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U.S. History 1877-Present Videos 173 videos
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U.S. History 1877-Present 4: Living in Tenements 262 Views
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Description:
Today we're going over the extreme crowding in tenement houses. And you probably thought sharing a room with one sibling was bad enough. Try ten siblings and you all have to share one bathroom with the people next door. Yikes.
Transcript
- 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
Full Transcript
- 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....
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