ShmoopTube

00:03

So we know that the streets used to be dirty diseased and [Man appears from pile of garbage]

00:08

overcrowded but what was it like inside people's homes so well pretty much the

00:13

same if you are portly the working-class folks in most cities lived in [Construction workers appear]

00:17

increasingly crowded and unpleasant houses called tenements more and more

00:22

cities during this time became divided by class as well as race and ethnicity

00:28

lots more non-whites and new immigrants ended up living in the tenements if it

00:33

were based on numbers alone it would look like immigrant workers love

00:36

tenement housing while two-thirds of New York City's population lived in tenement [People walking in busy street]

00:41

housing in the year 1900 truth is people definitely did not love it but lived

00:46

there because there weren't exactly a lot of other options well before

00:49

tenement buildings were built multiple families often crowded into [Cartoon family inside an apartment]

00:53

single-family apartments landlords centrally plus more floors on top or

00:58

built shoddy additions that sprawled into the backyard the solution to

01:02

overcrowding in this situation was simple

01:04

cram more people into buildings that already existed as a result there wasn't [Man inspecting building and woman appears holding rats]

01:09

a whole lot of light ventilation or elbow room at the dinner table some

01:13

Extreme Home makeovers would have been welcome then real estate speculators

01:18

began to build tenements specifically for the purpose of cramming as many [Tenements being built by construction workers]

01:22

people into a building as possible and they use cheap materials in rush job

01:26

construction with the population of New York City doubling every decade from

01:30

1800 to 1880 a housing crisis was pretty darn inevitable on top of criticisms

01:37

that tenements were grody and crowded residents got pretty upset when they [Man surrounded by trash bags]

01:41

burned alive inside of them and blame them for getting a little heated about

01:45

that one well the Great Fire of 1871 in Chicago

01:48

happened mostly because of the dense concentration of tenement housing with

01:52

the building's constructed so closely together the fire went from house to [Fire spreading through tenement houses]

01:56

house easier than Santa Claus fire wasn't the only thing that spread with

02:00

ease in 18-49 a cholera epidemic erupted in New York City many of the 5,000

02:06

victims live in tenements well the Housing Act of

02:10

1867 finally set legal limits on tenement construction and imposed some

02:15

standards for example the Act established that there had to be at [Toilet appears in dirty room]

02:19

least one toilet for 20 people that means more than 20 people usually shared

02:25

a toilet and that's before it was worse they're lucky those overworked toilets [Toilets marching]

02:30

didn't rebel....

Full Transcript