New Law Tenements were built in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

following the

New York State Tenement House Act One of the reforms of the Progressive Era The Progressive Era (late 1890s – late 1910s) was a period of widespread social activism and political reform across the United States focused on defeating corruption, monopoly, waste and ine ...

of 1901, so-called the "New Law" to distinguish it from the previous two Tenement House Acts of 1867 and 1879. New Law tenements are distinct from " Old Law" and "pre-law" tenements both in structural design and exterior ornament.

Design

Required under the New Law to include a large

courtyard A courtyard or court is a circumscribed area, often surrounded by a building or complex, that is open to the sky. Courtyards are common elements in both Western and Eastern building patterns and have been used by both ancient and contemporary ...

which consumed more space than the 1879 Old Law's air shafts, New Law

tenements A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. They are common on the British Isles, particularly in Scotland. In the medieval Old Town, i ...

tend to be built on multiple land lots or on corner lots to conserve space for dwelling units, the renting of which is the money-making purpose of the structure. In the early 21st century, a typical Lower East Side or East Village street will still be lined with five-story, austerely unornamented pre-law (pre-1879) tenements and six-story, bizarrely decorated Old Law (1879-1901) tenements, with the much bulkier, grand-style New Law tenements on the corners, always at least six stories tall. Aesthetically, the New Law coincided with the fashion for

Beaux-Arts architecture Beaux-Arts architecture ( , ) was the academic architectural style taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, particularly from the 1830s to the end of the 19th century. It drew upon the principles of French neoclassicism, but also incorp ...

. The fanciful sandstone faces, gargoyles and filigreed

terracotta Terracotta, terra cotta, or terra-cotta (; ; ), in its material sense as an earthenware substrate, is a clay-based unglazed or glazed ceramic where the fired body is porous. In applied art, craft, construction, and architecture, terracotta ...

of the previous twenty years of tenement design gave way to the more abstractly classical, but extremely florid ornamentation of this historically informed and integrated, urbane, international and more grandiose Parisian style. Unlike the flat street wall of previous tenements, which maximized the space available to tenants, the street wall façade of the New Law tenement often features recessed indentations, sometimes curved, sometimes rectilinear, giving the impression that stylish appearance mattered to the designer and owner more than optimizing space. They also feature oval and arched windows—more expensive to produce and replace—heavy

ornaments around the windows and often thin brick, again, more expensive to manufacture and to lay. They give an impression of opulence which belies their purpose, location and their inhabitants; many were built in the ghetto to make money on the housing of largely impoverished immigrants by packing several families into small apartments.Jacob A. Riis ''How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the tenements of New York''
(New York:Scribners, 1890) New Law tenements can be seen throughout

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

and especially in the Lower East Side and Washington Heights.

References

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External links

The Tenement Museum

Urban design Residential buildings in New York City Progressive Era in the United States New York City Department of Buildings

Design

See also

References

Further reading

External links