-
Buildings that had once been single-family dwellings were increasingly divided into multiple living spaces to accommodate this growing population. The population was growing due to immigration.
-
Tenements were overall not beneficial to the gilded age especially for the poor class.
-
Took some 5,000 lives, many of them poor people living in overcrowded housing.
-
Two mothers and their eight children died in the fire on West-Forty Fifth-street New York
-
Required a "window or ventilator" in each sleeping room, a fire escape, and "good and sufficient water-closets or privies" for every tenement house. The law forbade cesspools, making their use a misdemeanor. Instead, all new tenement houses "should be graded and drained, and connected with the sewer.
-
Led to restrictions on building wood-frame structures in the center of the city and encouraged the construction of lower-income dwellings on the city’s outskirts.
-
Brought light into how the tenement conditions were
-
By 1900 more than 80,000 tenements had been built in New York City.
-
Most of the ill tenements and slums were removed and replaced with apartments in Chicago