ancient cities

804 Tenement
rooms at the back had windows, and thus, each
unit had only one room with direct ventilation and
sunlight. For units in the back of the house, fresh
air and natural light were compromised by the
proximity of the house behind. Because city blocks
were organized north–south, only those facing
south actually received direct sun.
Front rooms with the window were typically
used as the parlor or living room; the kitchen was
in the middle, with a small bedroom opening off of
it; if there was an additional bedroom, it would be
accessed by going through the first bedroom. No
water, heat, or lighting was provided, although
there were sometimes sinks in the public hallways.
Privies were located in the yard, if there was one,
and shared by all tenants. Stairs and hallways had
no windows; they were dark and therefore dangerous.
Parlors often included fireplaces, but when
not used for cooking or heating, these were often
covered over. Tenants supplied their own stoves
for cooking and heating.
Needless to say, living conditions were grim.
Many tenement residents had no direct access to
light and fresh air. Construction was primarily of
wood, so fire was a constant threat. Privies were
shared and rarely cleaned out; access to water for
bathing, laundry, and cooking was limited.
New York City’s Tenement House Act of 1879
addressed these conditions by mandating that new
tenement houses could not occupy more than 65
percent of the lot. Enforcement of this provision
was, however, not upheld. Instead, developers
compromised by introducing the “dumbbell” tenement
plan, which typically filled at least 80 percent
of the lot.
Dumbbell tenements, also referred to as “old
law” tenements, derived from a plan submitted by
the architect James E. Ware to a tenement house
design competition sponsored by the journal
Plumber and Sanitary Engineer, in 1878. The competition
called for a plan that conformed to New
York’s 25-by-100-foot gridiron lots, provided
affordable rentals for tenants, yielded a viable
return for landowners, and increased ventilation,
light, and fireproofing. Ware’s entry kept the overall
organization of the railroad flat but added a
light well (also called an air shaft) in the center of
each long wall that would, when two dumbbell
tenements were built adjacent to one another,
combine with its neighboring light well to form a
small court. The light well also gave the plan its
dumbbell shape, narrow in the center but still filling
the full 25-foot width of the lot at the front and
rear. The rooms adjacent to it were now smaller.
The center room of a three-room unit was still
windowless.
The shafts were usually only 20 to 30 inches in
width. Aside from the rooms on the top floor,
these shafts, therefore, did not provide much illumination
or ventilation. Instead, they often became
garbage dumps as tenants threw kitchen scraps
and other waste into them. Building inspectors
reported that trash hung from window sills and the
walls inside the shaft. In the event of fire, the air
shaft rapidly spread the blaze up and down floors
and from building to building.
Speculative builders in other American cities
began using the dumbbell plan shortly after its
introduction in New York. The plan’s appearance
in Boston led to changes in that city’s building code
to reduce the size of tenements and prevent
Boston’s built environment from becoming like
New York’s. Overall, local governments and housing
reformers disliked the dumbbell plan; its prevalence
in New York led to more competitions for
improved tenement house plans and contributed to
ongoing updates in building legislation. Existing
tenement houses, whether railroad or dumbbell,
were rarely torn down unless their structural conditions
became imminently dangerous. Thus, many
nineteenth-century tenement houses still stand in
New York and other cities and are still used as
rental housing.
New York’s Tenement House Act of 1901,
called the “new law,” continues to be the basis for
the city’s regulation of low-rise housing construction
today and influenced housing legislation
across the United States. It mandated a maximum
lot coverage of 70 percent; most significantly, it
created a new Tenement House Department to
ensure its enforcement. New-law tenements eliminated
air shafts and instead required a minimum
12-by-24-foot courtyard and minimum 12-foot
rear yard, both to be larger for structures more
than 60 feet high. Buildings could not be taller
than one and one-third the width of the adjacent
street. The new law also required every room to
have a window opening onto the outdoors; each
apartment also had to have running water and a
water closet. Many new-law tenements were built