The belief that every man’s experience ought to be worth something to the community from which he drew it, no matter what that experience may be, so long as it was gleaned along the line of some decen...

“With gates of silver and bars of gold Ye have fenced my sheep from their father’s fold; I have heard the dropping of their tears In heaven these eighteen hundred years.” “O Lord and Master, not ours ...

Long ago it was said that “one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.” That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the str...

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....

The dread of advancing cholera, with the guilty knowledge of the harvest field that awaited the plague in New York’s slums, pricked the conscience of the community into action soon after the close of ...

When once I asked the agent of a notorious Fourth Ward alley how many people might be living in it I was told: One hundred and forty families, one hundred Irish, thirty-eight Italian, and two that spo...

Down below Chatham Square, in the old Fourth Ward, where the cradle of the tenement stood, we shall find New York’s Other Half at home, receiving such as care to call and are not afraid. Not all of it...

Certainly a picturesque, if not very tidy, element has been added to the population in the “assisted” Italian immigrant who claims so large a share of public attention, partly because he keeps coming ...

Where Mulberry Street crooks like an elbow within hail of the old depravity of the Five Points, is “the Bend,” foul core of New York’s slums. Long years ago the cows coming home from the pasture trod ...

Midnight roll-call was over in the Elizabeth Street police-station, but the reserves were held under orders. A raid was on foot, but whether on the Chinese fan-tan games, on the opium joints of Mott a...

When it comes to the question of numbers with this tramps’ army, another factor of serious portent has to be taken into account: the cheap lodging-houses. In the caravansaries that line Chatham Street...

Between the tabernacles of Jewry and the shrines of the Bend, Joss has cheekily planted his pagan worship of idols, chief among which are the celestial worshipper’s own gain and lusts. Whatever may be...

The tenements grow taller, and the gaps in their ranks close up rapidly as we cross the Bowery and, leaving Chinatown and the Italians behind, invade the Hebrew quarter. Baxter Street, with its interm...

Anything like an exhaustive discussion of the economical problem presented by the Tenth Ward13 is beset by difficulties that increase in precise proportion to the efforts put forth to remove them. I h...

Evil as the part is which the tenement plays in Jewtown as the pretext for circumventing the law that was made to benefit and relieve the tenant, we have not far to go to find it in even a worse role....

The color line must be drawn through the tenements to give the picture its proper shading. The landlord does the drawing, does it with an absence of pretence, a frankness of despotism, that is nothing...

There is another line not always so readily drawn in the tenements, yet the real boundary line of the Other Half: the one that defines the “flat.” The law does not draw it at all, accounting all flats...

The problem of the children becomes, in these swarms, to the last degree perplexing. Their very number make one stand aghast. I have already given instances of the packing of the child population in E...

First among these barriers is the Foundling Asylum. It stands at the very outset of the waste of life that goes on in a population of nearly two millions of people; powerless to prevent it, though it ...

Not all the barriers erected by society against its nether life, not the labor of unnumbered societies for the rescue and relief of its outcast waifs, can dam the stream of homelessness that issues fr...

Where God builds a church the devil builds next door⁠—a saloon, is an old saying that has lost its point in New York. Either the devil was on the ground first, or he has been doing a good deal more in...

The “growler” stood at the cradle of the tough. It bosses him through his boyhood apprenticeship in the “gang,” and leaves him, for a time only, at the door of the jail that receives him to finish his...

Of the harvest of tares, sown in iniquity and reaped in wrath, the police returns tell the story. The pen that wrote the “Song of the Shirt” is needed to tell of the sad and toil-worn lives of New Yor...

The reader who has followed with me the fate of the Other Half thus far, may not experience much of a shock at being told that in eight years 135,595 families in New York were registered as asking or ...

Pauperdom is to blame for the unjust yoking of poverty with punishment, “charities” with “correction,” in our municipal ministering to the needs of the Nether Half. The shadow of the workhouse points ...

A man stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street the other day, looking gloomily at the carriages that rolled by, carrying the wealth and fashion of the avenues to and from the big stor...

In twenty years what has been done in New York to solve the tenement-house problem? The law has done what it could. That was not always a great deal, seldom more than barely sufficient for the moment....

What, then, are the bald facts with which we have to deal in New York? That we have a tremendous, ever swelling crowd of wage-earners which it is our business to house decently. That it is not housed ...

Statistics of population were left out of the text in the hope that the results of this year’s census would be available as a basis for calculation before the book went to press. They are now at hand,...

Tweed was born and bred in a Fourth Ward tenement. ↩ Forty percent was declared by witnesses before a Senate Committee to be a fair average interest on tenement property. Instances were given of its b...