How the Other Half Lives: Situational Irony 1 key example

In Chapter 4, Riis recounts the story of a landlord whose tenements receive the nickname "Blind Man's Alley" on account of the fact that many blind, impoverished men come to find homes there. Riis quite clearly chooses to relate this story to his readership on account of the glaring situational irony it introduces:

"Old Dan" made a big fortune—he told me once four hundred thousand dollars—out of his alley and the surrounding tenements, only to grow blind himself in extreme old age, sharing in the end the chief hardship of the wretched beings whose lot he had stubbornly refused to better that he might increase his wealth.

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