Big Apple History . New York Living . Tenement Life


	Rear tenements

Today, the word "tenement" is sometimes used to refer to any kind of decrepit, low-rise city apartment building. But it actually refers to a specific kind of four-to-six-story building, which was a key part of an entire period of New York history. During the 1870s, and for many decades after that, tenement buildings were home to the immigrant millions pouring into Manhattan's Lower East Side.

These tenements were a dream come true for landlords but a nightmare for tenants. Quite simply, they packed the maximum number of rent-paying people into the smallest possible space. The lots on which tenements stood were only 25 by 100 feet. Up to five or six families shared a floor and a couple of toilets, if they were lucky. Some tenements built before 1887 didn't even have indoor plumbing, just a pump and outhouse for up to 150 people. In the older tenements, shafts only five feet wide, and over sixty feet deep, provided little air and no sun to interior rooms.

As writer William Dean Howells noted: "Had the foul fiend [the devil] designed these [buildings] they could not have been more villainously arranged to avoid any change of ventilation."

All this for about twenty dollars a month earned at a time when an immigrant seamstress brought home five dollars a week. In an important series of reforms, eventually new laws required better standards for tenements. In 1901, for instance, a new law required that every tenement apartment have at least one window with direct access to light and air, and its own bathroom.

Illustration: Courtesy of the Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.