Learning From New York Tenements

When we first moved in, we had two chairs and an idea for a table. After returning the U-Haul and lugging boxes and furnishings up seven flights of stairs, I took a video: two friends seated in the chairs, facing each other, miming the actions of eating and typing on a laptop. They were performing the reality of the table-to-come, and it would be made of plywood from the Home Depot on 23rd Street, transported by subway and supported by a single Ikea table leg. It was going to be beautiful. And it was.

We live in Manhattan’s Chinatown, one of the many downtown New York neighborhoods defined by walk-up 19th-century tenement apartments. Although every city has its own take on workers’ housing—from Boston’s triple-deckers to Manchester, England’s blind-backs—this city’s were some of the first and perhaps the cruelest. Tenements were envisioned as housing masses of the city’s poor and immigrants. But today, nearly everyone I know in the city who moved here young, broke, and scrappy has lived in one of these: railroad layout; tall, skinny brick facade; no light. These are apartments where you romanticize your fire escape, climbing out the window to access it by climbing awkwardly over your own, or your roommate’s, bed.

The influx of immigrants in the first half of the 19th century from Europe precipitated the need for tenements. About 3.7 million people immigrated via New York between 1820 and 1860. The city’s permanent population then was less than one million. Our building at 65 Mott Street, just south of Canal, is often cited as the first tenement. It’s estimated to have been here since 1824, when the rest of the street was populated by two-story houses.

My address is known as the Weeks Tenement. It was built and rented out by Jacob Weeks, a merchant who grew up in the area when there was still a canal on Canal Street. He moved uptown to get away from increasing industrial activity downtown and "slums" like Five Points, as was the trend for the upwardly mobile at the time, but the family maintained ownership over the tenement until the early 20th century. Maybe he felt that owning this property tied him to the memories of his childhood.

Others had a different perspective. An 1879 article published in The Plumber and Sanitary Engineer, a trade journal that advocated for housing and labor reforms, describes the building:

At No. 65 Mott Street stands a tenement house. It is seven stories high, contains 28 families and has been occupied for some 55 years. There is a rectifying distillery on the first floor. Dark interior rooms are abundant. The owner is a rich man. He complacently says ‘the building doesn’t owe me anything.’ But what does it and its self-satisfied owner owe its occupants and the community?

As this quote describes, 65 Mott was overloaded with residents—and this is just a published, likely conservative, estimate. The building originally had a "double-decker" design, only legal before legislation mandating air shafts and windows. Each floor above the ground level housed four apartments with two rooms and two windows, either facing the street or the rear yard. The main room had the windows, the second was a dark, unlit bedroom. The street-facing apartments likely garnered a higher rent, as the rear yard was merely a sunken court housing the communal privies. After the completion of the main building, a back building that was lower and even darker was built upon this yard, and it still stands today. There is a woman who practices tai chi on the roof most mornings, maybe 30 feet from my window.

As The Plumber and Sanitary Engineer alluded to, tenements quickly became notorious slum dwellings, and they rapidly spread and transformed lower Manhattan. A major reform law arrived in 1867 in the form of the Tenement House Act, which defined a tenement as any building rented to more than three families and mandated one privy for every 20 people as well as basic fire escapes. An 1879 law mandated air shafts, creating "dumbbell" layouts that survive today. In 1901 New York State prohibited new dumbbell tenements and mandated indoor plumbing. This brought the classic tenement era to an end, though the existing structures remained.

Around this time, feelings about apartment living were changing more broadly in the city. For much of the 19th century, multifamily dwellings in New York were primarily for working-class people, but by the 1880s the "French flat," with its allusion to taste and class, had been introduced in the city—popularized by new buildings like the Dakota, on Central Park. These large and luxurious apartment buildings, with space for on-hand servants and staff, took aim at New Yorkers’ desire to maintain social status and respectability even after giving up the town house. The change was necessary because much of Manhattan was running out of space to build. By the early 1900s uptown streets were lined with stately brownstones alongside "apartment hotels," which trickled down some of the French flat luxury to the middle classes. These new designs did this by prioritizing spatial specialization. Rooms were not interchangeable but were designed for specific purposes. The dining room was designed to be the dining room, the bedrooms to be the bedrooms, and the maid’s room to be the maid’s room.

Tenements retained the opposite. They had to flexibly house families of diverse sizes and structures, and they hold many of the keys to designing adaptable living spaces, where a piece of architecture might be commissioned for one thing today but adapts to changing needs in the future. Historically, two rooms were used by inhabitants to house large families, sometimes as large as 10. Now, in those same spaces live many young people and folks in creative industries, who form the modern "precariat," or a class of people who move from gig to gig and live paycheck to paycheck as the financial realities in these fields shift. My partner and I are architectural designers. In Chinatown, we in the precariat live alongside older generations of more traditional working-class folks, including cooks, fabricators, laundresses, and more. Adaptability, for many of us, is necessary and invaluable. One day your living room might be a photo studio for a product shoot; another day you might find out your roommate lost their job or that an extended family member needs to move in. Current rental leases are not kind toward flexibility and changing circumstances, so in the absence of being able to quickly and easily leave a lease agreement, flexible spaces allow life to happen, expand, and contract within tight constraints.

My partner and I are two of the few young, white people in our building. We understand that our relatively cheap rent likely subsidizes the even cheaper, below-market rate rents for the septuagenarian Chinese elders who live above, below, and alongside us. The family of our landlord, Carol, who asked that I just use her first name, has owned the building since 1992, and she has lived in Chinatown her entire life.

"My family originally rented a store at 63 Mott Street," Carol says, "but when the lease came up for renewal, the rent increased over 300 percent. My father felt that it was cheaper to purchase the building for sale…and pay a mortgage than to continue renting." Carol is the main point of contact for everyone at 65 Mott now, though she works full-time as a nurse. She was chosen for this role out of her sisters because she speaks both Cantonese and Toisanese, dialects from Guangdong Province, where many elders in this community hail from. Whenever we notice a vacancy in the building, she usually quips that it’s not available but is being made ready for a family member.

Instead of adapting our lives around the available furnishings, we’ve taken the lessons of the tenement as a design challenge.

This deeply enmeshed, family-style stewardship of the neighborhood and its real estate assets makes Chinatown an enduring ethnic enclave in New York City. By retaining control over property and doing their own branding of the area (think Chinese characters on business signs; the pagoda styling of prominent corner office buildings), the community has been able to not just remain in place but expand. And where the city government has failed, the community has worked together to maintain affordable, community-first health care options, pharmacies that stock herbs for traditional Chinese medicine, and dozens of food markets selling produce specific to Asian cuisine direct to customers, cutting out the big-box store middleman. Nonetheless Carol, and many in our neighborhood, have a simmering complaint: "The most frustrating aspect I find with gentrification is the fact that there are bubble tea shops on every block," she tells me.

Working at an architecture and urbanism nonprofit, I often hear a specific aspiration repeated: that it would be luxurious to be the first person to live in a place. The first one to have the keys to a brand-new, shiny, white-walled condo, for example. A place where prior owners don’t plague you with their maintenance issues or poor design choices; where you come in with a blank slate and no one else’s chalk to erase. While I can comprehend this sentiment, I cannot believe in it. I want a home that has stood the test of time and become better for it.

My partner and I have learned lessons from tenements, and we’re better designers because of it. We’ve found ways to blend custom pieces with strategies that psychologically expand space while prioritizing generosity and self-expression over convenience. Our space isn’t well served by big-box furniture stores that sell products that are often hyperspecific in their use. Even in Ikea, which claims to sell designs for renters and small spaces, furniture is presented in diorama-style kitchens, bathrooms, living rooms, and offices, each more generous in square footage than even my largest common area. So instead of adapting our lives around the available furnishings, we’ve taken the lessons of the tenement as a design challenge. We’ve removed doors to encourage a feeling of openness and connection; we’ve moved things away from the perimeter and preserved a main, clear enfilade; we’ve hung everything we possibly could on the walls to get things off the ground. And we’ve deployed our own designs where we simply couldn’t find anything that fit either our space or our budget.

Our desk, for example, is two pieces of common board that we had cut at our local Home Depot, which we then stained a deep mahogany on our roof. The planks are slung, unanchored, between two Ikea filing cabinets. It might not be everyone’s perfect piece of furniture, but it’s the exact proportion we needed for a tiny, narrow space to the left of the living room.

Living in an old building has allowed us to try new things. In the words of Jane Jacobs, "There is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings."

And while the conditions within tenement houses like mine have changed—new laws, codes, and social justice movements have improved conditions dramatically for residents since the 19th century—the elemental forms of tenements remain resilient. Many were well built, using wood structural beams cut from old-growth forests, whose timber quality and strength are high by today’s standards. With proper maintenance, brick facades can be repointed and repaired incrementally whenever needed, without requiring massive capital campaigns. The buildings also have a funny way of supporting each other’s continued existence quite literally. Demolishing a midblock tenement house like 65 Mott is complicated and costly, as each building shares a wall and holds the neighboring structure up. This is why midblock demolitions often require neighboring buildings to deploy serious bracing mechanisms during construction, which could otherwise cause real and noticeable damage, shifting, and warp.

So tenements remain the dominant typology in much of downtown Manhattan. They continue to inform what architectural historians call the "period of significance" for the place, preserving New York in the popular imagination as a 19th-century city. Tax photos of Mott Street don’t change drastically between the 1940s and the 1980s, save for the styles of cars parked on the roads.

As New York and other cities scramble to address the current housing crisis, this old housing stock holds so much potential. Sure, a tower on a tenement lot could house hundreds of people rather than dozens, but the preservation of this housing stock, and the affordability it engenders in a cultural enclave like Chinatown, remains invaluable. Tenements were a response to a housing crisis 200 years ago. What could happen if we learned from their failures and reinvented their successes for today?

Inscribing histories of poverty and overcrowding, class strata, and cultural enclaves onto one building is a lot for it to take. But feeling the weight and warmth of all the people who cooked in a kitchen before you can make your ordinary feel extraordinary. I don’t believe in ghosts, but if they’re here, I think they’re living quite comfortably.

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