What did the tenements do?

What did the tenements do?

Tenements were first built to house the waves of immigrants that arrived in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s, and they represented the primary form of urban working-class housing until the New Deal. A typical tenement building was from five to six stories high, with four apartments on each floor.

Did the tenement house law work?

The 1879 law was the result of a campaign by reformers who had become concerned about conditions in New York’s increasingly congested neighborhoods. The result, the Tenement House Act of 1879 or “old law”, actually did not greatly improve conditions.

What does tenement house?

: apartment building especially : one meeting minimum standards of sanitation, safety, and comfort and usually located in a city.

What made the tenements so bad to live in?

Due to the little amount of space, the living conditions in tenements were bad. Many people shared small 3 room apartments in tenements. Since there were 4 apartments per floor there were 5 to 6 families per floor. Since the apartments had no ventilation, sickness spread quickly.

What were the conditions in tenement buildings?

Tenement buildings were constructed with cheap materials, had little or no indoor plumbing and lacked proper ventilation . These cramped and often unsafe quarters left many vulnerable to rapidly spreading illnesses and disasters like fires.

What is a life in a tenement?

Life in the Tenements. 19th century: over 80,000 tenements built . About 2/3 of the city population lived in them. “…Thousands of people are living in the smallest space…for human beings to exist crowded together in dark, ill-ventilated rooms, in many of which the sunlight never enters and in most of which fresh air is unknown.

What is a city tenement?

The term ‘tenement’ is both a legal term, codified in city regulations, and a word commonly used to refer to a certain type of multi-family housing. As officially defined in the Tenement House Law of 1867, a tenement is any building housing more than three families, each living and cooking independently.