenement barracks as symbols for the patterns of human life in the slum. By his definition—and his definition has persisted in the popular mind and official government mind at least until Michael Harrington's The Other America (1963)—the slum is a poor immigrant quarter of overcrowded rooms, sweatshop manufacturing, poverty-stricken churches, broken-down schools, cheap retail shops, saloons, vice, and political corruption. Here the strong prey upon the weak; the ordinary man or woman trying to make adecent living and trying to lead a normal family life is continually harassed. Many are totally defeated.

Having defined the slum as an ecology of injustice, Riis proposed a multiple program for coping with it. He gathered up all the sentiments and ideas current at the moment of his writing. To satisfy the longing for the country, felt by immigrant and Americans alike, he proposed parks, fresh air funds, and flower campaigns; to assuage the homesickness for the small town or village he proposed clubs, settlement houses, and better schools; to meet the demand for decent living conditions he proposed general policing of the slum, enforcement of the housing laws against greedy landlords, and the building of model tenements by limited-dividend corporations; and to help the down-and-out he proposed municipal lodging houses and compulsory work. Above all he appealed to the middle class of New York to come, to take an interest, to lend a hand in municipal politics and in charity work, to see that every New Yorker got a chance to work and live according to the American standards which Riis himself ardently believed in. Put most simply, he appealed to his fellow citizens to help give the poor a decent break.

In his reminiscences² Riis wrote that his perception of the slum and his prescription for it grew naturally out of his personal experience—his experience as a child growing up in a small country mill town in Denmark, and his experience as a young immigrant drifting about for six years in New York and Pennsylvania seeking to find himself and his place in America.

Born on May 3, 1849, in Ribe, Denmark, Jacob was the third of fourteen children.³ While he was growing up there were twelve children in the house, two elder brothers, two younger sisters, four younger brothers (one of whom drowned when Jacob was eleven years old), and three infants who died in their first years. These deaths, and the relentless struggle of his schoolteacher father against the pains of genteel poverty, were etched in black in Riis's memory. In contrast he recalled the bright cheerfulness and easy companionship of his large family and the freedom of his small-town childhood. The tension between these opposing sets of memories formed Riis's deep sense of family. He believed the family to be the heart of life; it was both a group of people struggling together for life and a place where the most intense emotions of existence were experienced. In this commitment to the family lay the lines of Riis's later perception of the slum as a poisonous environment for the poor family and his vigorous demands for decent housing, decent schools, and neighborhood action. Such a reform focus allied him with the settlement house workers, who were also family and community oriented, as opposed to contemporary writers like William Dean Ho wells (Hazard of New Fortunes, 1890) or socialists and unionists who saw the city in terms of the "industrial question"—that is, who saw the city as a conflict of an army of toilers against greedy business organizations. Riis never saw industrial armies and masses; he saw individuals and families.

After grammar school, despite his father's hopes, Jacob refused professional training and chose instead to become a carpenter. In the mid-nineteenth century, Denmark, like all European countries, was urbanizing rapidly, so there were plenty of openings for skilled men in the building trades. Accordingly, Jacob was apprenticed to a Copenhagen builder and spent the next four years living and working in the metropolis. Although he always enjoyed outdoor life and working with his hands, carpentry did not satisfy him. Loneliness also spoiled his apprentice years. The moment the carpenter's guild admitted him, therefore, Jacob abandoned his tools and returned to Ribe. But Ribe, a stagnant town of three thousand, whose main employment was a single textile mill, had no room for a young carpenter. When his childhood sweetheart, the millowner's daughter, refused him, Riis embarked for America.

Riis landed in New York in 1870 to begin, at the age of twenty-one, three years of wandering and of searching for a place for himself in America. Over the weeks and months of 1870-1873 he acted out what must have been a common experience of nineteenth-century American boys and what became for American writers in the early twentieth century almost a ritual passage from youth to manhood.

Uncertain of everything, determined in some vague way to be a success, restless, independent, aggressive, self-righteous, unwilling to assume the harness of the craft for which he had been trained, Jacob wandered for three years over New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. He took the first job offered him, building workers' shacks for an Allegheny iron mill; he tried to enlist in the French army to avenge the German conquest of his homeland; he got into a fight with the French consul in New York. He went broke, bummed in New York City, begged rolls and bones from Delmonico's restaurant, spent a night in a police lodging house with other down-and-outs, was robbed and expelled for complaining of his treatment, spent a day in the rain staring at the oily waters of the East River, worked with a drunken crew of brickmakers in New Jersey, and was nursed back to health by the Danish consul in Philadelphia. He became a hired hand for a country doctor, did some lumbering, ran a line of muskrat traps in upstate New York, built ships on Lake Erie, worked in Buffalo lumberyards and a planing mill, tried lecturing and failed, took up selling furniture for a Danish furniture co-operative—it also failed, but selling was righter than odd jobs and carpentry. Jacob was a talker and a hustler. He made a small bankroll as a drummer in flatirons, selling up and down the smoky oil, mill, and mining towns of western Pennsylvania. He was cleaned out when he tried the Chicago flatiron agency, was defrauded by his fellow salesmen in Pittsburgh, and went on the road again back into the small towns. He took sick and spent weeks holed up in a lonely boarding-house, recovered and spent a summer selling his way back to New York city, studied to be a telegrapher, peddled books part-time without success, and finally secured a job as a reporter with a free-lance news service.

Out of the experience of these three years came Riis's strong confidence in himself and his conviction of the Tightness of American ways. Despite greed, meanness, and fraud, all of which he had fought and suffered, Riis believed a man had a chance in America; it was a free country, and any man with guts who was willing to work hard could make a decent living for himself and his family. This personal self-confidence and faith in American individualism permeated Riis's writing. In How the Other Half Lives it appeared in his harsh attacks on loafers, bums, grafting politicians, petty criminals, greedy landlords, and chiseling employers: all those who refused to try or who preyed upon the honest men who were trying. The same convictions also blinded Riis's vision. He never saw the slum as part of a metropolitan and national economy; he never absorbed the growing contemporary criticism of capitalism into his understanding of what he saw on the Lower East Side. For Riis the slum was the product of individual greed, immigrant ignorance, political corruption, and the slipshod habits of previous generations.

After his first entry into the newspaper business in 1873, it took five years for Riis to establish himself permanently in New York. He ran a weekly in Brooklyn for some local politicians, then purchased it and successfully managed it himself. He sold the paper and with the proceeds returned to Ribe to marry the millowner's daughter. Upon his return to New York he tried lantern slide shows and then finally settled down as a police reporter for the New York Tribune. In this job he mastered his basic stylistic technique: the short vignette.⁴ He wrote hundreds of human interest stories about the people he met at the station, in the courts, or while following up leads from the police blotter. In these little stories Riis learned to make his vision reach people. The Riis method was to begin with a quick dramatic statement of a person's plight, then to reveal the tension between the relentless struggle for survival and the quick emotions of love, anger, greed, and friendship, which Riis portrayed as heightened in intensity by the slum environment, and to close with an appeal to the common reader's sense of justice.

Steadily his career led him from slum vignettes to more systematic observation of the life around him. The offices of the city's Health Department were then around the block from the Tribune reporters' office; Riis could stop in regularly. He first became acquainted with the department on a smallpox story, then took to making regular calls in search of material. In time, as he formed friendships with the staff, he began going out on inspection rounds through the slums. The night rounds, especially, when inspectors checked against overcrowding of rooms, revealed the Lower East Side at its worst—the ragpickers' cellar nest, the flophouses, the all-night dives. Riis's shock and anger at these night scenes gave him the motive to take up the new invention of flash photography to portray to the public what the health inspectors were teaching him. The health officers also taught him to look beyond the single case toward a view of the entire environment. This experience is mirrored in the contents of How the Other Half Lives, in which Riis builds the whole concept of a slum out of dozens of individual cases. Presumably the health officers also informed him of the literature of the sanitary movement, which by the 1880's consisted of a long shelf of investigations and calls for reform. Riis later frequently cited these works.

In his autobiography Riis recounted the specific steps which led to the writing and publication of How the Other Half Lives.⁵ The first step was his experience in reporting the hearings of the 1884 Tenement-House Commission. The failure of the laws of 1879 and previous years to improve markedly the sanitary condition of New York tenements and the menacing spread of the new large five-story double house (the "dumbbell tenement") through the city led to the creation of still another state commission. Felix Adler (1851-1933), founder of the Ethical Culture Society, is generally credited with getting the investigation authorized and driving it forward.

⁶ The commission employed tenement inspectors of its own for a survey of one thousand dwelling units and during the summer and fall of 1884 conducted hearings and heard its inspectors' reports. As Riis listened to the parade of landlords, tenants, inspectors, charity workers, and reformers he became especially impressed at the way in which Adler led their testimony to bring out the basic issues of everyday life in the slum. In later years, when Riis had become a full-time reform journalist, he and Adler were associated on a number of projects. They shared a belief that children, child development, and education were society's most important tasks, and they shared a personal approach to life which was captured in Adler's slogan, "deed not creed."

For Riis the immediate outcome of this reporting experience was the confirmation of his personal view that the slum dwellers were better than their environment. The public confirmation was, he said, "a big white milestone on a dreary road."⁷ The people didn't make the slums; the slum environment made the slum dweller.

The next step toward the writing of How the Other Half Lives came four winters later, in 1888. This time Riis was reporting at a meeting of Protestant ministers and laymen who were deploring the failure of the church to reach the slum residents. Alfred T. White (1846-1921), by then a well-known builder of philanthropic tenements and President of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities, stood up in the hall and cried out, "How are these men and women to understand the love of God you speak of, when they see only the greed of men?"⁸ Riis often quoted White's statement. He recalled that the whole concept of the book, built around the theme of the title, How the Other Half Lives, began to grow upon him immediately upon hearing White's statement.

That fall and winter he had been seeking a platform for illustrated lectures on conditions in the Lower East Side. He resigned the diaconate of his Brooklyn church when his minister refused to let him lecture to the congregation on the subject, and other ministers also turned him down. On February 12, 1888, the New York Sun published some of his slum photographs. Two weeks later he opened his career as a reformer-journalist with a slide lecture at the Broadway Tabernacle in behalf of the City Mission Society. The lecture was a success, and, thanks to the patronage of Rev. Josiah Strong (1847-1916), he began to lecture in other New York churches.

With every month his personal commitment to a campaign of some kind became a little deeper. In June 1888 he published his appeal to the Tribune's readers, asking them to send flowers to his office for distribution to slum residents. "There are too many sad little eyes in the crowded tenements, where the sunshine means disease and death, not play and vacation, that will close without ever having looked upon a field of daisies," he wrote. His office was soon flooded with flowers, and he needed all the police reporters and some volunteers from the force to give them out.

As he went about lecturing, a Scribner's Magazine editor heard him speak and urged him to write a piece for the magazine. The December 1889 Scribner's carried a capsule version of what later became the book, a nineteen-page illustrated article entitled "How the Other Half Lives."¹⁰

Finally, a letter he received from another journalist encouraging him to expand the article into a book-length treatment of the slum led him to the task of writing the book. During the winter and spring of 1890 he wrote the manuscript at night at home, after his day's work as a police reporter. In November 1890 Scribner's published it, incorporating some of the illustrations from the magazine article and making engravings and halftones from many of Riis's photographs.

The book was well received by critics and welcomed by the general reader. It stated clearly and dramatically what middle-class Americans feared slum conditions were like. In the years before the first World War, How the Other Half Lives was read by all settlement house workers, all social workers, and all Progressive reformers. From the summer of 1890 on, Riis abandoned his regular newspaper work and became a free-lance journalist and active reformer. He went about lecturing on the slum, calling for city parks and playgrounds, urging better tenement regulations and the building of model tenements, working to support a settlement house that bore his name, and writing numerous books and articles. His most famous pupil was Theodore Roosevelt, whom he guided through the slums of New York when the latter became Police Commissioner. Roosevelt later wrote, "How the Other Half Lives had been to me both an enlightenment and an inspiration for which I felt I never could be too grateful."" Jacob Riis died at his summer farm in Massachusetts on May 25, 1914.

There are some antique habits of thought and style which today's reader must understand and overcome if he is to be able to evaluate Riis's descriptions and to appreciate the significance of Riis's appeal for reform. The use of ethnic and racial stereotypes shocks the modern, warweary, and riot-torn sensibility: the greedy, dirty, quarrelsome Jews; the happy-go-lucky, long-suffering Negroes; the home-loving, orderly Germans; the stealthy and secretive Chinese; the exuberant, lighthearted Italians; the somber Bohemians; the dirty Arabs; the thrifty Swiss; the saloon-loving, political Irish. The entire list of phrases rings unpleasant echoes of European nationalism, American nativism, and white racism.¹² These were the stereotypes created by Riis's newspaper audience, the working-class and middle-class native Americans of the late nineteenth century. Because the degree of opprobrium assigned to each group is directly proportional to the distance from Denmark we may assume that Riis, the Danish immigrant, found these American attitudes congenial. Fear of and prejudice against the incoming waves of foreigners are an old American habit, as old as immigration itself, and the political and cultural consequences of this fear have been dealt with by our scholars.¹³ All that needs to be said here is that the modern reader must accommodate himself to the unpleasant fact that in 1890 an openhearted, fair-minded appeal for justice for the poor could be couched in terms of racial and ethnic prejudice as well as individual compassion and understanding.

In addition to stereotyping there is a stylistic device of seeking picturesque you-were-there detail which may distract the modern reader. Riis, like most journalists of his day, imitated the style of Charles Dickens. Both in his vignettes of individuals and in his more general street scenes Riis piles up detail of sight, smell, and touch to give the reader the sensation that he might be there, standing beside the narrator.

For instance, Charles Dickens climbed the stairs of the old brewery in the Five Points on his visit to New York in 1841. "Ascend these pitch-dark stairs," he wrote, "heedful of the false footing on the trembling boards, and grope your way with me into this wolfish den, where neither ray of light nor breath of air, appears to come."¹⁴ Half a century later Jacob Riis leads his reader up the stairs of an old house on Cherry Street, a mere five blocks downtown from the Five Points. "Be a little careful, please! The hall is dark and you might stumble over the children pitching pennies back there. Not that it would hurt them; kicks and cuffs are their daily diet. They have little else. Here where the hall turnsand dives into utter darkness is a step, and another, another. A flight of stairs. You can feel your way if you cannot see it. Close? Yes!"¹⁵ At the top of the stairs there is a family with a dying baby.

The modern sensibility may also be offended by Riis's role as a tour guide, a journalist driving a literary bus full of middle-class American attitudes through the narrow and crowded streets of the ethnic slums of New York. "Down the street comes a file of women carrying enormous bundles of firewood on their heads, loads of decaying vegetables from the market wagons in their aprons, and each a baby at the breast supported by a sort of sling that prevents it from tumbling down. The women do all the carrying, all the work one sees going on in 'the Bend.' The men sit or stand in the streets, on trucks, or in the open doors of the saloons smoking black clay pipes, talking and gesticulating as if forever on the point of coming to blows. Near a particularly boisterous group, a really pretty girl with a string of amber beads twisted artlessly in the knot of her raven hair has been bargaining long and earnestly with an old granny, who presides over a wheel-barrow load of second-hand stockings and faded cotton yarn, industriously darning the biggest holes while she extols the virtues of her stock."¹⁶

This straining for the picturesque was the style of the age. Today it seems but a partial discount against Riis's wide sympathy for the men, women, and children of New York's slums. His basic account was "A story of thousands of devoted lives, laboring earnestly to make the most of their scant opportunities for good; of heroic men and women striving patiently against fearful odds and by their very courage coming off the victors in the battle with the tenement. . . . "¹⁷ And for the poor of New York, all of whom he saw in this light of a struggle for decency, he had one goal and one remedy: to help their family life by decent housing, decent schools, and decent working conditions.

Finally, the modern reader should be forewarned about the historical uniqueness of the place Riis described. Because New York has been for so long the literary center of the nation, and because Riis's book became such a popular text, the Lower East Side in general and Riis's portrayal of it in 1890 in particular have often been taken as representative of American urban poverty. They were not. Riis's slum population was young, its housing was unusually dense, and its centrality gave it a very untypical concentration of crime.

Although Riis stressed the bad sanitation, the high incidence of disease, and the generally lethal quality of the Lower East Side tenements, they were by no means America's worst urban death trap. Other slums levied a higher death toll. The inner wards of Newark, downtown St. Louis, New Orleans, Jane Addams' Chicago Ward 19—all had higher death rates. The mortality of the Lower East Side stood low in relation to these other cities in part because the quarter was inhabited by so many young immigrants and in part because the quarter had so few Negroes, a group whose death rate was always very much higher than that of whites.¹⁸

During Riis's years the Lower East Side was becoming a high-walled city of tenements, but in 1890 it had not yet been rebuilt in that form. As the pictures in this book reveal, physically it did not resemble today's Harlem. Its appalling crowding of the land—densities of 522, 429, and 386 persons per acre in the most crowded wards¹⁹—was achieved by a mixture of new five- and six-story tenements, conversions of old houses, and the filling of every backyard and alley with shacks and shanties. Most city slums in America were not and never have been filled so densely with structures. Jane Addams' Ward 19 in Chicago had a density of 83.5 persons per acre in 1895. Its housing consisted of adaptations of wooden farm structures, small houses of one and a half, two, or three stories placed often several to a narrow lot, one behind the other. Hers was the typical American city or mill town slum ecology. DuBois's Philadelphia Ward 7 had a density of 118 persons per acre in 1890. Its crowding took the English form of three- and four-story row houses on the main streets and tiny two-story rows in the alleys behind. Robert Woods's slum in Boston's South End in 1898 had the densest housing in that city, but only 157 persons per acre. In other words, Riis's Lower East Side was a unique physical setting and therefore a unique ecology of poverty.²⁰

Riis's slum was also a special urban place in that it was a core city slum where the criminals dwelt in large numbers among the poor. This mixture of crime and poverty in How the Other Half Lives joined literary tradition with special urban spatial patterns. Frightening the middle class with the specter of the depravity of the slum was already by Riis's time a much-used style. George Lippard and other popular writers of fiction had portrayed the slum as a terrifying haunt of criminals in order to sell books, while reformers like the New York Council of Hygiene and Charles Loring Brace threatened revolution, riot, and constant criminal harassment in order to encourage people to support their programs.²¹ Riis was, after all, a police reporter, and he did not fail to make the conventional links between the slum, revolution, and criminality. It seems likely that this technique more confirmed the conservative reader in his belief that the poor were depraved and beyond redemption than it galvanized the fearful middle class into action, but American reform has long remained committed to the formula.

The criminals of New York concentrated in the Lower East Side and neighboring areas because this slum was next to the metropolitan shopping, transport, and business core. Here were prey for pickpockets, customers for prostitutes, gamblers, dope peddlers, and all-night joints; here were the stores, shops, trains, and warehouses to be robbed, and here were the offices and factories to be broken into. Moreover, in Manhattan, the police and political bosses, like the police and political bosses of other American cities in the nineties, segregated the criminals, endeavoring to keep them out of the "better" neighborhoods and to concentrate them in certain quarters where they could be controlled and milked for revenue. Although no Jacob Riis wrote of the outer areas of poverty in the American metropolis of the late nineteenth century, there is no reason to believe that residents of these districts or indeed that most of the urban poor lived in criminal-infested areas.

The denomination of the criminal slum as the symbol of all urban poverty had, and still has, unfortunate consequences. In Riis's day it led to Progressive campaigns against crime, vice, and political corruption to the neglect of remedies for poverty. The persistence of this wrongful use of Riis's criminal slum has had the result of encouraging reformers and their audiences to spend their energy on the demeaning philanthropic task of distinguishing between the deserving and undeserving poor.

But Jacob Riis, despite his concentration on criminal elements, his anger at bums and loafers, his racial and ethnic stereotypes, and his use of what is now an antique style of picturesque detail, did manage to convey in his book the central theme that every man, woman, and child of the slum deserved a decent house, a decent job, a decent school, fresh air, clean water, and safety against fire, epidemics, and crime. He never lost sight of these basic urban rights of being human. It is this universal and still unanswered appeal which saves How the Other Half Lives from misinterpretation by its readers and accounts for its unending popularity.

NOTES

¹ "It seemed to me that a reporter's was the highest and noblest of all callings; no one could sift wrong from right as he, and punish the wrong. In that I was right. I have not changed my opinion on that point one whit, and I am sure I never shall. The power of the fact is the mightiest lever of this or any day." Jacob A. Riis, The Making of an American, ed. Roy Lubove (New York, 1966), p. 99.

² Riis, Making of an American, pp. 1-100; idem., The Old Town (New York, 1909).

³ There is a very good biography of Riis: Louise Ware, Jacob A. Riis, Police Reporter, Reformer, Useful Citizen (New York, 1938), and Riis's papers are now at the New York Public Library.

⁴ Ware, Jacob Riis, pp. 40-46.

⁵ Riis, Making of an American, pp. 245-248.

⁶ Lawrence Veiller, Tenement House Reform in New York, 1834-1900, Prepared for the Tenement House Commission of 1900 (New York, 1900), pp. 25-30.

⁷ Riis, Making of an American, p. 246.

⁸Ibid., p. 248.

⁹Ibid., p. 288.

¹⁰Scribner's Magazine, 6 (December 1889), 643-662.

¹¹ Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (New York, 1916), p. 174.

¹² These stereotypes and the harshness of tone toward the down-and-outs did not go unnoticed by reviewers when the book appeared. Ware, Jacob Riis, pp. 74-75.

¹³ John Higham, Strangers in the Land (New Brunswick, 1955).

¹⁴ Charles Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy (London, 1857), p. 89.

¹⁵ Riis, How the Other Half Lives, p. 32.

¹⁶Ibid., pp. 42-43.

¹⁷Ibid., p. 106.

¹⁸ See Bureau of the Census, U.S., Eleventh Census, 1890, vol. XXI: Report on Vital and Social Statistics, part 2, Vital Statistics (Washington, 1896).

¹⁹ Riis, How the Other Half Lives, Appendix, Wards 10, 13, 11.

²⁰ See Residents of Hull House, Hull House Maps and Papers (New York, 1895), pp. 3-19; W. E. Burghardt DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia, 1899), p. 58; Robert A. Woods, ed., The City Wilderness: A Settlement Study (Boston, 1898), p. 61.

²¹ George Lippard, The Quaker City (Philadelphia, 1845) and New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million (Cincinnati, 1853); Citizens' Association of New York, Report of the Council of Hygiene and Public Health upon the Sanitary Condition of the City (New York, 1865); Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years' Work among Them (New York, 1872).