Old Law Tenements are

tenement 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 ...

s 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 ...

after the Tenement House Act of 1879 and before 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 ...

("New Law") of 1901. The 1879 law required that every habitable room have a window opening to plain air, a requirement that was met by including air shafts between adjacent buildings. Old Law Tenements are commonly called "dumbbell tenements" after the shape of the building footprint: the air shaft gives each tenement the narrow-waisted shape of a

dumbbell The dumbbell, a type of free weight, is a piece of equipment used in weight training. It can be used individually or in pairs, with one in each hand. History The forerunner of the dumbbell, halteres, were used in ancient Greece as lifting ...

, wide facing the street and backyard, narrowed in between to create the air corridor. They were built in great numbers to accommodate waves of immigrating Europeans. The side streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side are still lined with numerous dumbbell structures today.

History

The 1879 Act was a response to the failure of the Tenement House Act of 1867, which required fire escapes from each suite as well as windows in each room. Builders met the letter of the 1867 law by merely inserting meaningless windows between interior rooms. Without air shafts, the 1867 requirement failed to increase natural light or fresh air ventilation in the crowded tenement "dark bedroom". Responding to the new requirements, a magazine, ''Plumbing and Sanitation Engineer'', held a tenement design contest in 1879. James Ware's winning dumbbell design represented a compromise between legal health standards and commercial viability. By indenting the sides of the structure three feet, he opened a slender airshaft between abutting buildings. The three-foot indentation required only a minimal sacrifice of rent-revenue space, placating the landlords, and provided just enough aperture for ventilation and natural, if not direct, light. The 1879 Act, though well-intentioned, was an even worse failure than the 1867 Act. Tenement dwellers tossed garbage, bilge water and waste into these air shafts which were not designed for garbage removal. As a result, the law's attempt to improve sanitation only created a new sanitation problem. Worse, the air shaft acted as a flue spreading fire from apartment to apartment. The 1901 law did away with the air shaft, replacing it with the large courtyard for garbage storage and removal. In later structures, the introduction of elevators reduced garbage defenestration by upper-story tenants.

Design

Stylistically, Old Law Tenements are unique and conspicuous. Though each uniformly occupies a twenty-five-foot lot just like the pre-Old Law tenement, the Old Law facade – with its fanciful sandstone human and animal gargoyles (sometimes in full figure), its terracotta filigree of no apparent historical precedent, its occasional design aberrations (e.g., dwarf columns), and its often varicolored brick – departs radically from the plain, dignified simplicity of the unassuming and largely unornamented older structures. Later in the Old Law period, the ornaments settle into a Queen Anne style, as the human representational forms gradually disappear into the more abstract extravagance of the following

Beaux Arts style 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 incorpora ...

. The symmetrical floor plan of the typical Old Law Tenement included four virtually identical apartments per floor. Three rooms each with a railroad layout, two of which shared an interior window that allowed light to reach the inner room. The entrance opened to the kitchen containing a bathtub that had a lid that could be lowered to form a working surface, alongside a sink opposite a wood-burning stove feeding into a flue. An icebox completed the appliances. Tenants usually placed a table and chairs at the angled window at the end of the narrow airshaft. Most people constructed a shelf at the kitchen window that hung out into the airshaft. During winter, food could be stored there and refrigerated without the expense of buying ice. Two toilets, cramped water closets were located on the landing in the hallway for common use.

References

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History

Design

See also

References

Further reading