“How the Other Half Lives” by Jacob Riis (excerpted)
Where Mulberry
Street crooks like...is “the Bend,” the foul core of New York’s slums...The
city authorities, moved by the angry protests of ten years of sanitary reform
effort, have decided that it is too much and must come down. Another Paradise
Park will take its place and let in sunlight and air to work such
transformation as at the Five Points, around the corner of the next block.
Never was change more urgently needed. Around “the Bend” cluster the bulk of
the tenements that are stamped as altogether bad, even by the optimists of the
Health Department. Incessant raids cannot keep down the crowds that make them
their home. In the scores of back alleys, of stable lanes and hidden byways, of
which the rent collector alone can keep track, they share such shelter as the
ramshackle structures afford with every kind of abomination rifled from the
dumps and ash-barrels of the city. Here, too, shunning the light, skulks the
unclean beast of dishonest idleness. “The Bend” is the home of the tramp as
well as the rag-picker.
“Our National Parks” by John Muir (excerpted)
The tendency
nowadays to wander in wildernesses is delightful to see. Thousands of tired,
nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the
mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks
and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating
rivers, but as fountains of life. Awakening from the stupefying effects of the
vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury, they are trying as best
they can to mix and enrich their own little ongoings with those of Nature, and
to get rid of rust and disease. Briskly venturing and roaming...jumping from
rock to rock, feeling the life of them, learning the songs of them, panting in
whole-souled exercise, and rejoicing in deep, long-drawn breaths of pure
wildness. This is fine and natural and full of promise. So also is the growing
interest in the care and preservation of forests and wild places in general,
and in the half wild parks and gardens of towns.
No comments:
Post a Comment