Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New YorkLuc Sante's Low Life is a portrait of America's greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues, and robber barons, but the messy, turbulent, often murderous story of the city's slums; the teeming streets--scene of innumerable cons and crimes whose cramped and overcrowded housing is still a prominent feature of the cityscape. Low Life voyages through Manhattan from four different directions. Part One examines the actual topography of Manhattan from 1840 to 1919; Part Two, the era's opportunities for vice and entertainment--theaters and saloons, opium and cocaine dens, gambling and prostitution; Part Three investigates the forces of law and order which did and didn't work to contain the illegalities; Part Four counterposes the city's tides of revolt and idealism against the city as it actually was. Low Life provides an arresting and entertaining view of what New York was actually like in its salad days. But it's more than simpy a book about New York. It's one of the most provocative books about urban life ever written--an evocation of the mythology of the quintessential modern metropolis, which has much to say not only about New York's past but about the present and future of all cities. |
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In its prime, the tenement was to Manhattan as the tree is to the forest, the basic
and irreducible unit of measure. ... Such a thing is difficult to imagine now that
tenements are confined to stray clumps along the avenues, or gathered into
certain ...
Before the late tenement phase lay decades' worth of unbelievable rookeries.
What all sorts of tenements have in common is the principle of containing the
greatest number of people in the least amount of space. The basic unit of
calculation ...
The first reliable survey of tenements, that of 1864, reveals the presence of more
than 15,000 such houses in Manhattan. There were more than 18,000 in 1867;
more than 20,000 by 1872. The typical tenement of the mid-nineteenth century ...
A survey cited by Jacob Riis in the 1890s distinguished between the respective
dangers of single tenements and double-deckers: the mortality rate for the First
Ward, for example, was 29.08 per thousand in the former case and 61.97 per ...
They were characteristic of the way life stretched, by necessity, out of the interiors
of tenement apartments as far as possible into ... They could act as an alternative
sidewalk, too, on streets dominated by rows of identically scaled tenements.
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LibraryThing Review
Comentariu Utilizator - datrappert - LibraryThingIt took me much longer than it should have to finish this book, because I was constantly putting it down to look up people on Wikipedia or to track down referenced books on Project Gutenberg or ... Citiți recenzia completă
LibraryThing Review
Comentariu Utilizator - EricCostello - LibraryThingA generally good book, with a handful of flaws. Sante, in this volume, gives an oversight of what New York City was like from roughly the 1830s to the end of World War I, going through various aspects ... Citiți recenzia completă
Cuprins
| xxv | |
Part 2 Sporting Life | ciii |
Part 3 The Arm | ccxxxix |
Part 4 The Invisible City | 107 |
Afterword | 363 |
A Note on Sources | 381 |
Notes | 391 |
Index | 403 |