Tenements and Scale

This topic is another rabbit hole I went down, starting with the HABS/HAER index entry for “tenement.” There are 36 surveys with that tag, none in New York. That’s fine – New York tenements have certainly been documented well enough – but the buildings in the surveys barely look like tenements to a New Yorker. Many of them are rowhouses or even single private houses. On the other hand, the picture above, taken by Lewis Hine, shows a row of Old Law or pre-Old-Law tenements on Elizabeth Street, on the Lower East Side. The balconies would be a pleasant amenity if not for the fact that people are using their apartments to work in clothing manufacture, and the work has slopped over onto the outdoor space. Perhaps that doesn’t feel claustrophobic enough. The photo below is from shortly after 1900 and shows the rear yard of a block of tenements, with laundry hung out to dry on a nice day:

Unlike the converted houses and relatively small buildings in the HABS “tenements” surveys, New York’s tenements, up to when the New Tenement Law was enacted in 1901, were boxes in which to cram as many people as would fit. They were, unfortunately, the logical result of (a) Manhattan’s growth from 60,000 people in 1800 to to 1,850,000 in 1900 and (b) the laissez-faire policies of the era. Manhattan reached its peak of 2,330,000 in the 1910 census; after consolidation in 1898, greater New York was over 3,400,000. Here’s why tenements matter: the population housed in New York tenements, in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, in 1900 was 2,300,000. The laws of that era didn’t actually recognize the idea of nice middle-class apartment houses – like those constructed under the 1901 New Tenement Law and the 1929 Multiple Dwelling Law – so some of the “tenements” were apartment buildings like the Dakota. But a lot of the nicer apartment hoses in 1900 were classified as hotels in order to get around certain zoning restrictions, so most of the two million people who were described as living in tenements lived in actual tenements. The population of the entire country in 1900 was just around 76,300,000, which means that three percent of the entire population of the United States lived in Old Law and pre-Old-Law tenements in New York in 1900. It’s mind-boggling.

Numbers are not history. But they can provide context for historical documents. Why should anyone outside the city care about New York tenements? Because they had a large effect on the design of housing and zoning across the country by weight of sheer numbers. When Jacob Riis wrote How the Other Half Lives, he was describing conditions in New York that had not yet reached their worst and it was both shocking to people who didn’t understand the problem (hence the book’s title) and a warning about the future if the conditions were not addressed.

A lot of the tenements have been demolished and replaced by newer buildings, including by better apartments. Those that remain have been upgraded in various ways, with the installation of modern plumbing being the most consistent change. But so many of those buildings were constructed, that many still remain. I think about them because we have to deal with them all the time.