I had the Housings in the cities.
During the 1880s and 1890s, cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago became very popular for homes of the immigrants. They came from Italy, Russia and Eastern Europe. Chicago had the first skyscrapers. Most of the immigrants were unskilled and worked in the factories. In the inner city tenements (narrow, low apartment buildings), whole families occupied the smallest of quarters usually served with only one bath. By 1900, over 2/3 of all New York's population were living in tenements.
There was very poor sanitation, and no water treatment or filtering.There was no indoor plumbing for a large amount of time. The living quarters were also very cramped. Diseases began and spread rapidly. In 1890, Jacob Riis documented urban problems in his book, How the Other Half Lives. This, along with the first pictures of these living conditions, showed the upper class people what really happens in the cities.
The infant death rate for tenements were as bad as 1 in 10. In some cases, 12 adults slept in a room about 13 feet across. The Tenement House Act of 1867 legally defined a tenement for the first time and set construction regulations. It was also a requirement to have toilet per 20 people in the tenements. This didn't take much affect until 1901, when the New York City officials really enforced the law. More than 200,000 new apartments were built over the next 15 years, supervised by city authorities. In New York City the population doubled every decade from 1800 to 1880.
By the 1920's, more people lived in cities than rural areas. It was then that America was known as an "urban nation." By the late 1920s, many tenements in Chicago had been demolished and replaced with large, privately subsidized apartment projects. The next decade involved President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which would transform low-income housing in many American cities through programs including slum clearing and the building of public housing. The first fully government-built public housing project opened in New York City in 1936. It was called First Houses and consisted of a number of rehabilitated pre-law tenements covering part of the Lower East Side.
The old law tenements were usually 5 to 7 stories high and used nearly all of the lot that they were built on. The lots were usually 25 ft wide and 100 ft long. Along with the trendy restaurants, boutique hotels, and bars that can be found in the neighborhood today, visitors can still get a glimpse into its past at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum on 97 Orchard Street. The building was built in 1863 and is an example of an "old-law" tenement (as defined by the Tenement House Act of 1867) and was home over the years for some 7,000 working class immigrants. Although the basement and the first floor have been renovated, the rest of the building looks much the same as it did in the 19th century, and has been designated a National Historic Site.
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