Blog assignment #3

The construction of the Erie Canal was a major development for New York, resulting in a revolution of transport and settlers flooding in from the West to the East. Although the new Canal brought a movement of poor immigrants to New York, the city was ill equipped to house all of the new citizens. The city’s proposed idea was to construct large multifamily dwellings called tenements to shelter the immigrants. Ironically, while tenement housing did solve the problem dealing with living spaces for immigrant laborers, their poor quality design and sanitation became an even worse problem for the immigrant settlers to deal with.

The tenements were designed mainly to take advantage of the 25 foot x 100 foot lot, resulting in very slim buildings but with more floors to include rooms. These buildings were clearly built to fill quantity rather than quality though. To fit as much people as possible, each floor was designed to accommodate approximately 20 families at a time, resulting in ridiculously cramped living quarters. These apartment rooms also lacked the most basic necessities such as kitchens and toilets. It was common for each floor to have only one or two public bathroom, which every family on the same floor shared. In addition, due to multiple tenement buildings being erected in very close proximities, they would block out the sunlight from each other. If a building was lucky, one or two of the families would receive sunlight through their windows.

Due to the cramped living conditions, sanitation was also deplorable in tenement houses. Due to the lack of a proper sewage and water system, most tenement families were content with just dumping their trash on the floor and outside on the streets; resulting in germs, animals, and disease to move in with them. The cramped quarters made it even easier for disease to spread as when one family with a sickness would often spread it to the adjacent families, whom themselves spread it to their adjacent families, repeating until the entire floor was infected.

The tenement buildings were a result of poor planning and a lack of care for the actual living conditions of its tenants. While the Erie Canal did bring a variety of wealth to New York, it also created the need of tenements: a poorly planned and maintained experiment. However, not all is a sense of disappointment with the tenements. It was due to the attention brought upon these sanitation violations that led to the improvement of living conditions by law, leading to the modern building code of today.

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