Children of the Tenements

Forty short pieces drawn from Jacob Riis’s years as a police reporter on New York’s Mulberry Street, collected by Macmillan in 1903. Riis says plainly in his preface that he could never invent even a small part of a plot, that a story had to come to him complete before he could tell it, and that nine out of ten of these came fresh from the life of the people. Most first ran in the Evening Sun, and some had already appeared in an earlier gathering called Out of Mulberry Street. The titles show the territory: The Rent Baby, Death comes to Cat Alley, The Christening in Bottle Alley, Heroes who Fight Fire, John Gavin Misfit, Skippy of Scrabble Alley. Christmas recurs often. Some titles and passages carry the ethnic and racial language of 1903 and read harshly now.