| Five Cents a Spot, Observing tenement housing,
Jacob Riis expressed the tragedy of the urban poor: "What squalor and degradation
in habit these dens the health officer's know. . . .From midnight until
far in the small hours of the morning the policeman's thundering rap on
closed doors is heard. . . .In a room not thirteen feet either way slept
twelve men and women, two or three in bunks set in a sort of alcove, the
reset on the floor. . . .Most of the men were lodgers, who slept for five
cents a spot." Source: Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives
(1890). |
