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Abstract
This paper explores the role of architecture as a catalyst for housing policy through analysis of the Tenement House Exhibition held in New York City in 1900. Organized by the progressive Charity Organization Society, this exhibition exposes the terms in which Americans addressed the problem of urban housing at the turn of the twentieth century. According to its organizers, a professionalized state apparatus, including a regulated rental market, would reform the sanitation problems endemic to the tenement typology while allowing it to continue as a profitable entity. This approach to housing reform reflects the “modern” liberal philosophy of the progressive movement and was intended to preserve the existing social and economic order. The paper explores the role of architecture in this reform movement, as both a model and a standard.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
Notes
1 Americans were introduced to European examples of mass housing designed in the modern, or “international,” style at another New York City exhibition, the 1932 International Style show at the Museum of Modern Art. See: Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1932).
2 Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing the People: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
3 Roy Lubove, “Lawrence Veiller and the New York State Tenement House Commission of 1900,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47, no. 4 (March 1961): 659–77; and Roy Lubove, Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890–1917 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962).
4 Matthew Gordon Lasner, “Architecture’s Progressive Imperative: Housing Betterment in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Architectural Design 88, no.4 (July/August 2018), 16.
5 T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Anti-modernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 26–31.
6 This is the narrative advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in his 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1921).
7 The literature on the tenement house reform movement is extensive. Key texts include: Richard E. Foglesong, Planning the Capitalist City: The Colonial Era to the 1920s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 56–88; Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling Type and Social Change in the American Metropolis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 21–49; Robert B. Fairbanks, “From Better Dwellings to Better Neighborhood: The Rise and Fall of the First National Housing Movement,” in From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth Century America, ed. John F. Bauman, Roger Biles and Kristen M. Szylvian (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 21–42; Robert M. Fogelson, “Inventing Blight: Downtown and the Origins of Urban Redevelopment,” Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 317–80; Lawrence J. Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 55–88; Andrew S. Dolkart, “Tenements,” in Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places and Policies That Transformed a City, ed. Nicholas Dagen Bloom and Mathew Gordon Lasner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 45–48; and Zachary Violette, The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 6–10, 197–216.
8 In July 1901 Architectural Record noted the lack of legal differentiation between the tenement and the apartment house: “New York Apartment Houses,” Architectural Record (July 1901), 477. The same lack of differentiation is noted in Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and John Massengale, New York 1900: Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism 1890–1915 (New York: Rizzoli, 1995), 280–87.
9 On the Exhibition, see: Lawrence Veiller, “The Tenement-House Exhibit of 1899,” Charities Review (March 1900), 20–21; and Lawrence Veiller, Tenement House Reform in New York 1834–1900 (New York: Tenement House Commission, 1900), 41–46. Photographic materials from the Exhibition are held at Columbia University: https://exhibitions.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/css/housing/tenementexhibit. On the Charity Organization Society, see: Lillian Brandt, The Charity Organization Society of the City of New York 1882–1910 (New York: B. H. Tyrell, 1910).
10 Veiller, Tenement House Reform in New York. See also; Robert W. De Forest, “A Brief History of the Housing Movement in America,” Housing and Town Planning, special issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 51 (January 1914): 8–16.
11 Elgin R. L. Gould, “The Housing Problem in Great Cities,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 14, no. 3 (May 1900), 378. The Committee was made up of Robert W. De Forest, Elgin R. L. Gould, Henry Phipps, Jacob A. Riis, Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, Lawrence Veiller and Alfred T. White.
12 Gould, “The Housing Problem in Great Cities,” 378–9.
13 Jacob Riis, “How the Other Half Lives,” Scribner’s Magazine (December 1889); and Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (London: Penguin, 1997 [1890]). On Riis’ contribution to the propaganda of tenement house reform in New York City, see Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan 1900–1940 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 73–96, 121–42.
14 Veiller, Tenement House Reform in New York, 42.
15 Veiller, Tenement House Reform in New York, 44.
16 The block depicted in the model was cleared in 1905 in preparation for the construction of Carrere and Hastings’ monumental arch at the approach to the Manhattan Bridge.
17 An 1897 guide to New York described the brothels lining “Chrystie, Forsyth, Stanton, Rivington and Houston Streets.” Frank Moss, The American Metropolis: From Knickerbocker Days to the Present, vol. 3 (New York: Peter Fenelon Collier, 1897), 22.
18 For example the models were shown in early 1908 at the Tuberculosis Exhibit organized by the Charity Organization Society at the Metropolitan Life building, Madison Ave and 23rd Street, and again at the Exhibition of Congestion in Population in New York held at the Museum of Natural History on March 9–23, 1908. See: Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 158, no. 1 (February 20, 1908), 267; and John W. Russell, “New York’s Improved Tenements,” House and Garden (July 1908), 25–29; (August 1908), 83–87.
19 Veiller, Tenement House Reform in New York, 45.
20 Veiller, Tenement House Reform in New York, 46. See also, Lawrence Veiller, “The Charity Organization Society’s Tenement-House Competition,” The American Architect and Building News (March 10, 1900), 77; “Prize Designs for Model Tenements,” The Construction News (March 7, 1900), 171; and Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City, 43–47.
21 On Phelps Stokes, see: Roy Lubove, “I. N. Phelps Stokes: Tenement Architect, Economist, Planner,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 23, no. 2 (1964): 75–87.
22 See: Montgomery Schuler, “The Art of City Making,” Architectural Record (May 1902): 1–26; and Herbert Croly, “Civic Improvements: The Case of New York City,” Architectural Record 21, no. 5 (May 1907): 347–52.
23 Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 77.
24 On the political basis of the Manhattan grid, see Edward K. Spann, “The Greatest Grid: The New York Plan of 1811,” Two Centuries of American Planning, ed. Daniel Schaffer (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 11–39; David M. Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002), 22–54, 120–33; and Hillary Ballon, “The Commissioner’s Plan of 1811,” The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811–2011 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 13–55.
25 Ballon, The Greatest Grid, 103–5.
26 Don Mitchell, “The Importance of Public Space in Democratic Societies,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85, no. 1 (March 1995), 117.
27 Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 77.
28 Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 51.
29 Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 211.
30 On the sweating system, see: Christine Stansell, “The Origins of the Sweatshop: Women and Early Industrialization in New York City,” in Working Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society, ed. Michael Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 78–103; Nancy L. Green, “Sweatshop Migrations: The Garment Industry Between Home and Shop,” in The Landscape of Modernity: New York City 1900–40, ed. David Ward and Oliver Zunz (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 213–32; and Heather J. Griggs, “‘By Virtue of Reason and Nature’: Competition and Economic Strategy in the Needle Trades at New York’s Five Points, 1855–1880,” Historical Archaeology 35, no. 3 (2001): 76–88.
31 Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 206.
32 Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City, 1–50; and Richard Plunz, “The Tenement as Built Form,” From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle for New York’s Lower East Side, ed. Janet Abu-Lughod (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1994), 63–79.
33 Violette, The Decorated Tenement, 14–16, 113–38.
34 “The Passing of the 25 × 100’ Lot in New York City,” Architectural Record (October 1901), 713. The term “skin-builder” indicated the construction of an attractive façade disguising inadequate or flimsy construction. See Viollette, The Decorated Tenement, 202–3.
35 Francis R. Cope, Jr., “Tenement House Reform: Its Practical Results in the ‘Battle Row’ District, New York,” American Journal of Sociology 7, no. 3 (November 1901), 346.
36 On Flagg’s work for City and Suburban Homes, see: “The Works of Ernest Flagg Illustrated,” Architectural Record (April 1902), 40; Ernest Flagg, “Economy in Tenements,” Architectural Record (1907), 73; Mardges Bacon, Ernest Flagg, Beaux-Arts Architect and Urban Reformer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986); and Andrew S. Dolkart, “City and Suburban Homes Company,” Affordable Housing in New York, ed. Bloom and Lasner, 48–52.
37 Cope, “Tenement House Reform,” 340.
38 “Housing the Poor,” Architectural Record (1907), 74.
39 Flagg, “Economy in Tenements,” 73.
40 Viollette, The Decorated Tenement, 205–7.
41 Grosvenor Atterbury, “The Phipps Model Tenement Houses,” Charities and the Commons 17 (October 6, 1906), 57. Quoted in Violette, The Decorated Tenement, 205.
42 The American economist Thorstein Veblen famously described conspicuous consumption as the social result of the mixture of demographic types bought together in Americans cities in The Theory of the Leisure Class (London: Penguin Books, 1994 [1899]).
43 Robert W. De Forest, “Tenement House Regulation; The Reasons for It; Its Proper Limitations,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 20 (July 1902), 84.
44 Franklin MacVeagh, “A Programme of Municipal Reform,” American Journal of Sociology 1, no. 5 (March 1896): 551–63. See also, L. S. Rowe, “The Relation of Municipal Government to American Democratic Ideals,” American Journal of Sociology 1, no. 1 (July 1905): 75–84.
45 De Forest, “Tenement House Regulation,” 85.
46 Gould, “The Housing Problem in Great Cities,” 385.
47 Gould, “The Housing Problem in Great Cities,” 388.
48 Stromquist, Reinventing the People, 98.
49 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977; New York: Vintage Books, 1995); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 (London: Pallgrave Macmillan, 2008). See also: Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (New York: Verso, 2003). On the family and the family home as instruments of state power in France, see Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1979). On the model tenement as a disciplinary mechanism in the United Kingdom and the United States, see: Robin Evans, “Rookeries and Model Dwellings: English Housing Reform and the Moralities of Private Space,” Translations from Building to Darwing and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association Publications), 93–118; and Tarsha Finney, “Repetition and Transformation: The Housing Project and the City of New York” (PhD diss., University of Technology Sydney, 2016), 67–78.
50 Robert W. De Forest and Lawrence Veiller, eds., The Tenement House Problem: including the report of the New York State tenement house commission of 1900, vols 1 and 2 (New York: New York (State) Tenement House Commission/The MacMillan Company, 1903); The Charity Organization Society of the City of New York, 1882-1907: History [and] account of present activities (New York: B. H. Tyrell, 1907), 58; Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City, 47–48; Marc A. Weiss, “Density and Intervention. New York’s Planning Traditions,” in The Landscape of Modernity, 52.
51 Russell, “New York’s Improved Tenements,” 83.
52 “New York Apartment Houses,” 711–13.
53 De Forest went on to become the President of the National Housing Association, established in 1910. Influenced by the Association, many cities across the country enacted tenement housing laws in the following decade. Fairbanks, “From Better Dwellings to Better Neighborhood,” 32–4.
54 Thomas Adams, The Building of the City: Regional Plan, vol. 2 (New York: Regional Plan Association, 1931), 398–406. On projects to remake the Lower East Side in the 1920s and ’30s see: Robert Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins, New York 1930: Architecture and Urbanism Between Two World Wars (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 438–41; and Joel Schwarz, The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals and the Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), 1–34.
55 Suzanne Wasserman, “Déjà Vu: Re-planning the Lower East Side in the 1930s,” From Urban Village to East Village, ed. Abu-Lughod, 99–120.
56 Richard Pommer, “The Architecture of Urban Housing in the United States During the Early 1930s,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 37, no. 4 (December 1978): 235–64; Plunz, History of Housing in New York, 207–46; Schwarz, The New York Approach, 25–60; and Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
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Notes on contributors
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury is a Professor of Architecture at Victoria University of Wellington.