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Image: The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1902 - 1914
If you've ever bemoaned the fact that you share a bathroom with several family members or housemates, you're not alone. Most New Yorkers live in apartments and most units have just a single bathroom. A hundred and fifty years ago, however, the situation was much worse. At the time, New Yorkers had just a few choices when it came to taking care of their lavatory needs and by modern standards, none of the options were appealing-visit an outhouse or use a chamber pot. Nevertheless, indoor toilets proved slow to gain popularity when they were first introduced in the second half of the nineteenth century. Initially, many residents feared the newfangled invention would bring poisonous gases into their homes, leading to illness and even death.
Outhouses and Chamber Pots
Until the late nineteenth century, most New Yorkers relied solely on outhouses located in backyards and alleys. While some residents had their own private outhouses, anyone living in a tenement would have shared facilities with their neighbors. The outhouse/resident ratio varied, but most tenements had just three to four outhouses, and as reported in Jacob Riis's " How the Other Half Lives," in the nineteenth century, it was not uncommon to find over 100 people living in a single tenement building. This meant that people often shared a single outhouse with anywhere from 25 to 30 of their neighbors, making long line-ups and limited privacy common problems. As one might expect, most tenement outhouses were also teeming with rats and other vermin and were a major source of disease.
Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library. "Row of outhouses" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1902 - 1914. The Business of Removing the City's "Night Soil"
If bathroom breaks were undesirable in the daytime hours, at night, especially in the dead of winter when running down several flights of stairs to street level posed additional dangers, most city residents turned to their chamber pots. Chamber pots, usually earthenware vessels, were typically stored under beds. Since most tenements had little or no ventilation, however, the stench from the chamber pots could quickly become unbearable. To help control the stench, chamber pots had to be emptied into backyard outhouses on a regular basis. Unsurprisingly, carrying pots full of human waste through the dark and narrow halls of a tenement was also no one's favorite chore.

Outside the city, outhouses were usually temporary structures built over a hole in the ground. As the holes filled up, the outhouses were simply moved to a new location and the holes covered over with fresh soil. In urban areas, limited space meant that most outhouses were permanent structures. This also meant that removing human waste was a thriving business in the nineteenth-century New York.
A night soil man. Images WikiCommons
At the time, human waste was euphemistically known as "night soil." This is presumably because the so-called night soil cart men, who worked for companies that had been lucky enough to win a coveted city contract for waste removal, made their living largely after dark. Their unenviable job involved shoveling waste from the city's outhouses into carts (sometimes other garbage and animal carcasses would also be collected) and then disposing of the contents.

So where did the city's night soil go?
The Arrival of Indoor Toilets and Fear of Sewer Gases
Although at least some of New York's night soil ended up being dumped in empty lots on the Upper West Side (some of this human excrement was reportedly even used as fertilizer during the construction of Central Park), most of the city's night soil was dumped into the city's surrounding waterways. At best, the night soil was placed on steamboats and dumped far out in the harbor (this form of dumping was legal at the time). At worst, the night soil was simply dumped off the side of piers located on the East River and Hudson.
Science, Industry and Business Library: General Collection, The New York Public Library. "Demarest's Patent Water Closet Apparatus." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1888.
On March 30, 1878, a report in the New York Times described a scene that took place on the East River at the foot of 95th Street. In this case, two police officers reported seeing a man on deck of a boat just off shore "who, with a crank, was unloading the boat and allowing the contents to run through the side into the river." The officers, who later testified to the Board of Police, explained, "they saw the boat rise in the water gradually as the contents flowed into the river, and the stench during the operation was intolerable." Unfortunately, such incidents were by no means uncommon at the time, since dumping night soil into local waterways was far less expensive than using steamboats to cart the waste out into the harbor.

By the time indoor toilets arrived in New York City, they were far from new. The first patent for a flushing lavatory was issued in 1775 to Scottish inventor Alexander Cumming. In the coming decades, Cumming's invention would continue to be perfected, but still, indoor toilets did not become the norm in most cities until the late nineteenth century and did not reach many rural areas until decades later. In New York, two obstacles slowed the arrival of indoor toilets.
Legislating Indoor Toilets
First, there was the problem of creating a sewage system in an already developed urban area. Today, New York is home to over 6,000 miles of mains and pipes with some of the pipes dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. Laying sewage pipes under an already existing urban area, however, proved to be a difficult, costly and at times politically contentious endeavor. For this reason, Brooklyn, which developed later, had a distinct advantage and outpaced Manhattan on the sewage front.

The other obstacle was an at-the-time broadly accepted theory about sewer gases. Given the health concerns and unpleasant smells associated with outhouses, one might assume that city residents would have rapidly embraced indoor toilets. In fact, indoor toilets were met with mixed reviews in the mid to late nineteenth century and many residents initially viewed this advance in sanitation as a potentially deadly conduit of disease. Notably, the fear of dangerous gases rising up from the city's sewers and resulting in serious illness and even death was driven both by urban legend and by the medical professions' alleged findings. While sewer gases are a nuisance (modern plumbing usually prevents the gases from seeping into homes), in the nineteenth century, many physicians and the general public believed that if inhaled, the gases could lead to severe illness and even death, because there was a strong conviction that the gases carried disease.
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In the pointedly titled 1881 publication, "Sewer-Gases and Its Dangers," George Preston Brown warns, "Wherever there are sewers, it is certain there will be sewer-gas. If confined to the sewer, it can do no harm...it is only when it finds its way into houses...that it becomes the enemy of the human race." Among other ailments, Brown reports that sewer gases carry into people's homes diseases ranging from typhoid, typhus, and scarlet fever to cholera, dysentery and croup. In an 1882 address to the Academy of Medicine, Dr. Frank H. Hamilton sought to send a similar warning to his audience, but unlike Brown, who appeared to believe that proper plumbing could solve the problem, Dr. Hamilton advised that closets, drains, and pipes be put in an annex outside one's living quarters: "Not a few of our lately constructed and most elegant mansions have not an inch of plumbing in those portions of their buildings which are usually occupied by their families."

It was not until the turn of the 20th century that most people in the medical profession agreed that sewer gases were not a source of disease and that on the contrary, continuing to deny city residents access to indoor toilets was contributing to the spread of deadly diseases. With this realization, the push to install indoor toilets and running water across New York City intensified. The Tenement Act of 1901 clearly states, "In every tenement house here after erected there shall be a separate water-closet in a separate compartment within each apartment." Although new tenement construction had to comply and nearly all buildings erected after 1910 were built with indoor toilets, many existing tenement owners were slow to come into line with the new regulations. Indeed, in 1937, an estimated 165,000 families living in tenements were still without access to private indoor toilets.

Today, anyone with an address in New York City should have access to an indoor toilet, but there is one resident who is likely more grateful for indoor toilets than anyone else. The New York Post recently reported that Vincenzo Giurbino, an NYC Housing Authority "toilet tech," made an impressive $228,633 in overtime during the last fiscal year. This means that in New York City, a toilet tech who is willing to spend up to 70 hours per week unclogging NYC Housing Authority toilets can take home over $375,000 per year-this tops Mayor de Blasio's annual take-home salary by more than $100,000.

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how new york city disposed of waste in the 19th century

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Life in New York City before indoor toilets | 6sqft

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Image: The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1902 - 1914 If you've ever bemoaned the fact that you share a bathroom with several family members or housemates, you're not alone. Most New Yorkers live in apartments and most units have just a single bathroom.

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In the 19th century, more and more people began crowding into America's cities, including thousands of newly arrived immigrants seeking a better life than the one they had left behind. In New York City-where the population doubled every decade from 1800 to 1880-buildings that had once been single-family dwellings were increasingly divided into multiple living spaces to accommodate this growing population.

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. By 1900, some 2.3 million people (a full two-thirds of New York City's population) were living in tenement housing.

The Rise of Tenement Housing

In the first half of the 19th century, many of the more affluent residents of New York's Lower East Side neighborhood began to move further north, leaving their low-rise masonry row houses behind. At the same time, more and more immigrants began to flow into the city, many of them fleeing the Irish Potato Famine, or Great Hunger, in Ireland or revolution in Germany. Both of these groups of new arrivals concentrated themselves on the Lower East Side, moving into row houses that had been converted from single-family dwellings into multiple-apartment tenements, or into new tenement housing built specifically for that purpose.

Did you know? By 1900, more than 80,000 tenements had been built in New York City. They housed a population of 2.3 million people, a full two-thirds of the city's total population of around 3.4 million.

A typical tenement building had five to seven stories and occupied nearly all of the lot upon which it was built (usually 25 feet wide and 100 feet long, according to existing city regulations). Many tenements began as single-family dwellings, and many older structures were converted into tenements by adding floors on top or by building more space in rear-yard areas. With less than a foot of space between buildings, little air and light could get in.

In many tenements, only the rooms on the street got any light, and the interior rooms had no ventilation (unless air shafts were built directly into the room). Later, speculators began building new tenements, often using cheap materials and construction shortcuts. Even new, this kind of housing was at best uncomfortable and at worst highly unsafe.

Calls for Reform

New York was not the only city in America where tenement housing emerged as a way to accommodate a growing population during the 1900s. In Chicago, for example, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 led to restrictions on building wood-frame structures in the center of the city and encouraged the construction of lower-income dwellings on the city's outskirts.

Unlike in New York, where tenements were highly concentrated in the poorest neighborhoods of the city, in Chicago they tended to cluster around centers of employment, such as stockyards and slaughterhouses. Nowhere, however, did the tenement situation become as dire as it was in New York, particularly on the Lower East Side. A cholera epidemic in 1849 took some 5,000 lives, many of them poor people living in overcrowded housing.

During the infamous New York draft riots that tore apart the city in 1863, rioters were not only protesting against the new military conscription policy; they were also reacting to the intolerable conditions in which many of them were living. The Tenement House Act of 1867 legally defined a tenement for the first time and set construction regulations; among these were the requirement of one toilet (or privy) per 20 people.

"How the Other Half Lives"

The existence of tenement legislation did not guarantee its enforcement, however, and conditions were little improved by 1889, when the Danish-born author and photographer Jacob Riis was researching the series of newspaper articles that would become his seminal book "How the Other Half Lives."

Riis had experienced firsthand the hardship of immigrant life in New York City, and as a police reporter for newspapers, including The Evening Sun, he had gotten a unique view into the grimy, crime-infested world of the Lower East Side. Seeking to draw attention to the horrible conditions in which many urban Americans were living, Riis photographed what he saw in the tenements and used these vivid photos to accompany the text of "How the Other Half Lives," published in 1890.

The hard facts included in Riis' book-such as the fact that 12 adults slept in a room some 13 feet across, and that the infant death rate in the tenements was as high as 1 in 10-stunned many in America and around the world and led to a renewed call for reform.

Two major studies of tenements were completed in the 1890s, and in 1901 city officials passed the Tenement House Law, which effectively outlawed the construction of new tenements on 25-foot lots and mandated improved sanitary conditions, fire escapes and access to light. Under the new law-which in contrast to past legislation would actually be enforced-pre-existing tenement structures were updated, and more than 200,000 new apartments were built over the next 15 years, supervised by city authorities.

Life After the Tenements

By the late 1920s, many tenements in Chicago had been demolished and replaced with large, privately subsidized apartment projects. The next decade saw the implementation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which would transform low-income housing in many American cities through programs including slum clearing and the building of public housing.

The first fully government-built public housing project opened in New York City in 1936. Called First Houses, it consisted of a number of rehabilitated pre-law tenements covering a partial block at Avenue A and East 3rd Street, an area that had been considered part of the Lower East Side.

Among the trendy restaurants, boutique hotels and bars that can be found in the neighborhood today, visitors can still get a glimpse into its past at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, located at 97 Orchard Street.

Built in 1863, the building is an example of an "old-law" tenement (as defined by the Tenement House Act of 1867) and was home over the years for some 7,000 working class immigrants. Though the basement and the first floor have been renovated, the rest of the building looks much the same as it did in the 19th century, and has been designated a National Historic Site.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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In the 19th century, more and more people began crowding into America's cities, including thousands of newly arrived immigrants seeking a better life than the one they had left behind. In New York City-where the population doubled every decade from 1800 to 1880-buildings that had once been single-family dwellings were increasingly divided into multiple living spaces to accommodate this growing population.

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Table of Contents

1. Working Conditions in The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

2. What Started The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire?

3. Importance of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City burned, killing 146 workers. It is remembered as one of the most infamous incidents in American industrial history, as the deaths were largely preventable-most of the victims died as a result of neglected safety features and locked doors within the factory building. The tragedy brought widespread attention to the dangerous sweatshop conditions of factories, and led to the development of a series of laws and regulations that better protected the safety of workers.

Working Conditions in The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

The Triangle factory, owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, was located in the top three floors of the Asch Building, on the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, in Manhattan. It was a true sweatshop, employing young immigrant women who worked in a cramped space at lines of sewing machines. Nearly all the workers were teenaged girls who did not speak English and worked 12 hours a day, every day. In 1911, there were four elevators with access to the factory floors, but only one was fully operational and the workers had to file down a long, narrow corridor in order to reach it. There were two stairways down to the street, but one was locked from the outside to prevent stealing and the other only opened inward. The fire escape was so narrow that it would have taken hours for all the workers to use it, even in the best of circumstances.

Did you know? Exactly 79 years to the day after the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, another tragic fire occurred in New York City. The blaze, at the Happy Land Social Club in the Bronx, killed 87 people, the most deadly fire in the city since 1911.

The danger of fire in factories like the Triangle Shirtwaist was well-known, but high levels of corruption in both the garment industry and city government generally ensured that no useful precautions were taken to prevent fires. Blanck and Harris already had a suspicious history of factory fires. The Triangle factory was twice scorched in 1902, while their Diamond Waist Company factory burned twice, in 1907 and in 1910. It seems that Blanck and Harris deliberately torched their workplaces before business hours in order to collect on the large fire-insurance policies they purchased, a not uncommon practice in the early 20th century. While this was not the cause of the 1911 fire, it contributed to the tragedy, as Blanck and Harris refused to install sprinkler systems and take other safety measures in case they needed to burn down their shops again.

Added to this delinquency were Blanck and Harris' notorious anti-worker policies. Their employees were paid a mere $15 a week, despite working 12 hours a day, every day. When the International Ladies Garment Workers Union led a strike in 1909 demanding higher pay and shorter and more predictable hours, Blanck and Harris' company was one of the few manufacturers who resisted, hiring police as thugs to imprison the striking women, and paying off politicians to look the other way.

What Started The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire?

On March 25, a Saturday afternoon, there were 600 workers at the factory when a fire began in a rag bin. The manager attempted to use the fire hose to extinguish it, but was unsuccessful, as the hose was rotted and its valve was rusted shut. As the fire grew, panic ensued. The young workers tried to exit the building by the elevator but it could hold only 12 people and the operator was able to make just four trips back and forth before it broke down amid the heat and flames. In a desperate attempt to escape the fire, the girls left behind waiting for the elevator plunged down the shaft to their deaths. The girls who fled via the stairwells also met awful demises-when they found a locked door at the bottom of the stairs, many were burned alive.

Those workers who were on floors above the fire, including the owners, escaped to the roof and then to adjoining buildings. As firefighters arrived, they witnessed a horrible scene. The girls who did not make it to the stairwells or the elevator were trapped by the fire inside the factory and began to jump from the windows to escape it. The bodies of the jumpers fell on the fire hoses, making it difficult to begin fighting the fire. Also, the firefighters ladders reached only seven floors high and the fire was on the eighth floor. In one case, a life net was unfurled to catch jumpers, but three girls jumped at the same time, ripping the net. The nets turned out to be mostly ineffectual.

Within 18 minutes, it was all over. Forty-nine workers had burned to death or been suffocated by smoke, 36 were dead in the elevator shaft and 58 died from jumping to the sidewalks. With two more dying later from their injuries, a total of 146 people were killed by the fire.

Importance of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

The fire helped unite organized labor and reform-minded politicians like progressive New York Governor Alfred E. Smith and Senator Robert F. Wagner, one of the legislative architects of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal agenda. Frances Perkins, who served on a committee that helped to set up the Factory Investigating Commission in New York in the wake of the fire, would later become Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor. The workers union set up a march on April 5 on New York's Fifth Avenue to protest the conditions that had led to the fire. It was attended by 80,000 people.

Despite a good deal of evidence that the owners and management had been horribly negligent in the fire, a grand jury failed to indict them on manslaughter charges. To settle lawsuits against them, they eventually paid $75 in compensation to each victim's family-a fraction of the $400 per death that they were paid by their insurer.

Still, the massacre for which they were responsible did finally compel the city to enact reform. In addition to the Sullivan-Hoey Fire Prevention Law passed that October, the New York Democratic set took up the cause of the worker and became known as a reform party. Both were crucial in preventing similar disasters in the future.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City burned, killing 146 workers. It is remembered as one of the most infamous incidents in American industrial history, as the deaths were largely preventable.

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New immigrants to New York City in the late 1800s faced grim, cramped living conditions in tenement housing that once dominated the Lower East Side. During the 19th century, immigration steadily increased, causing New York City's population to double every decade from 1800 to 1880. To accommodate the city's rapid growth, every inch of the city's poor areas was used to provide quick and cheap housing options.

Houses that were once for single families were divided to pack in as many people as possible. Walls were erected to create extra rooms, floors were added, and housing spread into backyard areas. To keep up with the population increase, construction was done hastily and corners were cut. Tenement buildings were constructed with cheap materials, had little or no indoor plumbing and lacked proper ventilation. These cramped and often unsafe quarters left many vulnerable to rapidly spreading illnesses and disasters like fires.

By 1900, more than 80,000 tenements had been built and housed 2.3 million people, two-thirds of the total city population.

Jacob Riis, who immigrated to the United States in 1870, worked as a police reporter who focused largely on uncovering the conditions of these tenement slums. However, his leadership and legacy in social reform truly began when he started to use photography to reveal the dire conditions in the most densely populated city in America. His work appeared in books, newspapers and magazines and shed light on the atrocities of the city, leaving little to be ignored.

In 1890, Riis compiled his work into his own book titled, How the Other Half Lives. As he wrote, "every man's experience ought to be worth something to the community from which he drew it, no matter what that experience may be." The eye-opening images in the book caught the attention of then-Police Commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt. Riis' work would inspire Roosevelt and others to work to improve living conditions of poor immigrant neighborhoods.
Want more HISTORY? Read these stories: Immigration at Ellis Island: Photos When America Despised the Irish: The 19th Centurys Refugee Crisis These Appalling Images Exposed Child Labor in America Watch a clip on Jacob Riis from America: The Story of Us

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Look Inside the Squalid Tenements Where NYC Immigrants Lived in the Late 1800s

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New immigrants to New York City in the late 1800s faced grim, cramped living conditions in tenement housing that once dominated the Lower East Side. During the 19th century, immigration steadily increased, causing New York City's population to double every decade from 1800 to 1880.

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New York City Housing Was Absolutely Awful In The Early 20th Century [25 PHOTOS]

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Dozens of people would pack into a space half the size of a subway car.

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U.S. Tenement Housing in the 1800s and early 1900s

As the United States became more industrialized during the 1800s, immigrants and workers from the countryside increasingly lived in former middle-class houses and other buildings such as warehouses, which were bought and divided into small dwellings. Additionally, beginning as early as the 1830s on the Lower East Side in New York City, people lived in jerry-built three- and four-floor "railroad flats" (so called because the rooms were linked together like a train) with windowless internal rooms. The adapted buildings also were known as "rookeries," and were particularly concerning as they were prone to collapse and fire. Mulberry Bend and Five Points were the sites of notorious rookeries that the city worked for decades to clear. In both rookeries and purpose-built tenements, communal water taps and water closets (either privies or "school sinks," which opened into a vault that often became clogged) were squeezed into what open space there was between buildings. In parts of the Lower East Side, buildings were older and had courtyards, which were generally occupied by machine shops, stables, and other businesses.

Such tenements (or "walk-ups") were particularly prevalent in New York, where in 1865, a report stated that 500,000 people lived in unhealthy tenements, whereas in Boston in 1845, fewer than a quarter of workers were housed in tenements. One reason New York had so many tenements was the large numbers of immigrants; another was that the grid pattern on which streets were laid out and the economic practice of building on individual 25-by-100-foot lots combined to produce extremely high land coverage, including back building.

How the Other Half Lives

How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890) was an early publication of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. It served as a basis for future "muckraking" journalism by exposing the slums to New York City's upper and middle classes. Immediately after publication, this work inspired many reforms of working-class housing, and it continues to make a lasting impact in today's society.

In January of 1888, Jacob Riis bought a detective camera and went on an expedition to gather images of what life was like in the slums of New York City. This not only involved Riis taking his own photos but also his using the images of other photographers. On January 28, 1888, Riis presented "The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies in New York" using his images on a projection screen and taking the viewer on a journey by describing the images. In February 1889, Riis wrote a magazine article based on his lectures in Scribner's Magaz ine, which was a resounding success. The book version of Riis' work was finally published in January 1890 as How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York.

The following is an example of Riis's description of the New York City tenements:

Enough of them everywhere. Suppose we look into one? No.--Cherry Street. Be a little careful, please! The hall is dark and you might stumble over the children pitching pennies back there. Not that it would hurt them; kicks and cuffs are their daily diet. They have little else. Here where the hall turns and dives into utter darkness is a step, and another, another. A flight of stairs. You can feel your way, if you cannot see it. Close? Yes! What would you have? All the fresh air that ever enters these stairs comes from the hall-door that is forever slamming, and from the windows of dark bedrooms that in turn receive from the stairs their sole supply of the elements God meant to be free, but man deals out with such niggardly hand. That was a woman filling her pail by the hydrant you just bumped against. The sinks are in the hallway, that all the tenants may have access--and all be poisoned alike by their summer stenches. Hear the pump squeak! It is the lullaby of tenement-house babes. In summer, when a thousand thirsty throats pant for a cooling drink in this block, it is worked in vain. But the saloon, whose open door you passed in the hall, is always there. The smell of it has followed you up. Here is a door. Listen! That short hacking cough, that tiny, helpless wail--what do they mean? They mean that the soiled bow of white you saw on the door downstairs will have another story to tell--Oh! a sadly familiar story--before the day is at an end. The child is dying with measles. With half a chance it might have lived; but it had none. That dark bedroom killed it.

The "Old Law"

The Tenement House Act of 1867, the state legislature's first comprehensive legislation on housing conditions, prohibited cellar apartments unless the ceiling was one foot above street level; required one water closet per 20 residents; required fire escapes; and began to delineate space between buildings. The Tenement House Act of 1867 was amended by the Tenement House Act of 1879, also known as the "Old Law," which required lot coverage of no more than 65 percent. The New York City Board of Health declined to enforce the regulations, and as a compromise, the "Old Law" tenement became the standard. It had a "dumbbell" shape, with air and light shafts on either side of the center, usually fitted to the shafts in the adjacent buildings, and typically covered 80 percent of the lot. James Ware is credited with the design; he had won a contest the previous year held by "Plumber and Sanitary Engineer" magazine to find the most practical yet profitable improved tenement design.

The "New Law"

The 1890 publication of Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives stirred public concern about New York tenements. The New York State Assembly Tenement House Committee report of 1894 surveyed 8,000 buildings with approximately 255,000 residents and found New York to be the most densely populated city in the world, at an average of 143 people per acre, with part of the Lower East Side having 800 residents per acre, an area denser than Bombay. The committee used both charts and photographs in their report (it was the first official use of such photographs). Together with the U.S. Department of Labor, the committee published The Housing of Working People in 1895 , a special report on housing conditions and solutions elsewhere in the world. This publication ultimately led to the passage of the Tenement House Act of 1901. Known as the "New Law," this law implemented the Tenement House Committee's recommendation of a maximum of 70 percent lot coverage (with strict enforcement); specified a minimum of 12 feet for a rear yard; required six feet for an air and light shaft at the lot line or 12 feet in the middle of the building (these numbers increased for taller buildings); required running water and water closets in every apartment; required a window in every room; and instituted fire-safety regulations. These rules are still used today as the basis for New York City law on low-rise buildings.

In some cities, social reformers built " settlement houses" in poor urban areas, in which volunteer middle-class "settlement workers" would live, hoping to share knowledge and culture with, and alleviate the poverty of, their low-income neighbors. The settlement houses provided services such as daycare, education, and healthcare to improve the lives of the poor in these areas. The most famous settlement house in the United States is Chicago's Hull House, founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889 after Addams visited Toynbee Hall within the previous two years. Hull House became, at its inception in 1889, "a community of university women," whose main purpose was to provide social and educational opportunities for working-class people (many of them recent European immigrants) in the surrounding neighborhood. The "residents" (volunteers at Hull were given this title) held classes in literature, history, art, domestic activities (such as sewing), and many other subjects. Hull House also held concerts that were free to everyone, offered free lectures on current issues, and operated clubs for both children and adults.

Skyscrapers

Not all new urban architecture revolved around lower-class housing. Louis Sullivan became a noted architect for using steel frames to construct skyscrapers for the first time while pioneering the idea of "form follows function." One of his earliest works was the Wainwright Building in St. Louis, Missouri. Elisha Otis's introduction of safety measures on elevators also helped buildings reach newer heights.

Early on, Chicago led the way in skyscraper design, with many constructed in the center of the financial district during the late 1880s and early 1890s. Sometimes termed the products of the Chicago school of architecture, these skyscrapers- large, square palazzo-styled buildings hosting shops and restaurants on the ground level and containing rentable offices on the upper floors-attempted to balance aesthetic concerns with practical commercial design. In contrast, New York's skyscrapers were frequently narrower towers which, more eclectic in style, were often criticized for their lack of elegance. In 1892, Chicago banned the construction of new skyscrapers taller than 150 feet (46 m), leaving the development of taller buildings to New York.

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As the United States became more industrialized during the 1800s, immigrants and workers from the countryside increasingly lived in former middle-class houses and other buildings such as warehouses, which were bought and divided into small dwellings.