USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Tenements were low-rise buildings with multiple apartments, which were narrow and typically made up of three rooms. Because rents were low, tenement housing was the common choice for new immigrants in New York City. It was common for a family of 10 to live in a 325-square-foot apartment.

Detailed explanation-2: -These repurposed buildings were known as “rookeries, ” after the term for a collection of nests. In 1867 the New York State Legislature passed the Tenement House Act, which defined a tenement as any building rented out to at least three families, each of which lives independently but shares halls, stairways, and yards.

Detailed explanation-3: -Cramped, poorly lit, under ventilated, and usually without indoor plumbing, the tenements were hotbeds of vermin and disease, and were frequently swept by cholera, typhus, and tuberculosis.

Detailed explanation-4: -Known as tenements, these narrow, low-rise apartment buildings–many of them concentrated in the city’s Lower East Side neighborhood–were all too often cramped, poorly lit and lacked indoor plumbing and proper ventilation.