The Times had a fascinating article about these newly discovered photos of tenements, taken before they were demolished to put up housing projects (which, of course, usually wound up to be much worse than the original tenements!). Click away, at this site, at the “How Public Housing Transformed New York” link, upper right.
Eve, this is a very cool resource. Thanks for sharing it with us. I will e-mail the link to my mother who loves “old New York”
Click onto the “Building Better Lives” 1 and 2 links and get a load of the horrible, blank, soulless buildings that replaced the tenements!
It looks like whole neighborhoods were demolished to make way for the new high rises. I can understand razing old tenement slums to make way for better more standard housing but replacing one ugly worn down slum with a huge soon to be worn down slum baffles me. Maybe those neat looking in the photos row houses were rat holes but they looked really interesting in the pictures.
Thanks for this link Eve. I’m far from a native New Yorker being born and raised down heah in Jawja but it’s really interesting. I’m looking forward to having some time to go through the whole thing. I’ve put the site in my favorite places just so I can go look through the whole thing. I wish they could come up with a better plan than ugly high rises but I guess it’s kind of tough to do to fit a lot of people in a relatively small area of land.
Well, the “old law” tenements, for all their Dickensian charm in photos, were airless deathtraps, many of them collapsing on their own by the 1930s.
But as you can see, the Bauhaus Worker’s Paradise Behemoths that replaced them are today’s godawful, crime-ridden, ugly projects . . .
Very interesting – thanks!
BY an odd coincidence, I just finished reading Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which everyone interested in this topic should read. (Jacobs, of course, is not all all unbiased on the subject, but I think the past forty years have proved that she’s somewhat more on the side of right than the project-builders were.)
Great link, Eve. It’s now in the “American History” folder of my bookmarks.
I’m going to be spending a week or so in New York over the summer, and i’m going to make a point of seeing the Tenement Museum, which i’ve been meaning to visit for ages.
I went to the Tenement Museum on a trip with school last year, it was pretty cool. I was the only Jewish student in my class and I felt like I got something more out of it. There’s a jar on display with the Rokeach brand name on it, I thought that was neat.