Progressive Housing in New York City: - Columbia University ...

one interior room receiving no natural light. The floor plan was an improvement over the
speculative tenements that were being built at the same time (pre-law and old law tenements).
These buildings are protected from exterior change and demolition by their placement on the list
of New York City Landmarks.
Women held a particular roll in the development of progressive housing, again looking to Britain
from the 1860’s and earlier “many women in towns and cities in Britain devoted themselves to
voluntary work.” 11 They wanted to take initiatives in housing reform because the interior of
homes were the one place that women were strictly in charge of. Frustrated by their inability to
work directly with the poor due to social norms, women set up settlement houses and teams of
volunteers in attempts to befriend and help the poor. This roll continued and expanded in the
United States with the formation of settlement houses in poor neighborhoods, the creation of
active civic groups, such as the League of Mothers’ Club and through the financing of model
tenements by women, such as the Shively Sanitary Tenements by Ann Harriman Vanderbilt.
It is important to note that model tenements made up only a very small amount of tenement
buildings built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
The following seven model tenements are designated New York City Landmarks or protected by
being contributing buildings to a historic district:
1. Home Building- Brooklyn
2. Tower Building- Brooklyn
3. Shively Sanitary Tenements (East River Homes)- Manhattan
4. City & Suburban York Avenue Estates- Manhattan
5. City & Suburban 1 st Avenue Estates- Manhattan
6. Astral Apartments- Brooklyn
7. Riverside Buildings- (in historic district)-Brooklyn
11 Darling and Whitworth, p. 17.
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