New York’s Improved Tenements 
By JOHN W. RUSSELL 
PART I 
T he Exhibit of Congestion of Population in 
New York, which was held in the American 
Museum of Natural History during March 
9-23, brought forcibly to the attention of thousands 
of visitors many aspects of the housing problem that 
escape the ordinary observer. If one has not actually 
seen the depressing conditions under which the poorer 
classes of tenement dwellers live, imaginative sym¬ 
pathy can do something toward realizing what they 
endure; but the slumming expeditions of those who 
are little more than academically interested, or even 
the careful examinations made by practical philan¬ 
thropists, have not thus far awakened a proper sense 
of the evils of congested population. The exhibit at 
the American Museum was an excellent popular 
introduction of the question. “ How the Other Half 
Lives” was there seen in a striking way that illus¬ 
trated the close relation be¬ 
tween overcrowded areas 
and a degraded, danger¬ 
ous citizenship. The 
nurseries of beg- 
g a r y and 
crime were 
exposed in 
the places of 
their economic ori¬ 
gin, and to people of any 
foresight at all glimpses of consequen ¬ 
ces commonly called immoral were plainly 
revealed. This, too, in the greatest city of oppor¬ 
tunity in the New World, where some housing con¬ 
ditions are worse than in the older cities of Europe. 
The word tenement is here used to designate the 
dwellings in which families of city wage-earners 
of moderate or small means are housed. They 
are usually five or six stories — sometimes seven 
—in height, and many of them were built before 
the tenement house law of 1901 was passed, on 
lots twenty-five feet wide by one hundred feet deep 
and contained three or four families on each floor. 
The apartment house, though included in the legal 
definition of a tenement, holds itself aloof from its 
humbler brother. It knows nothing of the crowded 
misery and constant friction in which the people of 
the tenement live. It is associated rather with the 
ease, security and culture which, in the upbringing 
of youthful persons happily disposed, ordinarily 
result in positions of comfort and usefulness. To 
vary a remark once made by Professor Eelix Adler, 
from the point of view of economic opportunity it 
offers the children of its occupants the freedom of the 
city, while the tenement house has too frequently 
offered the freedom of the streets. 
If the problem of housing city wage-earners is 
older in Europe, so also are the solutions more varied 
and ingenious. New York’s position in this respect 
is much less favorable than the optimistic American 
thinks. Tenement conditions here are more urgent 
on account of the immense immigration and the 
unexampled pressure of population upon space. In 
London the chief difficulty is overcrowding in in¬ 
dividual rooms; in New York, overcrowding of 
masses of population in limited areas. On the east 
side, below Eourteenth Street, are blocks which show 
a greater number of dwellers m proportion to space 
than any other similar areas m the world. It should 
be recalled that, according to the report of the Tene¬ 
ment House Commission of 1900, New York has 
the unenviable distinction of having invented 
the “double-decker” or “dumb¬ 
bell” tenements, a 
class of building 
not found 
elsewhere, 
and for 20 
years the 
p reva iling 
type of tene¬ 
ment house 
in the metropolis 
until the law of 
1901 brought about a 
better state of things. In 
the east side the congestion 
of population resulting from 
this kind of tenement house 
is even now greater than in 
any other urban district in the world. Eor example, 
one section in that district contains 1,000 persons to 
the acre, while the most congested spot in Bombay has 
only 759, Prague 485, Paris 434, London 365 and Glas¬ 
gow 350. In 1900, according to the census of that 
year, of the city population of 3,434,202, about 2,275,- 
000 lived in tenement houses; and although apartment 
houses were included, the tall tenement housed the 
great majority of those classed as the wage-earning 
population. Not only the immense numbers, but 
also the racial differences of the immigrants who 
remain in the city accentuate the difficulties en¬ 
countered. In two model tenements on the upper 
west side containing 370 persons nineteen nationalities 
Fig. I 
An actual 
block of tenements on 
the east side, as it stood 
on January i, 1900 
25 
