For the museum in Glasgow see Tenement House (Glasgow)

Tenement House (Glasgow)

The Tenement House is a National Trust for Scotland property in Glasgow. It is near Charing Cross railway station and Cowcaddens underground station....

A tenement is, in most English-speaking areas, a substandard multi-family dwelling

Apartment

An apartment or flat is a self-contained housing unit that occupies only part of a building...

, usually old, occupied by the poor.

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.

In Scotland

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 this continues to be the meaning of the term, but elsewhere it is used as a pejorative in contrast to apartment or flat. Tenement houses were either adapted or built for the working class as cities industrialized, 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 immorality in the young and disease—and apartment houses—for fostering "sexual immorality, sloth, and divorce."

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, and also, beginning as early as the 1830s on the Lower East Side

Lower East Side

The Lower East Side, LES, is a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is roughly bounded by Allen Street, East Houston Street, Essex Street, Canal Street, Eldridge Street, East Broadway, and Grand Street....

 or possibly the 1820s on Mott Street

Mott Street

Mott Street is a narrow but busy thoroughfare that runs in a north-south direction in the borough of Manhattan in New York City in the United States. It is best known as Chinatown's unofficial "Main Street". Mott Street runs from Chatham Square in the south to Bleecker Street in the north...

, in jerry-built 3- and 4-floor "railroad flats" (so called because the rooms are linked together like a train) 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

Five Points

Five Points may refer to:*Five Points, Alabama*Five Points, California , multiple locations*Five Points, Florida*Five Points, North Carolina*Five Points, Ohio*Five Points, Pennsylvania , multiple locations...

 were the sites of notorious rookeries that the city worked for decades to clear. 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. In parts of the Lower East Side

Lower East Side

The Lower East Side, LES, is a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is roughly bounded by Allen Street, East Houston Street, Essex Street, Canal Street, Eldridge Street, East Broadway, and Grand Street....

, buildings were older and had courtyards, generally occupied by machine shops, stables, and other businesses.

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. 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. Prior to the 1867 law, tenements often covered more than 90 percent of the lot, were 5 or 6 stories high, and had 18 rooms per floor of which only 2 received direct sunlight. Yards were a few feet wide and filled with privies where they had not been entirely eliminated. Interior rooms were unventilated.

Early in the 19th century, many of the poor were housed in cellars, which became even less sanitary after the Croton Aqueduct

Croton Aqueduct

The Croton Aqueduct or Old Croton Aqueduct was a large and complex water distribution system constructed for New York City between 1837 and 1842...

 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.

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. 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 and as a compromise, the Old Law tenement

Old Law Tenement

Old Law Tenements are tenements built in New York City after the Tenement House Act of 1879 and before the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901....

 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. The "dumbbell plan" design is attributed to noted architect James E. Ware

James E. Ware

James Edward Ware was an American architect, best known for devising the "dumbbell plan" for New York City tenement housing....

 (1846-1918).

Public concern about New York tenements was stirred by the publication in 1890 of Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives. 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 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. 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

New York State Tenement House Act

One of the reforms of the Progressive Era, the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901 was one of the first such laws to ban the construction of dark, poorly ventilated tenement buildings in the state of New York...

, 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.

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.

Berlin

In German, the term corresponding to tenement is Miet(s)kaserne, "rental barracks," and the city especially known for them is Berlin. In 1930, Werner Hegemann

Werner Hegemann

Werner Hegemann was a city planner, architecture critic, and author.Hegemann began his studies in Berlin, studied art history and economics in Paris and economics at the University of Pennsylvania and in Strasbourg, completing his doctorate in Munich in 1908...

's polemic Das steinerne Berlin (Stony Berlin) referred to the city in its subtitle as "the largest tenement city in the world." 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. 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. 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.

One notorious Berlin Mietskaserne was Meyers Hof in Wedding

Wedding (Berlin)

Wedding is a locality in the borough of Mitte, Berlin, Germany and was a separate borough in the north-western inner city until it was fused with Tiergarten and Mitte in Berlin's 2001 administrative reform...

, which at times housed 2,000 people and required its own police officer to keep order.

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.

Many apartments in the Wilhelmian Ring were very small, only one room and a kitchen. Also, apartments were laid out with their rooms reached via a common internal corridor, which even the Berlin Architects' Association recognized was unhealthy and detrimental to family life. 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. Heating was provided by stoves burning charcoal briquettes.

Buenos Aires

In Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...

 the tenements, called conventillos, developed out of the subdivision of one- or two-storey 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. El conventillo de la Paloma was particularly famous and is the title of a play by Alberto Vaccarezza

Alberto Vaccarezza

Bartolomé Ángel Venancio Alberto Vaccarezza was an Argentine poet and playwright.Vaccarezza was born in Buenos Aires on April 1, 1886. He is usually credited as the foremost exponent of the sainete genre, having written its most popular play, El Conventillo de La Paloma...

.