ancient cities

Yard of a tenement at Park Avenue and 107th Street, New York, circa 1900
Source: Library of Congress.
large housing blocks around courtyards or set back
from the street to increase garden space around
them. Designers angled buildings from the street
along diagonal lines to increase exposure to air and
light.
New York City
New York’s rapid population growth, along with
the availability of undeveloped land, makes this
city particularly important in the study of the tenement
house as a building type. An 1864 survey
counted 15,309 tenements that housed 61 percent
of the city’s population. New York’s gridiron plan
shaped the development and evolution of the tenement
building. It divided the city into 200-by-800foot
blocks, with the long sides facing north and
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south; these blocks in turn were subdivided into
25-by-100-foot individual building lots.
Nineteenth-century speculative builders seeking
rental profits typically constructed single tenement
houses on individual lots. The earliest such structures
often filled 90 percent or more of the lot and
spanned the full width. Houses rose five or six
stories. In general, each floor held four three- or
four-room apartments, with two units facing the
street and two facing the back. Rooms were organized
two across and six or eight deep in two
straight rows, with the stairwell in the center of the
building. Called “pre-law” tenements because they
were built prior to any tenement legislation, they
were also referred to as “railroad flats” because
the rooms ran straight back in a row, like train
cars. Only the two rooms at the front and the two