USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -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-2: -During 1850 to 1920, people immigrating to America needed a place to live. Many were poor and needed jobs. The jobs people found paid low wages so many people had to live together. Therefore, tenements were the only places new immigrants could afford.

Detailed explanation-3: -The people inhabiting these buildings were certainly not the rich and the powerful; rather, the families who were crammed into the tenement houses and apartments were mostly European immigrants and poor laborers who could not afford to move to a better area of the city in which they were living.

Detailed explanation-4: -Tenements were first built to house the waves of immigrants that arrived in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s, and they represented the primary form of urban working-class housing until the New Deal. A typical tenement building was from five to six stories high, with four apartments on each floor.