How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1890, and it was a book that changed America. Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant and police reporter for the New York Tribune, had spent a decade covering the slums of the Lower East Side, and he had seen things that most middle-class New Yorkers could not imagine: families of ten living in windowless rooms, children sleeping in alleys, sweatshops operating in unventilated cellars, disease spreading through buildings with no plumbing or light.
Riis’s innovation was to combine three forms of evidence: written reportage (vivid, specific, emotionally compelling), statistics (death rates, density figures, income data), and — most revolutionary — photographs. Riis was among the first journalists to use flash photography (the newly invented magnesium flash powder) to document interiors, and his images of dark tenement rooms, sleeping vagrants in police lodging houses, and children in sweatshops had an impact that words alone could not have achieved. The photographs made poverty visible to people who had never seen it.
The book’s moral argument is direct: the tenements are breeding grounds of crime, disease, and vice not because their inhabitants are morally inferior but because the conditions of their lives make decency impossible. “The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat.” Riis insisted that the Other Half was not alien or exotic but human — and that their suffering was the direct result of the Other Half’s indifference.
The book’s influence was immediate and lasting. Theodore Roosevelt — then a young politician — read it and sought Riis out, beginning a friendship that would shape Roosevelt’s reform career. The Tenement House Act of 1901 was a direct result of the public awareness Riis created. And the tradition of photojournalistic social reform that Riis inaugurated continues to this day.
Collecting How the Other Half Lives
First edition (Scribner’s, New York, 1890): Cloth binding with seventeen halftone photographs and numerous drawings. A landmark of American social history.
Market values:
- First edition, good condition: $500–$2,000
- With original photographs in good condition: premium
- Later editions (numerous): $20–$80
- Dover reprint (complete with photographs): $8–$15