How the Other Half Lived

"How the Other Half Lives" is the title of a book, published in 1890, by author and social reformer, Jacob Riis. The New York writer photographed and wrote about the deplorable filth and crowded conditions of New York's Lower East Side. This was during the years of the greatest influx of immigrants into the United States in its history, and the Lower East Side was the most densely populated piece of real estate in the country (possibly even the world) at that time.

A trip to the New York Historical Society a week ago confirmed what I had suspected since undertaking some family research: that some of my family members had lived in the squalor that Riis's photo essay depicted. With the aid of maps, we identified the address of my paternal great-grandparents on Broome Street. "A traditional dumbbell tenement," the librarian told me. "How do you know?" I asked, looking at the drawings. "You can tell be the shape of the building," he said, pointing out the hand-drawn indentations that look like a dumbbell weight in the center of the rectangle. "This was one of the bad ones, wasn't it?" I asked.

"The worst of the worst," he replied. "Have you seen Jacob Riis's pictures?"

I nodded.

"It was like that."

After boarding the subway at Union Square, emerging from the subway station at Delancey and Essex Streets is like stepping into another world. Union Square is not without its homeless and a few obvious addicts, but it is by and large populated by middle and upper middle class parents, college students, and fifty-somethings. Those on the Lower East Side, before you get into the section that is now heavily Chinese, remind me of the people from my childhood on the streets of downtown Pittsburgh. It is a mix of those who have lost limbs or eyes, whose clothing is literally threadbare, whose "down and out" station in life is clearly visible in their vacant stares and lined faces. It is a reminder that in a land of plenty, when we can find the money to build military bases on foreign soil, we have marginalized those whose luck has run out.

From everything I have been able to research, that visible evidence of despair most likely characterized my great-grandparents. After enduring filth and degradation in steerage to come across the Atlantic Ocean in the belief they were embarking on a a journey to a better life, they quickly discovered that America's streets, far from being paved with gold, were strewn with animal manure and human waste. While some of their peers threw up their hands in despair and returned to Russia and Eastern Europe, my great-grandparents found each other, married, and had children. Their middle son, my grandfather, was the only one of the three boys to have children of his own.

This is what I marvel at: that it has taken three generations for the nightmarish conditions of being an immigrant to materialize into the "American dream." Yet, I cannot help but wonder, as I get ready to become a grandparent myself for the second time, if there will still be some wisps of that dream for my grandchildren to take hold of.

I grew up with the tacit understanding from my parents that they desired that I have a better life than the one they had experienced. I was pushed to think big career-wise, and my parents were a not a little unconcerned when I opted for a marriage and a "lifestyle" ahead of income. In the days of my 20s and 30s, the option to choose lifestyle in the belief that the income would take care of itself was a carryover from the post-World War II years, when we believed, as a nation, that our prosperity was never-ending.

Now, in my 50s, I rue some of those naive decisions, recognizing that, as the Bible has timelessly warned, wealth (even a nation's wealth) is fleeting. I watch my children step with great confidence into worlds I wanted to enter, but which, at the time, were closed to me either because of my gender or because of a lack of opportunity to demonstrate my talent. But I also know that another reason these worlds have opened for my children is because money has been invested to democratize access to careers that were previously closed to "the masses." Nevertheless, as I look at our crumbling infrastructure, see the creeping federalization of our financial and social services markets, and wonder if we will be choked by regulations that do not necessarily "reform" so much as they hinder, I wonder whether my grandchildren will find themselves pushed back in time to an era that my parents were anxious to see their children avoid.

The ascent out of poverty is difficult because it is just that - a climb - an effort that has gravity operating against it. The descent back into poverty, because it goes downhill, is relatively faster. We have taken much for granted over the last two generations. It is time to reconsider - will our children's children enjoy the prosperity we have experienced, or will they chronicle our lives as "how the older ones lived"?