Riis opens by distinguishing between a flat and a tenement, noting that a flat has a locked door, which signifies “the first step” toward “privacy” and thus raises the flat above the tenement (159). A sketch (“The Open Door”) shows an older woman carrying a basket and walking up stairs, ironically toward a closed door. The meaning is this: in tenements “the door-bell” is “extinct as the dodo,” and yet “well-paid labor puts its stamp on a tenement even in spite of the open-door, and usually soon supplies the missing bell” (159-60). Riis marvels at the fact that some tenants have risen above their surroundings, but these resilient souls are few in number and should not deceive readers into believing that the problem in the tenements originates with the tenants themselves. Even in the newer tenements, dominated by Irish and German immigrants, life “does not seem worth the living” (162). Another sketch (“Bird’s Eye View of an East Side Tenement Block [From a Drawing by Charles F. Wingate, Esq.]) shows a total of 42 tenement buildings, each between four and six stories high, crammed together on a single block. So dreary are the scenes in such places and so starved for beautiful things are its residents that a simple flower garden “does the work of a dozen police clubs” (165). In the summer the hot weather is unbearable. July and August bring “death to an army of little ones whom the doctor’s skill is powerless to save” (166). An untitled photograph shows the “white badge of mourning,” a piece of white cloth or linen hanging “from every second door” where sick children languish (166). Epidemics such as measles prove “fatal among the children of the poor” (167). Considering cramped conditions and deadly diseases among numerous other ills common in the tenements, Riis argues for taller buildings.

The second half of the chapter features two photographs. The first (“In Poverty Gap, West Twenty-Eighth St. An English Coal Heaver’s Home”) shows a father, mother, and two children, one seated on the father’s lap. The room is small and dark with no bed in sight, only blankets on the floor. The faces of all reveal “the stony resignation of helpless despair” (168). A second photo (“The Trench in the Potter’s Field”) shows workers placing coffins in a mass grave. Together, these photographs illustrate the plight of the “common herd.” Hundreds gradually starve to death each day. Out of desperation, many turn to alcohol. Some are evicted. A sketch (“Dispossessed”) depicts one such eviction, though Riis notes that it might be better for the tenants if more of them were forced from the tenements. When life finally ends, impoverished individuals often insist on “utterly ruinous” and “expensive funerals,” only to watch as their loved ones are put to rest in a trench (177).