New Law Tenement Floor Plan

Plan of first floor.

New law tenement floor plan.

Note that the new style tenement s footprint if you will was wider with 6 bays across instead of the formerly standard 4 bays. At least one of the living rooms for each family must have one hundred and twenty square feet of floor space and seventy square feet is the minimum allowance for any room. The typical floor plan shown for this particular building featured two apartments instead of four in this upscale building built more for the middle to upper class renters. If you looked at the building from above it would be shaped like a series of dumbbells pushed together with the air shafts being the small space between them you can see a sample floor plan here.

A rare example of a tenement which could fulfill the requirements of the new law on a 25 foot wide lot. Despite its shortcomings the dumbbell was the most accepted plan for tenements for over twenty years until the new tenement law was passed in 1901. Every room in the new law tenements is light and well ventilated. Required under the new law to include a large courtyard which consumed more space than the 1879 old law s air shafts new law tenements tend to be built on multiple land lots or on corner lots to conserve space for dwelling units the renting of which is the money making purpose of the structure.

Plan of upper floors new york public library digital collections. Accessed september 9 2020. A model tenement house. Irma and paul milstein division of united states history local history and genealogy the new york public library.

The final iteration was the dumb bell building which had larger shafts along the sides in the middle which gave the floor plan the look of that piece of weightlifting equipment. The 1879 law required that every habitable room have a window opening to plain air a requirement that was met by including air shafts between adjacent buildings. The tenements built according to this law followed that rule but they did so by creating extremely narrow air shafts. In the early 21st century a typical lower east side or east village street will still be.