Children of the Tenements was published by Macmillan in 1903, and it represents Riis’s most direct attempt to humanize the immigrants he championed — not through statistics or photographs but through stories. The book collects his tales of tenement children: some based on real individuals he encountered during his reporting, others fictionalized composites drawn from years of observation.
The stories depict children of every immigrant group on the Lower East Side — Italian, Jewish, Irish, German, Chinese — living in conditions of extreme poverty but displaying the resilience, humor, and ingenuity that Riis consistently found among the poor. There are stories of children who work in sweatshops, who sell newspapers on street corners, who care for younger siblings while their parents labor, who navigate the dangerous streets of the slums with a street wisdom that both impresses and horrifies.
Riis’s purpose is polemical: he wants his middle-class readers to see these children as children — not as statistics, not as potential criminals, not as alien creatures from an incomprehensible world — and to recognize that their suffering is not inevitable but the result of policies and indifference that could be changed. The sentimental mode (which Riis adopted deliberately, knowing his audience) may seem dated, but the underlying argument — that children deserve better than what poverty gives them — remains as urgent as ever.
Collecting Children of the Tenements
First edition (Macmillan, New York, 1903): Cloth binding, illustrated.
Market values:
- First edition, good condition: $30–$80
- Later editions: $8–$20