New Law Tenement Floor Plan

A rare example of a tenement which could fulfill the requirements of the new law on a 25 foot wide lot.

New law tenement floor plan. Plan of upper floors new york public library digital collections. A model tenement house. If you looked at the building from above it would be shaped like a series of dumbbells pushed together with the air shafts being the small space between them you can see a sample floor plan here. The final iteration was the dumb bell building which had larger shafts along the sides in the middle which gave the floor plan the look of that piece of weightlifting equipment.

Such tenements were particularly prevalent in new york where in 1865 a report stated that 500 000 people lived in unhealthy tenements whereas in boston in 1845 less than a quarter of workers were housed in tenements. New york state s tenement house act of 1867 the first attempt to reform tenement building conditions required that tenement buildings have one outhouse for every 20 residents. A tenement house was a four or five storey row of modules. Accessed september 9 2020.

208 thompson street built 1903. One reason new york had so many tenements was the large numbers of immigrants. Despite its shortcomings the dumbbell was the most accepted plan for tenements for over twenty years until the new tenement law was passed in 1901. Irma and paul milstein division of united states history local history and genealogy the new york public library.

Despite the new law the tenement department in its first heavily documented and illustrated report for 1902 and 1903 noted that some of the conditions found in. The 25 by 90 strip was split down the middle and cut in two to make apartments for four families. Tenement evolution and history 1880 s old law to post 1901 new law back in the second half of the 19th century the walk up tenement buildings were well established in new york city s east village as cheap quick housing for the masses of newly arriving immigrants flooding into the city in waves at various times. Often rather than walking all the way downstairs to the backyard residents dumped chamber pot waste out of their windows.

Old law tenements are tenements built in new york city after the tenement house act of 1879 and before the new york state tenement house act new law of 1901. But no one enforced these regulations. The tenements built according to this law followed that rule but they did so by creating extremely narrow air shafts. Plan of first floor.

The ones in front had two bedrooms a kitchen and a living room twelve feet wide and forty feet long.