Cramped, poorly lit, under ventilated, and usually without indoor plumbing, the tenements were hotbeds of vermin and disease, and were frequently swept by cholera, typhus, and tuberculosis.
Why was tenement housing bad?
Tenement buildings were constructed with cheap materials, had little or no indoor plumbing and lacked proper ventilation. These cramped and often unsafe quarters left many vulnerable to rapidly spreading illnesses and disasters like fires.
What was one problem a tenement neighborhood experienced?
Known as tenements, these narrow, low-rise apartment buildings–many of them concentrated in the city’s Lower East Side neighborhood–were all too often cramped, poorly lit and lacked indoor plumbing and proper ventilation.
Did poor people live in tenements?
The people inhabiting these buildings were certainly not the rich and the powerful; rather, the families who were crammed into the tenement houses and apartments were mostly European immigrants and poor laborers who could not afford to move to a better area of the city in which they were living.
What was tenement living?
A tenement is legally defined in New York by the Tenement House Act of 1867 as “any house, building, or portion thereof, which is rented, leased, let or hired out to be occupied or is occupied, as the home or residence of more than three families living independently of one another and doing their own cooking upon the
Who exposed the problems of tenement life?
In the late 1880s, Jacob Riis, himself a Danish immigrant, began writing articles for the New York Sun that described the realities of life in New York City’s slums.
What was inside a tenement like?
Apartments contained just three rooms; a windowless bedroom, a kitchen and a front room with windows. A contemporary magazine described tenements as, “great prison-like structures of brick, with narrow doors and windows, cramped passages and steep rickety stairs. . . .
Did tenements have bathrooms?
While the average tenement building’s exterior specs could easily make you feel claustrophobic (most were just 25 feet wide and 100 feet long) their interiors were just as jarring. Original tenements lacked toilets, showers, baths, and even flowing water.
What was life like in tenements and slums?
Many families worked out of their apartments as well – sewing clothes or rolling cigars. Tenement buildings were usually made of brick and built side by side on narrow streets. As a result, most rooms had only one or two windows, sometimes none. The atmosphere was suffocating.
What kind of people lived in a tenement?
Tenements were first built to house the waves of immigrants that arrived in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s, and they represented the primary form of urban working-class housing until the New Deal. A typical tenement building was from five to six stories high, with four apartments on each floor.
Do people still live in tenement?
Tenement housing dates back to the 19th century but still exists in the 21st century, often in the form of low-income housing complexes.
What caused tenements?
An increase in the flow of trade, and immigration that followed the war of 1812 caused them to be displaced. Within 35 years, the city went from a population of less than a hundred thousand to half a million people who all need homes (Riis 7). The population doubled every decade between 1800 and 1880 (Tenements).
How many people lived in each tenement?
In one New York tenement, up to 18 people lived in each apartment. Each apartment had a wood-burning stove and a concrete bathtub in the kitchen, which, when covered with planks, served as a dining table. Before 1901, residents used rear-yard outhouses. Afterward, two common toilets were installed on each floor.
What tenement means?
: any of various forms of property (as land) that is held by one person from another. : an estate in property. : dwelling. History and Etymology for tenement. Anglo-French, from Old French, from Medieval Latin tenementum, from Latin tenēre to hold.
What diseases were spread in tenements?
The three main stories of “Life and Death at the Tenement” concentrate on three major health crises in the city: 19th-century tuberculosis, the 1918 flu, and the AIDS crisis.
Why did people live in tenement housing?
Glasgow tenements were built to provide high-density housing for the large number of people immigrating to the city in the 19th and early 20th century as a result of the Industrial Revolution, when the city’s population boomed to more than 1 million people.
How did government fix tenements?
The New York State Tenement House Act of 1901 was one of the first laws to ban the construction of dark, poorly ventilated tenement buildings in the state of New York. This Progressive Era law required new buildings to have outward-facing windows, indoor bathrooms, proper ventilation, and fire safeguards.
Why are tenement ceilings so high?
They were built for wealth merchants and other business types who wanted high ceilings because it looked impressive.
What did people in tenements eat?
Here’s a window into what they would have been eating, and where you can find those treats today.
- 1860s-1880s: Oysters, whiskey, and hard cheese.
- 1860s-1880s: Pretzels, bratwurst, sauerkraut, and lager beer.
- 1900s-1910s: Herring, pickles, bialys, stuffed cabbage.
How did people in tenements get water?
A spigot for water may have been in the hall. As for toilet facilities, they were communal. You either went in the hall or in an outhouse between tenements (as seen below), or on the roof.
Did tenement houses have running water?
Some tenements had a single water line with a tap in the hall on each floor. Most, however, had both the water source and toilets in the shallow backyard. In some cases the toilets were placed between a front building and a rear tenement erected at the back of the lot.