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Article: Tenements
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
- Author:
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TENEMENTS
TENEMENTS.
The New York City Tenement House Act of 1867 defined a tenement as any rented or leased dwelling that housed more than three independent families. 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. To maximize the number of renters, builders wasted little space. Early tenements might occupy as much as 90 percent of their lots, leaving little room behind the building for privies and water pumps and little ...