Tenement
1
Tenement
For the concept in property law see Tenement (law)
For the museum in Glasgow see Tenement House (Glasgow)
A tenement is, in most English-speaking areas, a substandard
multi-family dwelling in the urban core, usually old and occupied by
the poor. (In Scotland it still has its original meaning of a
multi-occupancy building of any sort, and in parts of England,
especially Devon and Cornwall, it refers to an outshot, or additional
projecting part at the back of a terraced house, normally with its own
roof.[1])
Park Avenue and 107th Street, New York City,
around 1900
History
Originally the term tenement referred to tenancy and therefore to any
rented accommodation. The New York State legislature defined it in
the Tenement House Act of 1867 in terms of rental occupancy by
multiple households, 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 premises, or by more than two families upon a
floor, so living and cooking and having a common right in
the halls, stairways, yards, water-closets, or privies, or
some of them.[2]
In Scotland, it continues to be the most common word for a
multiple-occupancy building, but elsewhere it is used as a pejorative in
Rear view of a 18th-century Scottish tenement,
contrast to apartment building or block of flats.[3] Tenement houses
Edinburgh
were either adapted or built for the working class as cities
industrialized,[4] and came to be contrasted with middle-class apartment houses, which started to become fashionable
later in the 19th century. Late 19th-century social reformers in the U.S. were hostile to both tenements (for fostering
disease, and immorality in the young) and apartment houses (for fostering "sexual immorality, sloth, and
divorce.").[5]
Tenement
Specific cities
New York
As the United States industrialized during the 19th century, immigrants and workers from the countryside were
housed in former middle-class houses and other buildings, such as warehouses, which were bought up and divided
into small dwellings,[6][7] and also, beginning as early as the 1830s on the Lower East Side[4] or possibly the 1820s
on Mott Street,[8] in jerry-built 3- and 4-floor "railroad flats" (so called because the rooms are linked together like a
train)[9] with windowless internal rooms. The adapted buildings were also known as "rookeries," and were a
particular concern as they were prone to collapse and fire. Mulberry Bend and Five Points were the sites of notorious
rookeries that the city worked for decades to clear.[8] In both rookeries and purpose-built tenements, communal water
taps and water closets (either privies or "school sinks," which opened into a vault that often became clogged) were
squeezed into what open space there was between buildings.[9] In parts of the Lower East Side, buildings were older
and had courtyards, generally occupied by machine shops, stables, and other businesses.[10]
Such tenements were particularly prevalent in New
York, where in 1865 a report stated that 500,000
people lived in unhealthy tenements, whereas in
Boston in 1845 less than a quarter of workers were
housed in tenements.[4] One reason New York had so
many tenements was the large numbers of
immigrants; another was that the grid pattern on
which streets were laid out and the economic practice
of building on individual 25- by 100-foot lots
combined to produce extremely high land coverage,
including back building.[11] Prior to the 1867 law,
tenements often covered more than 90 percent of the
lot, were five or six stories high, and had 18 rooms
Lower East Side tenement buildings
per floor of which only two received direct sunlight.
Yards were a few feet wide and filled with privies where they had not been entirely eliminated. Interior rooms were
unventilated.[9]
Early in the 19th century, many of the poor were housed in cellars, which became even less sanitary after the Croton
Aqueduct brought running water to wealthier New Yorkers: the reduction in well use caused the water table to rise,
and the cellar dwellings flooded. Early housing reformers urged the construction of tenements to replace cellars, and
beginning in 1859 the number of people living in cellars began to decline.[12]
The Tenement House Act of 1867, the state legislature's first comprehensive legislation on housing conditions,
prohibited cellar apartments unless the ceiling was 1 foot above street level; required one water closet per 20
residents and the provision of fire escapes; and paid some attention to space between buildings.[13] This was
amended by the Tenement House Act of 1879, known as the Old Law, which required lot coverage of no more than
65 percent. The New York City Board of Health, empowered to enforce the regulations, declined to do so. As a
compromise, the Old Law tenement became the standard: this had a "dumbbell" shape, with air and light shafts on
either side in the center (usually fitted to the shafts in the adjacent buildings), and typically covered 80 percent of the
lot.[14] James Ware is credited with the design;[15] he had won a contest the previous year held by Plumber and
Sanitary Engineer magazine to find the most practical improved tenement design, in which profitability was the most
important factor to the jury.[16]
Public concern about New York tenements was stirred by the publication in 1890 of Jacob Riis' How the Other Half
Lives.[17] The New York State Assembly Tenement House Committee report of 1894 surveyed 8,000 buildings with
approximately 255,000 residents and found New York to be the most densely populated city in the world, at an
2
Tenement
3
average of 143 people per acre, with part of the Lower East Side having 800 residents per acre, denser than Bombay.
It used both charts and photographs, the first such official use of photographs.[18] Together with the publication in
1895 by the U.S. Department of Labor of a special report on housing conditions and solutions elsewhere in the
world, The Housing of Working People, it ultimately led to the passage of the Tenement House Act of 1901, known
as the New Law, which implemented the Tenement House Committee's recommendation of a maximum of 70
percent lot coverage and mandated strict enforcement, specified a minimum of 12 feet for a rear yard and 6 feet for
an air and light shaft at the lot line or 12 feet in the middle of the building (all of these being increased for taller
buildings), and required running water and water closets in every apartment and a window in every room. There
were also fire-safety requirements. These rules are still the basis of New York City law on low-rise buildings, and
made single-lot development uneconomical.[19]
Most of the purpose-built tenements in New York were not slums, although they were not pleasant to be inside,
especially in hot weather, so people congregated outside, made heavy use of the fire escapes, and slept in summer on
fire escapes, roofs, and sidewalks.[20]
Glasgow
Tenements make up a large percentage of the
housing stock of Glasgow, Scotland. The 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 due to the Industrial
Revolution, when the city's population boomed to
more than 1 million people.
The tenements were generally built no taller than the
width of the street on which they were located;
therefore, most are about 3–5 storeys high. Virtually
all tenements were constructed using red or blonde
sandstone, which has become extremely distinctive.
Typical Glasgow tenements in the West End of Glasgow
A large number of the tenements in Glasgow were
demolished in the 1960s and 1970s due to slum
conditions, overcrowding and poor maintenance of the buildings. Perhaps the most striking case of this is seen in the
Gorbals district of the city, where virtually all the tenements were demolished to make way for tower blocks, which
in turn have been demolished to be replaced with modern tenements (in the Scottish meaning of the word). The
Gorbals is a relatively small area and at one time had an estimated 90,000 people living in its tenements, leading to
very poor living conditions; now the population is roughly 10,000.
However, the many remaining tenements in various areas of Glasgow have experienced a resurgence in popularity
due to their large rooms.
Tenement
4
Berlin
In German, the term corresponding to tenement is Mietskaserne, "rental
barracks," and the city especially known for them is Berlin. In 1930,
Werner Hegemann's polemic Das steinerne Berlin (Stony Berlin)
referred to the city in its subtitle as "the largest tenement city in the
world."[21] They were built during a period of great increases in
population between 1860 and 1914, particularly after German
unification in 1871, in a broad ring enclosing the old city center,
sometimes called the Wilhelmian Ring. The buildings are almost
always 5 storeys high because of the mandated maximum height.[22]
The blocks are large because the streets were required to be able to
handle heavy traffic, and the lots are therefore also large: required to
have courtyards large enough for a fire truck to turn around, the
buildings have front, rear, and cross buildings enclosing several
courtyards.[23][24] Buildings within the courtyards were the location of
much of Berlin's industry until the 1920s, and noise and other
nuisances affected the apartments, only the best of which had windows
facing the street.[25]
Members of a tenant collective in front of their
tenement building in East Berlin in 1959, (the
façade still pockmarked with 1945 battle
damage).
One notorious Berlin Mietskaserne was Meyers Hof in Wedding,[26]
which at times housed 2,000 people and required its own police officer
to keep order.[27]
Between 1901 and 1920, a Berlin clinic investigated and documented
in photographs the living conditions of its patients, revealing that many
lived in damp basements and garrets, spaces under stairs, and
apartments where the windows were blocked by courtyard
businesses.[28]
Many apartments in the Wilhelmian Ring were very small, only one
room and a kitchen.[29] Also, apartments were laid out with their rooms
reached via a common internal corridor, which even the Berlin
A series of inner courtyards in a Mietskaserne in
Architects' Association recognized was unhealthy and detrimental to
Prenzlauer Berg
family life.[30] Sanitation was inadequate: in a survey of one area in
1962, only 15 percent of apartments had both a toilet and a bath or shower; 19 percent had only a toilet, and 66
percent shared staircase toilets.[29] Heating was provided by stoves burning charcoal briquettes.[31]
Tenement
5
Buenos Aires
In Buenos Aires the tenements, called conventillos, developed out of
the subdivision of one- or two-story houses built around courtyards for
well-off families. These were long and narrow, three to six times as
long as they were wide, and the size of the patios was reduced until as
many as 350 people could be living on a lot that had originally housed
25. Purpose-built tenements copied their form. By 1907 there were
some 2,500 conventillos, with 150,000 occupants.[32] El conventillo de
la Paloma was particularly famous and is the title of a play by Alberto
Vaccarezza.
Conventillo in La Boca, Buenos Aires
Mumbai
A "chawl" is a name for a type of building found in India. They are
often 4 to 5 stories with about 10 to 20 tenements, referred to as kholis,
which literally means 'rooms', on each floor. Many chawls can be
found in Mumbai, where they were constructed in abundance to house
the people migrating to the city because of its booming cotton mills
and overall strong economy.
A usual tenement in a chawl consists of one all-purpose room which
functions both as a living and sleeping space, and a kitchen which also
serves as a dining room. A frequent practice is for the kitchen to also
serve as a bedroom for a newly married couple, to give them some
degree of privacy.
A chawl in Mumbai.
People living in a chawl have little privacy. Due to the close nature of the quarters, gossip travels quickly. On the
other hand, this intimate living situation also leads to a friendly atmosphere, with support networks akin to familial
relationships.
References
[1] Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (6th ed.). Oxford University Press. 2007. p. 3804. ISBN 0199206872.
[2] Quoted in Richard A. Plunz, "On the Uses and Abuses of Air: Perfecting the New York Tenement, 1850–1901," Berlin/New York: Like and
Unlike: Essays on Architecture and Art from 1870 to the Present, ed. Josef Paul Kleihues and Christina Rathgeber, New York: Rizzoli, 1993,
ISBN 0-8478-1657-5, pp. 159–79, p. 167.
[3] For example, Vivian Heller, The City Beneath Us: Building the New York Subways, New York Transit Museum, New York: Norton, 2004,
ISBN 978-0-393-05797-3, p. 34 (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=mOBydvX0wCQC& pg=PA34& dq=we+ called+ them+ apartment+
houses,+ because+ that's+ what+ they+ really+ were. + To+ us,+ a+ tenement+ was+ a+ dump& hl=en& ei=Xw3TTYuhC5S6sQPQi62hCQ&
sa=X& oi=book_result& ct=result& resnum=1& ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage& q=we called them apartment houses, because that's
what they really were. To us, a tenement was a dump& f=false) quotes an Italian mason contrasting the better accommodations for the poor
built in New York in response to a 1901 law with tenements: "We didn't call them tenements . . . we called them apartment houses, because
that's what they really were. To us, a tenement was a dump."
[4] John F. Bauman, "Introduction: The Eternal War on the Slums," From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing
Policy in Twentieth-Century America, ed. John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian, University Park: Pennsylvania State
University, 2000, ISBN 0-271-02012-1, pp. 1–17, p. 6 (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=YZ9mO3NLP90C& printsec=frontcover&
dq=Bauman,+ Biles,+ From+ Tenements+ to+ the+ Taylor+ Homes& hl=en& ei=kAsqTdruGcnsrAeB1NSeDA& sa=X& oi=book_result&
ct=result& resnum=1& ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage& q=had become a commonplace habitation of the working poor& f=false).
[5] Janet Hutchison, "Shaping Housing and Enhancing Consumption: Hoover's Interwar Housing Policy," From Tenements to the Taylor Homes
pp. 81–101, p. 83 (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=YZ9mO3NLP90C& printsec=frontcover& dq=Bauman,+ Biles,+ From+
Tenements+ to+ the+ Taylor+ Homes& hl=en& ei=kAsqTdruGcnsrAeB1NSeDA& sa=X& oi=book_result& ct=result& resnum=1&
Tenement
ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage& q=condemned urban tenement houses as centers of juvenile vice& f=false).
[6] Bauman, pp. 5–6.
[7] Robert B. Fairbanks, "From Better Dwellings to Better Neighborhoods: The Rise and Fall of the First National Housing Movement," From
Tenements to the Taylor Homes pp. 21–42, p. 22 (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=YZ9mO3NLP90C& printsec=frontcover&
dq=Bauman,+ Biles,+ From+ Tenements+ to+ the+ Taylor+ Homes& hl=en& ei=kAsqTdruGcnsrAeB1NSeDA& sa=X& oi=book_result&
ct=result& resnum=1& ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=snippet& q=Some investors converted abandoned warehouses& f=false).
[8] Plunz, p. 161.
[9] Plunz, p. 164.
[10] Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845-80, Urbana: University of Illinois, 1990, ISBN
0-252-01677-7, p. 34 (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?ei=DCsqTae7PIbRrQet_tjXDA& ct=result& id=-uJ4AAAAMAAJ& dq=Nadel,+
Little+ Germany& q=courtyards#search_anchor).
[11] Plunz, p. 163.
[12] Plunz, p. 160.
[13] Plunz, pp. 167–68.
[14] Plunz, p. 168.
[15] Kathy Howe (January 2004). "National Register of Historic Places Registration: Maple Grove Cemetery" (http:/ / www. oprhp. state. ny. us/
hpimaging/ hp_view. asp?GroupView=100663). New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. . Retrieved
2011-01-12.
[16] Plunz, pp. 168–69.
[17] Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. Repr. ed. Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap/Harvard University, 1970.
[18] Plunz, p. 172.
[19] Plunz, p. 175.
[20] Mark Girouard, Cities and People: A Social and Architectural History, New Haven, Connecticut/London: Yale University, 1985, ISBN
978-0-300-03502-5, pp. 312–13.
[21] Werner Hegemann, Das steinerne Berlin: Geschichte der grössten Mietkasernenstadt der Welt, Berlin: Kiepenheuer, 1930.
[22] Related to the width of the street, but generally the maximum, 72 feet: Girouard, p. 329.
[23] Dietrich Worbs, "The Berlin Mietskaserne and Its Reforms," Berlin/New York pp. 144–57, p. 145.
[24] Girouard, pp. 337–38 says that the blocks had been intended to be subdivided with side streets.
[25] T.H. Elkins with B. Hofmeister, Berlin: The Spatial Structure of a Divided City, London/New York: Methuen, 1988, ISBN 0-416-92220-1,
pp. 20, 126, 164–67.
[26] Sabine Hake, Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2008,
ISBN 0-472-07038-X, p. 30.
[27] Dagmar Reese, Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2006, ISBN 0-472-09938-8, p. 165 (http:/ /
books. google. com/ books?id=5qA4My-C2nkC& pg=PA165& dq=Meyers+ Hof& hl=en& ei=8T8qTfPIK8KGrAe-6uiLCQ& sa=X&
oi=book_result& ct=result& resnum=1& ved=0CCMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage& q=Meyers Hof& f=false).
[28] Republished as Hinterhof, Keller und Mansarde: Einblicke in Berliner Wohnungselend 1901–1920, ed. Gesine Asmus, Reinbek bei
Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1982, ISBN 3-499-17668-8.
[29] Elkins, p. 189.
[30] Worbs, p. 146.
[31] Elkins, p. 190.
[32] Girouard, p. 338.
6
Article Sources and Contributors
Article Sources and Contributors
Tenement Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=520506634 Contributors: Angelastic, Crossmyloof, Darorcilmir, Daveco333, EKindig, Eggsalad1999, Entropy, Geraldshields11,
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