4. Essa descrição do Lower East Side, a favela
de Nova Iorque na virada do século:
“The Lower East Side of New York was one of the
most densely populated square miles on the face of the earth in the 1890s. The
photo-essayist Jacob Riis famously described it as a world of bad smells,
scooting rats, ash barrels, dead goats, and little boys drinking beer out of
milk cartons. Six thousand people might be packed into a single city block,
many in tenements with sanitary facilities so foul as to repel anyone who dared
approach. City health inspectors called the neighborhood “the suicide ward”;
one tenement was referred to—in an official New York City Health Department
report, no less—as an “out and out hog pen.”
Diarrhea epidemics blazed through the slums each
summer, killing thousands of children every week. In the sweatshops of what was
then known as “Jewtown,” children with smallpox and typhus dozed in heaps of
garments destined for fashionable Broadway shops. Desperate mothers paced the
streets trying to soothe their feverish children, and white mourning cloths
hung from every story of every building. A third of the children born in the
slums died before their fifth birthday.”
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