TENEMENT HOUSE REGULATION 197 



speaking, are the poorest class of apartment houses. They 

 are generally poorly built, without sufficient accommodation 

 for light and ventilation, and are overcrowded. The middle 

 rooms often receive no daylight, and it is not uncommon in 

 them for several families to be crowded into one of their dark 

 and unwholesome rooms. Bad air, want of sunlight, and filthy 

 surroundings work the physical ruin of the wretched tenants, 

 while their mental and moral condition is equally lowered. 

 Attempts to reform the evils of tenement life have been going 

 on for some time in many of the great cities of the world.' 



Legally, tenement is applied to any communal dwelling, 

 inhabited by three, or in some cities four, or more families, 

 living independently, who do their cooking on the premises. 

 It includes apartment houses, flat-houses and flats, as well as 

 what is popularly called a tenement, if only built to acconamo- 

 date three, or as the case may be, four or more families who 

 cook in the house. It is in its legal sense that I use the term. 

 At first blush it may seem objectionable to class apartment 

 houses, flat-houses and tenements, so-called, together, and sub- 

 ject them to the same code of regulation. Practically, it has 

 never been possible to draw any line of separation between 

 different houses which are popularly designated by these 

 different words. Nor has any one ever suggested any regula- 

 tion proper for the poorest tenement, using the word now in 

 its popular sense, which would not be voluntarily, and as a mat- 

 ter of self interest, complied with in the most expensive apart- 

 ment house. Nor is there any certainty that what to-day is 

 popularly called an apartment house may not to-morrow, in 

 popular parlance, be a tenement of the worst kind. My own 

 grandmother, within my own recollection, lived in what was 

 then one of the finest houses in one of the most fashionable 

 streets of New York. Not long since I passed the house, and 

 noticed on the front door a sign reading, ^Trench flats for 

 colored people.'* 



In its earliest form (and many cities have not yet passed 

 beyond the first stage) the tenement was a discredited private 

 house or other building, not originally built for the occupation 

 of several families, but altered for the purpose. Each floor of 

 what was originally a private dwelling was changed so that it 



