OT: What is a Tenement?

As I've been off on this tangent on"tenement housekeeping," I've just assumed that everyone who might stumble on this little blog o' mine just knows what a tenement is.

But maybe not, eh?

"Dumbbell" tenements proliferated in New York City during the hey-day of massive immigration from the Old Country, and they continued to be the typical working class housing in New York well into the Thirties and later. They often formed the bulk of the slum housing cleared to build the Projects that in many cased turned out to be magnificent failures that had to be blown up later on.



The floor plan above (click to enlarge) shows a typical New York tenement c. 1910. There are four dwelling units on each floor, and there are probably four or five (but sometimes six or seven) floors. There are two three room units and two four room units on each floor. The two three room units consist of a front room, a kitchen in the middle, and a back room or bedroom. The four room units have two so-called bedrooms, the rear one entered through the front one. Sometimes the rear bedroom would have a door on the public hallway so that it could be entered without going through the other bedroom.

Each apartment's main entrance is in the kitchen. The plan above shows each room with a window to the outside. The rooms in the center had windows on the airshaft that ran from the ground to the roof; the rooms at each end had windows on the street or the rear "yard."

Many tenements built before the Old Law required the "dumbbell" plan had no air shafts at all or only the most minimal slots between buildings. Consequently, the center rooms -- ie: the kitchens and back rooms -- had no direct daylight or ventilation of any kind. The kitchen would instead have an interior window opening on the front room, and the back room would be ventilated through the kitchen.

With the coal range going night and day to heat the water, the tenement apartments were, charitably, stifling. Roofs were often used for sleeping in the summertime, for there was no earthly way for residents to do much but sweat inside their tenements on those hot summer nights.

There are two toilets out in the public hall and a sink. Some tenements did not provide sinks in the individual kitchens, and most did not have toilet or bathing facilities in the individual units. Consequently, residents either made do with sponge baths as best they could or they used the public baths which by 1911 when "Housekeeping Notes" was published were fairly common in New York and other large cities. The absence of any plumbing inside a tenement unit was the source of constant discomfort, but even the New Law of 1901 only required one bathroom for each two households. Better, but still...

These units rented for $10 to $15 a month. Seems reasonable, especially given rents in New York these days, but incomes were much lower, too. If a household could earn $100 a month, it was doing very well indeed, but for that to happen everybody in the household had to work, including the children.

Lewis Hine documented some of the consequences for tenement dwellers in the early 1900's:



Children making flowers


Making doll clothes (Campbell Kids)


Working kids



Making Campbell Kids Clothes



Well-off Girl with Campbell Kid doll:


We haven't quite got back to these conditions in the United States... well, except for some of the conditions under which illegales live and work in this country, but most Americans have no idea about that, and they'd be shocked if they knew.

But given the likelihood that our rulers will continue to forcibly impoverish the masses, how long will it be before we see similar conditions accepted as standard once again?