Learning Targets:
I can cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.
I can determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative, connotative, and technical meanings; analyze how an author uses and refines the meaning of a key term or terms over the course of a text.
I determine two or more central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to provide a complex analysis; provide an objective summary of the text.
I can read and comprehend literary nonfiction.
I can draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.
I can integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats, including visually, quantitatively, and orally.
Reminder: vocabulary quiz on Friday. If you are on a
field trip, you will need to make arrangements before
hand; otherwise the grade is a zero.
In class: class reading of Riis'
"The Genesis of the Tenement"
(class handout / copy below)
Accompanying text-based questions (class handout / copy below) Due at the close of class.
I. Genesis of the Tenement
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HELL’S
KITCHEN AND SEBASTOPOL.
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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 tenant-houses 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.
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It was the stir and
bustle of trade, together with the tremendous immigration that followed upon
the war of 1812 that dislodged them. In thirty-five 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
real-estate agents and boarding-house keepers; and here, says the report to
the Legislature of 1857, when the evils engendered had excited just alarm,
“in its beginning, the tenant-house 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 become 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 rôle, 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 made of them while they lasted. Neatness, order, clean-liness,
were never dreamed of in connection with the tenant-house system, as it
spread its localities from year to year; while reckless slovenliness,
discontent, privation, and ignorance were left to work out their invariable
results, until the entire premises reached the level of tenant-house
dilapidation, containing, but sheltering not, the miserable hordes that crowded
beneath mouldering, water-rotted 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.”
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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. The question was not
always asked, judging from complaints made by a contemporary witness, that
the old buildings were “often carried up to a great height without regard to
the strength of the foundation walls.”
It was rent the owner was after; nothing was
said in the contract about either the safety or the comfort of the tenants.
The garden gate no longer swung on its rusty hinges. The shell-paved walk had
become an alley; what the rear house had left of the garden, a “court.”
Plenty such are yet to be found in the Fourth Ward, with here and there one
of the original rear tenements.
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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 houses 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 under-letting.”
With the appearance of the
middleman, wholly irresponsible, and utterly reckless and unrestrained, began
the era of tenement building which turned out such blocks as Gotham Court,
where, in one cholera epidemic that scarcely touched the clean wards, the
tenants died at the rate of one hundred and ninety-five to the thousands of
population; which forced the general mortality of the city up from 1 in 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 tenement-houses in which are
lodged several hundred people that have a prorata allotment
of ground area scarcely equal to two square yards upon the city lot,
court-yards and all included.”
The tenement-house 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 other lands and other days
had never contrived to herd much more than half that number within the same
space. The greatest crowding of Old London was at the rate of 175,816. Swine
roamed the streets and gutters as their principal scavengers. 1
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 had 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 beings to people a city, and enough human labor to sustain
it.” And yet experts had testified that, as compared with uptown, rents were
from twenty-five to thirty per cent, higher in the worst slums of the lower
wards, with such accommodations as were enjoyed, for instance, by a “family
with boarders” in Cedar Street, who fed hogs in the cellar that contained
eight or ten loads of manure; or a one room 12 x 12 with five families living
in it, comprising twenty persons of both sexes and all ages, with only two
beds, without partition, screen, chair, or table.” The rate of rent has been
successfully maintained to the present day, though the hog at least has been
eliminated.
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Lest anybody flatter
himself with the notion that these were evils of a day that is happily past
and may safely be forgotten, let me mention here three very recent instances
of tenement-house life that came under my notice. One was the burning of a
rear house in Mott Street, from appearances one of the original tenant-houses
that made their owners rich.
The fire made homeless ten
families, who had paid an average of $5 a month for their mean little
cubby-holes. The owner himself told me that it was fully insured
for $800, though it brought him in $600 a year rent. He evidently considered
himself especially entitled to be pitied for losing such valuable property.
Another was the case of a hard-working family of man and wife, young people
from the old country, who took poison together in a Crosby Street tenement
because they were “tired.”
There was no other explanation,
and none was needed when I stood in the room in which they had lived. It was
in the attic with sloping ceiling and a single window so far out on the roof
that it seemed not to belong to the place at all. With scarcely room enough
to turn around in they had been compelled to pay five dollars and a half a
month in advance. There were four such rooms in that attic, and together they
brought in as much as many a handsome little cottage in a pleasant part of
Brooklyn.
The third instance was that of a
colored family of husband, wife, and baby in a wretched rear rookery in West
Third Street. Their rent was eight dollars and a half for a single room on the
top-story, so small that I was unable to get a photograph of it even by
placing the camera outside the open door. Three short steps across either way
would have measured its full extent.
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TENEMENT
OF 1863, FOR TWELVE FAMILIES ON EACH FLAT 2 D.
dark L. light. H. halls.
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Name____________________________ Jacob Riis “The Genesis of the Tenement”
Please respond to the following in complete, text-based
sentences.
1.
What is the literary allusion employed by Cain
in the first paragraph?
______________________________________________________________________________________________
2.
Who were the “proud Knickerbockers” and what was
their country of origin?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
3.
How were the “necessities of the poor” exploited
by their “wealthier neighbors”?
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
4.
Give two examples of “tenant house dilapidation.”
_____________________________________
______________________________________________
5.
How could estate owners “make a greater
percentage of profit?”
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
6.
Describe the cholera epidemic. ________________________________________________________
7.
How was the death of a child recorded by the
Bureau of Statistics?
___________________________________________________________________________________________
8.
How did tenement rents compare to uptown rents?
__________________________________________________________________________________________
9.
How did the “hard-working couple from the old
country” succumb to their brutal situation?
__________________________________________________________________________________________
10.
Describe the living circumstances of the “colored
family” and why they could not be photographed?
____________________________________________________________________________________________
How the Other Half
Lives vocabulary please define the following words
1. promiscuous
2. garret-
3. slovenliness
4. cupidity
5. maxim
6. to augur-
7. rumpus-
8. perambulate
9. hegira
10. turpitude
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