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Title: The Battle With the Slum (Patterson Smith Reprint Series in Criminology, Law Enforcement, and Social Problems. Publication No. 77) by Jacob August Riis ISBN: 0-87585-077-4 Publisher: Patterson Smith Pub. Date: June, 1969 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $25.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: Politics and Poverty
Comment: Though not as heart-rending as "How the Other Half Lives", this book by Riis is important to shed light on how society cleaned up some of the worst slums in US history.

Tammany Hall, the Democratic party machine, was responsible for political patronage jobs that were do-nothing plums; a photo shows the street-cleaning of Tammany broomsmen versus that of a reformer who took over cleaning the precinct's streets. Various charitable societies worked strenuously to ameliorate the worst of the slums, to pass laws requiring light and air in tenements, though landlords were clever in circumventing or perverting the legal requirements (a window in a room could be on an inside wall; the airshaft--a thin passageway between buildings was all the air many apartments got.) Schools were at first overcrowded rooms with no desks, no ventilation and seventy students attempting to learn. Reformers got desks, ventilated buildings, smaller class sizes. This is a fascinating story of how people worked together to try to better an abusive situation in the poorest sections of American cities.

Rating: 5
Summary: Wake up Call
Comment: This book hilights the lows of urban life around the turn of the century, a time when immigration and migration were happening all around. City life in america had a huge underside with noise, crime, poverty, and squalor. Racial and ethnic conflicts were previlant. Riis' photos capture this side of city life in America.