Quotes About Tenement

in 1890, of Jacob A. Riis's How the Other Half Lives. A pioneering urban journalist, Riis, himself an immigrant from Denmark, had taken powerful photographs of tenement life.

I see good men performing wonderful deeds, smoking marijuana and feeding LSD to cops, telling fairytales about the future. Spectacular things, no doubt. But where? In the White House? On Wall Street? No. These wonderful things happen in tenement buildings, in the slums, in dying cities. Forgive me if I don't expect these, uh, these—great things—to change the course of history.

While the justices were well intentioned, they interpreted law solely from the vantage point of the propertied classes. "They knew nothing whatever of tenement house conditions," he charged, "they knew nothing whatever of the needs, or of the life and labor, of three-fourths of their fellow-citizens in great cities." In

Of the Wobblies, most probably, but not just them. Of hope, perhaps, that her country might rise to the challenge, might override the legacies of slavery, Indian slaughters, and tenement squalor and actually place itself at the forefront of human progress.

More than a food, the pickle was a kind of drug for tenement children, who were still too young for whiskey.

Upon the clothes behind the tenement, That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines, Linking each flat, but to each indifferent, Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines.

America is a post-Christian nation only in the sense that we have built a tenement on the foundation of a palace.

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail—its roof may shake—the wind may blow through it—the storm may enter—the rain may enter—but the King of England cannot enter—all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!

I grew up on the south side of Chicago, most of that time on welfare. My mother and sister and I used to live with my grandparents and various cousins. We shared a two-bedroom tenement, and the three of us slept in one of those bedrooms and had a set of bunk beds.

The tenement house is the enemy of modesty, the enemy of virtue, the enemy of patriotism. Home is where the virtues grow. I would like to see the law so that every home, to a small amount, should be free not only from sale for debts, but should be absolutely free from taxation, so that every man could have a home. Then we will have a nation of patriots.

Houses, housetops, like human beings have wonderful character. The lives of housetops. The wear of the seasons. The country is beautiful, young, growing things. The majesty of trees. The backs of tenement houses are living documents.

Within half an hour Frank was guiding their convertible through the crowded streets of the grimy waterfront section of Southport. Reaching Dock Street, Joe began to look at the house numbers. "There it is!" he exclaimed. "Pull up, Frank." Twenty-four Dock Street was a ramshackle tenement. As the boys walked through the open front door, a stocky man dressed in dirty work clothes brushed rudely by them into the hallway.

I was brought up in a tenement house in a working district. We didn't even have a bathroom! We had a gaslight in the hallway and a black-and-white TV.

It was great being brought up in a Glasgow working-class tenement. It wasn't miserable, and it wasn't poverty stricken. It felt very safe, full of delights.

We are the people in cheap hotels and tenement housing walking down side alleys talking to ourselves. We are the people the pushers the whores the crackheads the gunrunners the bangers the pimps the homeless the outlaws the crippled the freaks the damned. Drink to us my friends for we are the forgotten.

Gould is a night wanderer, and he has put down descriptions of dreadful things he has seen on dark New York streets – descriptions, for example, of the herds of big gray rats that come out in the hours before dawn in some neighborhoods of the lower East Side and Harlem and unconcernedly walk the sidewalks. 'I sometimes believe that these rats are not rats at all,' he says, 'but the damned and aching souls of tenement landlords.

He led me out of that tangle of alleys in another direction, it seems, for when we sighted a lamp-post we were in a half-familiar street with monotonous rows of mingled tenement blocks and old houses. Charter Street, it turned out to be, but I was too flustered to notice just where we hit

The fellow must be a relentless enemy of all mankind to take such glee in the torture of brain and flesh and the degradation of the mortal tenement.

I remember my own life as a small boy, son of Jewish immigrants, in a janitor's flat on Orchard and Stanton streets on the Lower East Side of New York City. My father made pants and doubled as janitor of a tenement - before he made janitoring at $30 a month, plus rooms, a career.

You will die a worse death if you do not leave my domain," a voice thundered down from the third story of the old tenement. "I am a servant of the Sacred Fire, the wielder of the flame of Arnor—" "So I should call you Gandalf?

The islanders, while employed in erecting this tenement, reminded me of a colony of beavers at work. To be sure, they were hardly as silent and demure as those wonderful creatures, nor were they by any means as diligent. To tell the truth they were somewhat inclined to be lazy, but a perfect tumult of hilarity prevailed; and they worked together so unitedly, and seemed actuated by such an instinct of friendliness, that it was truly beautiful to behold. Not

However, my first visits to the tenement-house districts in question made me feel that, whatever the theories might be, as a matter of practical common sense I could not conscientiously vote for the continuance of the conditions which I saw. These conditions rendered it impossible for the families of the tenement-house workers to live so that the children might grow up fitted for the exacting duties of American citizenship.

On January 24, 1998, a century-old tenement building still in use and located at 172 Stanton Street was demolished by the City of New York

Upon the clothes behind the tenement,That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines,Linking each flat, but to each indifferent,Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines.