A tenement, also called an apartment building, is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. Tenements are common in cities throughout Europe and North and South America, albeit called different names (e.g. conventillos in Spanish, Mietskaserne in German, vuokrakasarmi in Finnish, hyreskasern in Swedish or kamienica in Polish).
From medieval times, fixed property and land in Scotland was held under feudal tenement law as a fee rather than being owned, and under Scots law dwellings could be held individually in a multi-storey building, known as a tenement. In England, the expression "tenement house" was used to designate a building subdivided to provide cheap rental accommodation, which was initially a subdivision of a large house. Beginning in the 1850s, purpose-built tenements of up to six stories held several households on each floor. Various names were introduced for better dwellings, and eventually modern apartments predominated in North American urban living.
In the medieval Old Town, in Edinburgh, Scotland, tenements were developed with each apartment treated as a separate house, built on top of each other (such as Gladstone's Land). Over hundreds of years, custom grew to become law concerning maintenance and repairs, as first formally discussed in Stair's 1681 writings on Scots property law. In Scotland, these are now governed by the Tenements Act, which replaced the old Law of the Tenement and created a new system of common ownership and procedures concerning repairs and maintenance of tenements. Tenements with one- or two-room flats provided popular rented accommodation for workers, but in some inner-city areas, overcrowding and maintenance problems led to shanty towns, which have been cleared and redeveloped. In more affluent areas, tenement flats form spacious privately owned houses, some with up to six bedrooms, which continue to be desirable properties.
In the United States, the term tenement initially meant a large building with multiple small spaces to rent. As cities grew in the nineteenth century, there was increasing separation between rich and poor. With rapid urban growth and immigration, overcrowded houses with poor sanitation gave tenements a reputation as shanty towns.
In parts of England, especially Devon and Cornwall, the word tenement refers to an outshot, or additional projecting part at the back of a terraced house, normally with its roof.Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th ed. Oxford: Oxford University, 2007, , p. 3804.
History
In medieval times, the Old Town in Edinburgh, Scotland, developed along its High Street on narrow strips of land ("tenements") feued under tenement law. The restricted site and the constraints of the Edinburgh town walls led to multi-storey buildings with each apartment treated as a separate house, built on top of each other (such as Gladstone's Land of 1617). Over hundreds of years, custom grew to become law concerning maintenance and repairs, as first formally discussed in Stair's 1681 writings on Scots property law.
An early example of a tenement in Wales is Morris Castle in Swansea. The castle was built sometime before 1775 by Sir John Morris to house workers in the rapidly industrializing area. The castle's location was hazardous and impractical and many workers preferred to live in individual cottages. As such, the tenement was abandoned in the 1850s.
In the United States, the term tenement originally referred to tenancy and therefore to any rented accommodation. The New York State legislature defined it in the Tenement House Act of 1867 in terms of rental occupancy by multiple households, as:
In Scotland, it continues to be the most common word for a traditional multiple-occupancy building, including high quality dwellings, but elsewhere it is used as a pejorative in contrast to apartment building or block of flats.For example, Heller, Vivian. The City Beneath Us: Building the New York Subways, New York Transit Museum, New York: Norton, 2004, , p. 34 quotes an Italian mason contrasting the better accommodations for the poor built in New York in response to a 1901 law with tenements: "We didn't call them tenements ... we called them apartment houses, because that's what they really were. To us, a tenement was a dump." Tenement houses were either adapted or built for the working class as cities industrialized,Bauman, p. 6 . and came to be contrasted with middle-class apartment houses, which started to become fashionable later in the 19th century. Late-19th-century social reformers in the United States were hostile to both tenements (for fostering disease, and immorality in the young) and apartment houses (for fostering "sexual immorality, sloth, and divorce").Hutchison, Janet. "Shaping Housing and Enhancing Consumption: Hoover's Interwar Housing Policy", From Tenements to the Taylor Homes pp. 81–101, p. 83 .
Specific places
New York
As the United States industrialized during the 19th century, immigrants and workers from the countryside were housed in former middle-class houses and other buildings, such as warehouses, which were bought up and divided into small dwellings.Bauman, pp. 5–6.Fairbanks, Robert B. "From Better Dwellings to Better Neighborhoods: The Rise and Fall of the First National Housing Movement," From Tenements to the Taylor Homes pp. 21–42, p. 22 . Beginning as early as the 1830s in New York City's Lower East Side or possibly the 1820s on Mott Street,Plunz, p. 161. three- and four-story buildings were converted into "railroad flats," so called because the rooms were linked together like the cars of a train,Plunz, p. 164. with windowless internal rooms. The adapted buildings were also known as "rookeries," and these were a particular concern, as they were prone to collapse and fire. Mulberry Bend and Five Points were the sites of notorious rookeries that the city worked for decades to clear. In both rookeries and purpose-built tenements, communal water taps and water closets (either privies or "school sinks," which opened into a vault that often became clogged) were squeezed into the small open spaces between buildings. In parts of the Lower East Side, buildings were older and had courtyards, generally occupied by machine shops, stables, and other businesses.Nadel, Stanley. Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845-80, Urbana: University of Illinois, 1990, , p. 34 .
Such tenements were particularly prevalent in New York, where in 1865 a report stated that 500,000 people lived in unhealthy tenements, whereas in Boston in 1845, less than a quarter of workers were housed in tenements. One reason New York had so many tenements was the large number of immigrants; another was that the grid plan on which streets were laid out, and the economic practice of building on individual lots, combined to produce high land coverage.Plunz, p. 163. Prior to 1867, tenements often covered more than 90 percent of the lot, were five or six stories high, and had 18 rooms per floor, of which only two received direct sunlight. Yards were a few feet wide and often filled with privies. Interior rooms were not ventilated.
Early in the 19th century, many of the poor were housed in cellars, which became even less sanitary after the Croton Aqueduct brought running water to wealthier New Yorkers: the reduction in well use caused the water table to rise, and the cellar dwellings flooded. Early housing reformers urged the construction of tenements to replace cellars, and beginning in 1859 the number of people living in cellars began to decline.Plunz, p. 160.
The Tenement House Act of 1866, the state legislature's first comprehensive legislation on housing conditions, prohibited cellar apartments unless the ceiling was above street level; required at least one water closet per each 20 residents and the provision of fire escapes; and paid some attention to space between buildings.Plunz, pp. 167–68. This was amended by the Tenement House Act of 1879, known as the Old Law, which required lot coverage of no more than 65 percent. As of 1869, New York State law defined a "tenement house" as "any house or building, or portion thereof, which is rented, leased let or hired out, to be occupied, or is occupied as the home or residence of three families or more living independently of each other, and doing their cooking upon the premises, or by more than two families upon any floor, so living and cooking, but having a right in the halls, stairways, yards, water-closets or privies, or some of them." L 1867, ch 908. The New York City Board of Health was empowered to enforce these regulations, but it declined to do so. As a compromise, the "Old Law tenement" became the standard: this had a "dumbbell" shape, with air and light shafts on either side in the center (usually fitted to the shafts in the adjacent buildings), and it typically covered 80 percent of the lot.Plunz, p. 168. James E. Ware is credited with the design;* he had won a contest the previous year held by Plumber and Sanitary Engineer Magazine to find the most practical improved tenement design, in which profitability was the most important factor to the jury.Plunz, pp. 168–69.
Public concern about New York tenements was stirred by publication in 1890 of Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives,Riis, Jacob A., How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. Repr. ed. Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap/Harvard University, 1970. and in 1892 by Riis's The Children of the Poor. Riis, 2018 The New York State Assembly Tenement House Committee report of 1894 surveyed 8,000 buildings with approximately 255,000 residents and found New York to be the most densely populated city in the world, at an average of , with part of the Lower East Side having , denser than Bombay. It used both charts and photographs, the first such official use of photographs.Plunz, p. 172. Together with the publication in 1895 by the US Department of Labor of a special report on housing conditions and solutions elsewhere in the world, The Housing of Working People, it ultimately led to the passage of the Tenement House Act of 1901, known as the New Law, which implemented the Tenement House Committee's recommendation of a maximum of 70 percent lot coverage and mandated strict enforcement, specified a minimum of for a rear yard and for an air and light shaft at the lot line or in the middle of the building (all of these being increased for taller buildings), and required running water and water closets in every apartment and a window in every room. There were also fire-safety requirements. These rules are still the basis of New York City law on low-rise buildings, and they have made single-lot development uneconomical.Plunz, p. 175.
Most of the purpose-built tenements in New York were not slums, although they were not pleasant to be inside, especially in hot weather, so people congregated outside, made heavy use of the fire escapes, and slept in summer on fire escapes, roofs, and sidewalks.Girouard, pp. 312–13.
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a five-story brick former tenement building in Manhattan that is a National Historic Site, is a museum devoted to tenements on the Lower East Side.
Other famous tenements in the US include tenement housing in Chicago, in which various housing areas were built to the same affect as tenements in New York.
Glasgow and Edinburgh