New Law Tenement Floor Plan

Irma and paul milstein division of united states history local history and genealogy the new york public library.

New law tenement floor plan.

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. Every room in the new law tenements is light and well ventilated. If you looked at the building from above it would be shaped like a series of dumbbells pushed together with the air shafts being the small space between them you can see a sample floor plan here. Note that the new style tenement s footprint if you will was wider with 6 bays across instead of the formerly standard 4 bays.

In the early 21st century a typical lower east side or east village street will still be. A model tenement house. The typical floor plan shown for this particular building featured two apartments instead of four in this upscale building built more for the middle to upper class renters. At least one of the living rooms for each family must have one hundred and twenty square feet of floor space and seventy square feet is the minimum allowance for any room.

A rare example of a tenement which could fulfill the requirements of the new law on a 25 foot wide lot. Accessed september 9 2020. Plan of upper floors new york public library digital collections. Required under the new law to include a large courtyard which consumed more space than the 1879 old law s air shafts new law tenements 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.

208 thompson street built 1903. The final iteration was the dumb bell building which had larger shafts along the sides in the middle which gave the floor plan the look of that piece of weightlifting equipment. Old law tenements are tenements built in new york city after the tenement house act of 1879 and before the new york state tenement house act new law of 1901. Despite the new law the tenement department in its first heavily documented and illustrated report for 1902 and 1903 noted that some of the conditions found in these buildings surpasses the imagination.