Status Updates From How the Other Half Lives: S...

45

- the “Melican Joss,” the almighty dollar."
Moving on the Jewtown!

"There was another inscription overhead [on a wall in a shrine] that needed no interpreter. In familiar English letters, copied bodily from the trade dollar, was the sentiment: “In God we trust.” The priest pointed to it with undisguised pride and attempted an explanation, from which I gathered that the inscription was intended as a diplomatic courtesy, a delicate international compliment to -

- "One thing about them was conspicuous: their scrupulous neatness. It is the distinguishing mark of Chinatown, outwardly and physically. It is not altogether by chance the Chinaman has chosen the laundry as his distinctive field." HA!
Once again in this chapter Riis proves his writing is engaging, immersive, laugh out loud funny at times and feels true to life although surely I can't confirm, only hope.

Chapter IX Chinatown. Apparently NYC Chinatown is as uninteresting today as it were back then. It is populated by Chinese merchants along with their young, white wives, as none came married from abroad. Apparently the girls have succumbed to some sort of opium addiction and they along with their husbands worship the pipe. -

I also enjoyed the distinction between the tramp and the tough. "The tramp doctorine that the world owes him a living makes him a theif; of the tramp a coward".

The Raid on the Stale Beer Dives chapter describes a nocturnal police raid on an illegal bar where stale beer, touched up w different substances to revive its taste, is serves. Riis describes an interesting practice where on cold nights, the bar keeper would gather up some tramps, sit them around the fire for customers to buy them a sandwich or a beer out of pity, and the both of them come out ahead.