Long ago French Writer Francois Rabelais wrote: “One half of the world does not know how the other half lives.” It was from this quote that Jacob August Riis derived the title of his renowned book How the Other Half Lives (Riis 5). The goal of Riis’ work was to bring the plight of the people who lived in the ‘tenements’ to the attention of middle and upper class New Yorkers, and appeal to them to do something about this (Riis 5). Jacob Riis was born in Ribe, Denmark and was the third of fifteen children. He had a happy childhood but experienced tragedy at age eleven when his little brother drowned. He documented later in his life that his mother never recovered from this (Buk-Swienty 39). Riis immigrated to the United States from his native Denmark in 1870 aboard a steamship, ‘The Iowa.’ He was heartbroken before he left when the love of his life Elizabeth refused his marriage proposal (Buk Swienty 38). He arrived in New York City without a concrete plan of what he wanted to do. He spent his first couple of months living in immigrant hostels, crowded with people new to the United States just like him. He was skilled in woodwork, and worked as a carpenter. He was popular because he charged low prices (Buk-Swienty 55). Riis was offered a short-term job as city editor of the “New York Tribune.” He went on to become a police reporter at Mulberry Street. In this position he dealt mainly with investigative reporting and helped solve numerous cases. He also did a lot of work in the slums, about the conditions in which people lived (Buk-Swienty 137). Riis defined a tenement as “a house occupied by three or more families, living independently and doing their cooking on the premises” (Riis 12). This also included flats. Tenements were usually made up of about four to six stories high and with a store on the first floor (Riis 12). The first tenements were not built purposely to house poor people or so many of them. Aristocrats known as the Knickerbockers first inhabited them. They began to relocate after the huge immigration that followed the War of 1812 (Riis 7). Riis referred to this immigration as “the nineteenth century drift of the population to the cities (Riis 5).” More dwellings were needed to house this new influx of people, and after the Knickerbockers moved, real-estate agents and boarding house keepers acquired these homes. These greedy landlords knew demand for homes was high, and exploited this by packing rooms with as many people as possible to make money (Riis 5). They partitioned the large rooms of the tenements into several smaller rooms, which were dark and lacked ventilation. These dwellings became breeding grounds for diseases. After the division of the rooms into smaller ones, rent prices went way down, inviting people from all over to move in. Most of these people were poor working class people who lived from paycheck to paycheck. They were usually dirty and had bad habits (Riis 8). Tenement owners set their prices high enough to survive any damage that would be done to the dwellings. They did not expect any better from these people and did not care to renovate, allowing the buildings to take the damage as they could. A cholera epidemic that broke loose in the city of New York had a field day in the breeding grounds that were the tenements. This only added to the already squalid conditions the tenants had to endure. The cholera outbreak on the other hand brought attention to the conditions of the slums after the close of the war (Riis 11). The issue of the tenements gathered prominence throughout the 1870’s and 80’s. Numerous articles on slum life were published in prominent magazines, and these got the middle and upper class talking about the issue. Two influential books depicting the state of the slums were written before Riis: The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872) and Our Country: It’s Possible Future and its Present Decay (1885) both provided an insight into the terrible conditions of the slums but, “depicted the inhabitants largely in terms of the pejorative stereotypes. (Hug 48)” Due to increased public awareness on the state of the tenements, as a result of these works, Riis finally felt confident he had a sympathetic audience to hear him out. In the late 1880’s he finally decided to gather photographic evidence to help get his message across (Hug 48). In the beginning people refused to hear Riis speak, including a number of churches, and this really exasperated him. People believ