How the Other Half Lives

Riis accompanies local police in a raid on stale-beer dives in Mulberry Bend. The content of stale-beer, including drugs, is illegal, as are the seedy establishments, sometimes called “two-cent restaurants,” that sell it. A photograph (“An All-Night Two-Cent Restaurant, in ‘the Bend’”) shows nearly a dozen seated patrons of one such establishment, two of whom, in the foreground, appear passed out or sleeping with their heads and arms resting on a table. To Riis, the “filth and stench were utterly unbearable” (73). All told, police arrested 275 “tramps”—people who frequent these dives in search of resources—and charged them with vagrancy. The Mulberry Street Bend is “the real home of trampdom” (76). Some “tramps” are so destitute that they cannot even pay for entrance into a stale-beer dive, so they sit outside in the alley. A photo (“The Tramp”) depicts one such person: a man seated on the rung of a ladder smoking a clay pipe. Riis attributes “trampdom” to “ill-applied charity and idleness” (78). He is always careful to distinguish between impoverished and unemployed people whom he regards as lazy, and those he describes as the “honest” working impoverished, for whom he has boundless sympathy.