“Pre”

Residential construction in New York can be broken into groups in a number of ways, but the most straightforward is not known to the general public, and that’s by era of regulation. For just under a hundred years, multiple dwellings – AKA apartment houses – have been governed by the Multiple Dwelling Law. Before that, starting in 1901, it was the regulation usually referred to as the New Tenement Law. Before that, the Old Tenement Law of 1879, which was a refinement of the 1867 law. Before that, chaos: buildings constructed as private houses or for commercial use were converted to boarding houses with little oversight on habitability, and purpose-built tenements were little better than packing crates for people.

Building constructed to the standards of the Multiple Dwelling Law are fine. They’re modern in terms of space, window, ventilation, and plumbing requirements. New Law tenements are almost as good, although some windows will be facing narrow (i.e., 8-foot wide) light courts. Old Law tenements are not good, and were worse when they were built. Roughly half the rooms in an Old Law tenement have windows facing an airshaft that can be as narrow as 18 inches. (I used to live in an apartment where the living room only had windows on the light shaft. The most annoying part was having to buy shades for windows that never got any light, because there were someone else’s windows a few feet away.) The Old Tenement Law did not actually require toilets in the building, but allowed for privies in the rear yard; those that remain have been modernized at least to the extent of having real plumbing installed.

The Lower East Side building in the photo above has been abandoned for a few years. I’m not sure when it was originally built – and it has been heavily modified at least three times – but I’m pretty sure it was before 1857, making it a Pre-Old-Law tenement. My apologies for the distortion caused by using the panorama setting on my phone’s camera, but I wanted one shot that captured the room past the open doorway. This was an apartment and that room – the one with the graffiti man’s head – was entirely interior, with no outside windows of any kind. The big door I was facing helps a bit, but you can see how dark it is in the corners. If the rear windows were open rather than blocked off, I doubt they’d help much. The awful airshafts of the Old Law tenements were considered to be a good idea when first introduced because they eliminated this: they made it illegal to constructed a residence with interior rooms with no direct access to outside air.

Even a bad regulation, like the Old Tenement Law, is better than nothing.