Questions for Curatorial: High and Low

Curatorial Director Dave answers your questions. To submit a question, leave it in the comments or on our Facebook page.

Were there ever height regulations placed on buildings in New York City, especially tenements on the Lower East Side?

Height regulations were first placed on buildings in New York City by the 1916 Zoning Resolution. As the first comprehensive effort at regulating the height, area, and use of structures built in an urban environment, the resolution proved influential to other U.S. cities that enacted zoning legislation after 1916.

While the 1916 Zoning Regulation was in a sense formulated as a reaction to the ways in which a new building form, the “skyscraper,” blocked sunlight to the surrounding streets (resulting in the setback, pyramid-style designs typical of New York City high-rises,) it applied to the entire city. Neighborhoods such as the Lower East Side were divided into height districts where limitations were formulated in relation to the width of the street. The Lower East Side was deemed a 1½ times district, meaning that no building was to be erected to a height in excess of 1½ times the width of the street. However, for each foot that the building or a portion of it was set back from the street line, three feet could be added to the height limit of the structure.

Although many of the tenements on the Lower East Side were erected prior to 1916, the height of those constructed after were subject to the limitations imposed by the 1916 Zoning Resolution.

Public Housing Projects

The La Guardia and Wagner Archives at CUNY have a wonderful database of information about the city, especially during the 1930s and 1940s. If you haven't checked it out before, it's highly recommended.

They recently put some photos from their collection on Flickr, and they're fascinating. I was particularly interested in the NY Public House set, which includes images relating to the public housing projects constructed in NYC in the mid-20th century. Many of those projects displaced tenants from their homes, which the government considered sub-standard.

The archive includes a number of pre-development site photos, which are pretty interesting if you never saw the former buildings in person. There are also images of the new construction which provide a good counterpoint to the empty-lot photos and, I think, complicate our notions of what public housing and "slum clearance" projects meant to the city and to the people who lived here then.

Here are some of my favorites from the set:

Here's an arial shot showing the new Lillian Wald and Jacob Riis projects on the East River, along with Sty-Town to the north, from 1949:



Here's a woman in her tenement apartment building in Chelsea, summer 1941. This apartment looks so much like our restored Baldizzi apartment. We probably have the same model washtub (cheapest available):



Here's another tenement kitchen, this one on the Lower East Side, in 1945:



Here's a look at Orchard and Rivington in 1936. Thankfully this street was never razed:



But, these tenements on 4th and D were - they were on the site of the present-day Wald Houses:



These also met the wrecking ball (Baruch Houses, 1950):



Stores like this one, on the site of the future Lincoln Center, lost their spaces and the neighborhood clientele who shopped there:



On the other hand, couples like this one found promise in new, clean homes with modern technology, which were in short supply after the war. So much of the city's housing stock was old and deteriorating that new buildings were much appreciated (1947):



Housing projects like the Red Hook Houses also provided classrooms for immigrants to learn English, like this one below (1940):




Have a look through the La Guardia and Wagner Archives' Flickr set and let us know which photos strike you the most.

 - posted by kate

"Apartment Houses of the Metropolis"

A model tenement house. 224-226 Avenue B; Plan of first floor; Plan of upper floors. (1908). Built by Charles I. Weinstein, 1904 / Architect - Geo. F. Pelham. Collection: NYPL.


A model tenement house. 310 East Houston Street; Plan of first floor; Plan of upper floors. Built by Charles I. Weinstein, 1905 / Architect - Geo. F. Pelham. Collection: NYPL.


Two model tenement houses. 504-508 East 12th Street; Plan of first floor; Plan of upper floors. (1908) Built by Charles I. Weinstein, 1905 / Architect - Geo. F. Pelham. Collection: NYPL.

These designs were meant to provide more air and light for residents, ideally making them more sanitary places to live than traditional tenement houses.

Questions for Curatorial: Renovation Habitations

Curatorial Director Dave answers your questions. Have a question for Dave about tenement living conditions or the history of the Lower East Side? Send us an email.

When the hallway toilets were introduced to 97 Orchard Street in 1905, where did the residents of the apartments on the south side of the building go?

In order to comply with the requirements of the 1901 Tenement House Act, at 97 Orchard Street, two water closets and an adjoining fireproof shaft of steel and terracotta were constructed on each floor in 1905, in space that had previously been part of the inner bedrooms of the apartments on the south side of the building.

The addition of the toilets and shaft reduced the square footage of the south apartments from 345 square feet to 318 square feet. The toilet rooms and shaft occupied a substantial part of the old bedrooms of 97 Orchard Street and similar buildings, making these inner rooms uninhabitable. To alleviate this problem, but keep a three-room arrangement in each apartment, the partitions between the kitchen and bedroom in all of the south apartments at 97 Orchard Street were rearranged.

Although the addition of hallway toilets was major structural undertaking that impacted the building’s livability, Museum researchers know little about how residents dealt with what must have been challenging situation. Indeed, those who inhabited the apartments on the south side of 97 Orchard Street would have experienced the greatest inconvenience, but there is no evidence to suggest whether or not they were evicted or found residence elsewhere during the construction.

Photo © Collection of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum

Work has begun on Rear Yard exhibit!

This week we started construction on the rear yard.

If you ever walked by in the past, or took The Moores: An Irish Family in America tour, you probably remember that the yard looked something like this:

The flagstones (stacked up around the edge) were removed from the yard. The large pieces of stone are architectural details from the old Daily Forward building, which the Museum salvaged when the building was being renovated into condos.

While the stone details will be put into storage, we're planning to use the flagstones in the restoration. We're building the wooden privy shed against that cinder block wall, installing a water pump next to that, and putting up a wooden fence around the yard, similar to what you see here:

This is Fanny Rogarshevsky and her son Sam in 97 Orchard Street's rear yard, early 20th century, but date unknown.















Here's what we plan for the final exhibit to look like:

The water pump is there on the left. Until well into the 20th century, there was a row of tenements up against ours on what is now the sidewalk and northbound traffic lane of Allen Street, so this image really does give a good sense of what our yard probably looked like circa 1904, when this photo was taken. (Courtesy New York Public Library, original source New York City Tenement House Department).

Here are some more photos from the NYPL to give you a better sense of what the privy shed will look like. (Warning, I'm sending you down a time-suck rabbit hole if you like looking at old pictures from the Tenement House Department - they're pretty interesting, and there are lots of them in the NYPL's collection.)

There will also be laundry lines and wash buckets to simulate the activity that would have constantly been going on in this space (for years, the only source of water for the building was the rear yard water pump, and the only toilets were back here, so you can imagine how many people would have been in and out all day long).

The restoration will be semi-visible from the street and will enhance The Moores tour by giving some context to the discussion about health and sanitation in tenement housing. For now, there are no plans for it to be its own free-standing tour or exhibit.

We'll keep you posted as work continues. We should be done in a few weeks!

- Posted by Kate

History of 103 Orchard Street

Standing across the street from the corner tenement at 103 Orchard today, there is little evidence suggestive of the immense changes it has undergone since it was erected in the late 19th century. In 1888, the wood-frame dwellings at 103, 105, and 107 Orchard were replaced by three separate, individual dumbbell tenements, each 25 feet wide by 88.6 feet deep, each with 18 individual apartments.

Commissioned by Michael Fay and William Stacom, and constructed by architects Rentz and Lange for the sum of $25,000, these three tenements were built according to requirements of the 1879 Tenement House Act, known also as the “old law.”

The light and air requirements of the Act were physically manifested in the form of the dumbbell tenement, with its characteristic airshaft. Though the new design was intended to ameliorate the dark, dank interior rooms of pre-old law tenements (like 97 Orchard), they too soon became burdened with their own problems. Just eight years after being built, 105 Orchard Street was mentioned in a September 1895 New York Times article as a building the Board of Health would forcibly vacate if “not put in better sanitary condition within five days.”

In 1903, Delancey Street was widened as an approach to the newly built Williamsburg Bridge. In this widening, the tenements at 109, 111, and 113 Orchard Streets were demolished and cleared. The corner building at 83 Delancey Street was cleared as well. For about three years, the Delancey Street end of the block probably looked as if something was missing—the end of the street just shorn off. In 1906, the tenements at 103, 105, and 107 Orchard Street were purchased by Joseph Marcus, founder and president of the Bank of the United States. He completed major alterations that turned 107 Orchard into a corner building. Total cost: about $10,000.

The 1906 alteration was only the first of a series of changes that occurred at 103, 105, and 107 Orchard during the first decades of the 20th century. Undoubtedly the most far-reaching of these occurred in 1913. According to this Tenement House Department “Application to Alter a Tenement House,” 103, 105, and 107 Orchard were combined to create one building.

The description of alterations reads, “Rear part of all the buildings and southerly building to be removed; lots to be reapportioned and buildings altered so as to make one corner building. All stairs to be removed and new fireproof stairs erected. Partitions to be altered and bathrooms installed.”

Before completion, these major alterations were met with some concern by the Tenement House Department. In this series of memoranda from July 1913, Acting Commissioner Abbot notes his opinion that “the three original buildings have been so changed in form, occupancy and location that the portion of the structure remaining when alterations are completed constituted so different a type of structure that existed originally that I feel the Department would have to treat the alteration of such a gigantic nature requiring the filing of the application form for a new law tenement…”

The old dumbbell tenements were altered to create one, single new law tenement. While each of the original buildings had 18 apartments, for a total of 54, the new building at 103 Orchard Street had a total of only 16 individual apartments, or four apartments on each of the second, third, fourth, and fifth floors. No residential units existed on the first or ground floor after 1913, as this level was dedicated commercial space. Sometime between 1913 and 1917, one apartment on the second floor was turned into a dentist’s office. In 1938, another apartment on the second floor was discontinued and used for storage. From 1938 to the present, 103 Orchard Street has had a total of 14 individual residential apartments.

103 Orchard Street photo courtesy Municipal Archives.

Tenement Architects - Entirely Unneccessary?

It’s a good thing 19th century architects rarely got famous for their work on tenement houses. According to Andrew Dolkart, a historic preservation expert at Columbia who studies they city’s everyday, or “vernacular,” structures, tenement architects (and even the renowned designers of some cast-iron commercial buildings in SoHo) did little more than sign legal documents and select pre-fab ornamentations from warehouses.

The Italiante stone lintels above the windows of buildings surrounding the museum, for instance, which were in fashion at the time and helped stabilize the window frames, were probably chosen from a manufacturing lot somewhere in the city. (97 Orchard's have since been scraped off and smoothed over.)

And as for the design of the tenements themselves, the boxy four or five story buildings – subdivided into equally nondescript two or three room apartments – are among the simplest structures in the city to build. Contractors hardly needed to follow blueprints; in fact, they often improvised as they went along.

For more info: Check out Dolkart's book, Biography of a Tenement House in New York City (featuring none other than 97 Orchard), on sale at the museum shop.

97 Orchard in the 1940s, stone lintels still intact. Courtesy Municipal Archives.

-posted by Liana Grey

Working-Class Housing in Tough Times

Yesterday Brian Lehrer talked with Steven Greenhouse about how the recession is affecting the working poor. More people are "doubling up," sharing apartments with boarders or other families. This was a common practice in New York's poorer neighborhoods in the 19th and 20th centuries, as overcrowding limited the available housing options.

Listen to the segment here:


Greenhouse was a recent guest at Tenement Talks (left, with Labor Commissioner Smith, Andrew Friedman of Make the Road New York, and Jeff Madrick):



- Posted by Kate Stober

Questions for Curatorial - Short But Sweet

There was quite a bit of buzz last year about rezoning plans that would impose height restrictions on new construction in an 111-block radius of the Lower East Side. This was hardly the first effort to limit vertical growth in the neighborhood. Curatorial Director Dave explains.

Were there ever height regulations placed on buildings in New York City, especially tenements on the Lower East Side?

Height regulations were first placed on buildings in New York City by the 1916 Zoning Resolution. As the first comprehensive effort at regulating the height, area, and use of structures built in an urban environment, the resolution proved influential to other U.S. cities that enacted zoning legislation after 1916.

While the 1916 Zoning Regulation was in a sense formulated as a reaction to the ways in which a new building form, the “skyscraper,” blocked sunlight to the surrounding streets (resulting in the setback, pyramid-style designs typical of New York City high-rises) it applied to the entire city. Neighborhoods such as the Lower East Side were divided into height districts where limitations were formulated in relation to the width of the street. The Lower East Side was deemed a 1½ times district, meaning that no building was to be erected to a height in excess of 1½ times the width of the street. However, for each foot that the building or a portion of it was set back from the street line, three feet could be added to the height limit of the structure.

Although many of the tenements on the Lower East Side were erected prior to 1916, the height of those constructed after were subject to the limitations imposed by the 1916 Zoning Resolution.

Building height hasn't changed much in parts of the Lower East Side since the turn of the last century...



...although more of these have certainly sprung up over the last few years