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Architecture as Model and Standard: Modern Liberalism and Tenement House

Reform in New York City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

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DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2019.1698399

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Architecture as Model and Standard: Modern

Liberalism and Tenement House Reform in New
York City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury

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Modern Liberalism and Tenement House Reform in New York City at the Turn of the Twentieth
Century, Architectural Theory Review, DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2019.1698399

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ARCHITECTURAL THEORY REVIEW
https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2019.1698399

Architecture as Model and Standard: Modern Liberalism

and Tenement House Reform in New York City at the
Turn of the Twentieth Century
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury
Victoria University of Wellington

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This paper explores the role of architecture as a catalyst for housing Architecture; housing;
policy through analysis of the Tenement House Exhibition held in tenements; New York;
New York City in 1900. Organized by the progressive Charity sanitation; liberalism
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 professional-
ized 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 architec-
ture in this reform movement, as both a model and a standard.

In New York City a laissez-faire attitude towards urban development had, by the turn
of the twentieth century, produced what progressive reformers saw as an unsanitary
and exploitative building typology, the tenement house. Conceived by speculative
building developers, the tenement was the result of demand for low-cost rental housing
near manufacturing workshops in the strictly constrained urban environment of Lower
Manhattan. Organized by the private Charity Organization Society of New York City,
the 1900 Tenement House Exhibition exposes the terms in which reformers understood
and addressed this typology, two decades before European models of worker housing
(such as the Bauhaus-inspired German Siedlung) began to have an influence across the
Atlantic.1 Planned under the direction of the Society’s President Robert De Forest and
its Chief Executive Officer Lawrence Veiller, the exhibition was a material manifest-
ation of the “modern liberal” philosophy favored by the American progressive move-
ment.2 Motivated by this philosophy, progressives sought to preserve the American
values of freedom and independence while at the same time persuading citizens to
reject individualism and embrace cooperation for the benefit of community and the
country as a whole. The ideal form of this cooperation was an enlarged state, in par-
ticular the expansion of municipal authority over public health, education and housing.

CONTACT Joanna Merwood-Salisbury joanna.merwood-salisbury@vuw.ac.nz

ß 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 MERWOOD-SALISBURY

De Forest and Veiller’s work on housing reform, which led to the passage of the
New York Tenement House Law of 1901, is well documented in the literature of urban
housing policy.3 Highly influential in the period between 1900 and World War One,
the two men rejected philanthropic or governmental efforts to improve the quality of
worker housing in industrial cities via the construction and control of reform or
“model” tenement buildings. Instead, they concentrated on the passage of housing laws
mandating strict minimum standards, seeing such legislation as more effective on a
mass scale. Architectural historians have argued that even though few model tenements
were built, they played a significant role “as catalysts for significant leaps forward in
housing provision.”4 How, precisely, did this catalytic action occur? Building on recent
studies that challenge the canonical narrative of the American housing reform move-
ment, this paper looks at the relationship between the products of architectural practice
(models) and building laws based on those products (standards). Prompted by scholar-
ship on the relationship between modern liberalism and the built environment, it con-
siders the role of the Tenement House Exhibition as an ideological display intended to
promote greater state control over the citizens of the industrial metropolis. Placing the
exhibition in its political context, this paper proposes that social progressives employed
the image of so-called sanitary design as both a publicity mechanism and a creative
stimulant for housing legislation. De-coupled from the austere aesthetic favored by
reformist architects and translated into laws applicable to the entire rental housing
market, the principles of sanitary design would become an effective tool for population
management. Enforced through an expanded municipal bureaucracy, minimum hous-
ing standards would discipline the immigrant laborers who powered the expanding
industrial economy, transforming them into healthy and productive citizens.

The Image of the Tenement in the Tenement House Exhibition

For progressive reformers—predominantly Protestant, white, upper- and middle-class
Republicans—the country’s late-nineteenth century demographic transformation from
largely rural to largely urban population represented a threat to national values.
Historian T. J. Jackson Lears has discussed the popular perception that urbanization,
industrialization and mass immigration were eroding the republican ideal.5 In the
dominant historical narrative, the frontier experience had exerted a powerful influence
on the national character, instilling the values of independence, self-reliance and
resourcefulness, values engendered by private property ownership and the privileging
of agrarianism.6 With its rapidly growing industrial economy fueled by an expanding
immigrant labor force living in close proximity, New York City seemed to embody the
threat to those values. By 1890 nearly half of the residents of the city were recent immi-
grants from Europe: Irish, Germans, Poles and Russians. More than any other built
product, the tenement house signified the dangers these foreigners were thought to
represent.7 Legally, any communal dwelling inhabited by three or more families was
designated a tenement; an apartment house was merely a better-equipped version com-
manding higher rents.8 In cultural terms, however, the divide was stark and unbridge-
able (fig. 1).
 ARCHITECTURAL THEORY REVIEW 3

Figure 1. A Tenement House in Mulberry Street. New York Public Library.

In 1899 the Charity Organization Society of New York City published a pamphlet of
recommendations addressing what it identified as the “tenement house problem”
endemic to the densely occupied industrial cities of the American north-east. While
these recommendations received positive publicity, the city government (dominated by
the Democratic Party) showed little interest in implementing more restrictive housing
laws, or even policing those laws already in place. Expressing frustration with what
they saw as political inertia, the Society took a different approach to gather support for
its reform agenda. For two weeks during February and March of 1900, the Society
hosted a Tenement House Exhibition in rented rooms at the Stanford White-designed
Sherry Building on Fifth Avenue at 44th Street.9 This exhibition utilized statistics,
graphics and photographs to argue that the tenement was an urgent social problem.
According to Veiller’s research, in 1900 there were more than 80,000 tenement build-
ings in New York City, housing 2.4 million people (about two thirds of the total popu-
lation), with more being built every day (fig. 2).10
Like the tenement reform movement as a whole, the Tenement House Exhibition
was driven by fear of the growing strength of ethnic working-class culture, not least its
affiliations with Tammany Hall and the Democratic party, as well as more radical polit-
ical movements including socialism and anarchism. In the words of Dr. Elgin Gould, a
4 MERWOOD-SALISBURY

Figure 2. Orchard Street Scene ca. 1902. New York Public Library.

member of the organizing committee, the exhibition illustrated the “close relations
between bad housing, bad health, bad morals, and bad citizenship.”11 Describing the
tenement house district as a dangerous, even pathological environment, Gould wrote:
The housing question is the most fundamental of social problems relating to
environment … The home is the character unit of society; and where there is little or
no opportunity for the free play of influences which make for health, happiness, and
virtue, we must expect social degeneration and decay … The relationship between
humanity and its environment is very close. Strong-willed, intelligent people may create
or modify environment. The weaker-willed, the careless, and the unreflecting are
dominated by environment … Populous masses herded together, as they are over large
areas of the tenement regions of New York City, with difficulty resist the influence by
which they are surrounded.12
In this sense, tenement house reform was necessary for social control. Properly con-
figured, working class housing would help an industrial labor force made up largely of
immigrants to accept, appreciate and embody American political values.
To make this argument, the Tenement House Exhibition marshalled and exploited
many registers of tenement house imagery from the emotive to the scientific, starting
with Jacob Riis’ photographs of interiors and back alleys in New York’s most notorious
tenement district, Five Points. Created using the new technique of flash photography,
these images caused a sensation when they were published in Scribner’s Magazine in
1889.13 To the impressionistic horrors of Riis’ photographs, the exhibition added new
illustrative tools, the graphic products of two emerging professions: sociology and
architecture. Members of a new academic discipline, sociologists took the urban indus-
trial city and its inhabitants as their primary subject of study, compiling numerous
 ARCHITECTURAL THEORY REVIEW 5

Figure 3. Model of a Lower East Side tenement house block bounded by Chrystie, Forsyth, Bayard
and Canal Streets, New York ca. 1900. Museum of the City of New York.

observational reports, surveys, and other forms of data collection. Drawing on this new
field of social science, the Exhibition displayed, “over 1,000 photographs, over 100
maps, and many charts, diagrams and tables of statistics” related to population density,
mortality rates, and the income and ethnic origin of tenants.14 So-called poverty and
disease maps illustrated the close correlation between deprivation and public health,
and their proliferation in tenement districts. On the poverty maps, black dots on a
tenement block indicated a group of five families who had applied for charity relief;
almost all buildings showed at least one dot, and some as many as fifteen. Disease
maps were covered with black dots indicating a case of tuberculosis had been reported
to the Board of Health within the past five years; nearly every building had at least one
dot on it. Colored dots denoted the presence of typhoid, diphtheria and other diseases.
According to Veiller, these maps earned for New York City the “title of the City of
Living Death.”15
6 MERWOOD-SALISBURY

Figure 4. Model of a Lower East Side block bounded by Chrystie, Forsyth, Bayard and Canal
Streets, New York ca. 1900. “As a solid block of double-deckers, lawful until now, would appear.”
Museum of the City of New York.

The exhibition also included one of the most enduring images of the pathology of
the American slum, a cardboard model of a dense urban block bounded by Chrystie,
Forsyth, Bayard and Canal Streets, purportedly as it stood on the first day of the new
century, January 1, 1900 (fig. 3).16 Situated in the Lower East Side, this block was
notorious for its euphemistically named “cafes” or brothels.17 The centerpiece of the
exhibition and its most commonly reproduced component, the model was a single unit
chosen to represent a much larger whole. A long list of statistics was produced to
accompany it: the block housed 2,781 people in 39 six-story buildings containing 605
apartments; 441 interior rooms provided no ventilation or outside view; only 40 apart-
ments had hot water; a single bath served the entire block; rentals derived from it
amounted to $113,964 a year, an astonishing fortune. As a partner to this model, the
exhibition included a second, speculative model showing the result if the same site
were fully built to the density allowed by the 1879 building code (fig. 4). This model
showed buildings standing shoulder to shoulder, penetrated only by narrow light wells
that gave the plans their characteristic dumb-bell shape. This version of the model was
intended to illustrate the ineffectiveness of current legislation. Vivid three-dimensional
representations of the problem of tenement house crowding, these models attracted
huge interest. Photographs of them, along with the horrifying statistics relating to
them, were reproduced in numerous magazines and journals, and in the following dec-
ade they were displayed again at exhibitions dealing with issues of public health.18
 ARCHITECTURAL THEORY REVIEW 7

Figure 5. Thomas R. Short, Winning Entry to the New York Tenement House Competition, 1900.
Ryerson and Burnham Library, Art Institute of Chicago.

Balancing the negative imagery of Riis’ photographs, maps locating poverty and dis-
ease, and the Chrystie-Forsyth block, the exhibition featured drawings of so-called
model tenements, multi-family housing planned according to improved or “sanitary”
standards in European cities including London, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow,
Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin, Dresden, and Copenhagen.19 Some of these examples were
built by municipal authorities and others were the product of philanthropic charities.
While local examples were scarcer, the Exhibition also featured American projects built
on a philanthropic basis, including the Improved Dwellings Company of Brooklyn
founded by Alfred T. White, and Ernest Gould’s City and Suburban Homes Company,
along with model tenements by architects Grosvenor Atterbury, Ernest Flagg and I. N.
Phelps Stokes. (It was no coincidence that many of these figures were members of the
organizing committee.) The exhibition also displayed the results of architectural com-
petition designed to “arouse interest among architects in the scientific planning of tene-
ment houses.”20 The 170 entries focused on the size of individual rooms and the spatial
8 MERWOOD-SALISBURY

relationships between units, and were explored predominantly in plan. They were
judged on commercial viability as well as the quality of their “sanitary” improvements,
including increased access to bathing facilities and WCs, fewer or no internal rooms,
and reduced lot coverage with the remainder of the site given over to communal space
intended for recreation (fig. 5). Sanitary design implied not only efforts to limit the
spread of contagion and disease, but also to promote healthy and wholesome habits.
Because the organizers wanted to encourage pragmatic solutions that could be
immediately realized, the competition required entrants to deal with the economics of
the private rental market and with the dimensions of the New York City grid, defined
by its restrictive 25 by 100-foot lots (although combined lots up to 100 feet wide were
considered; in other words, four standard lots side by side). Phelps Stokes was one of
the few entrants to suggest the creation of larger lots through municipal condemnation
and rebuilding.21 (A model of Stokes’s scheme was shown in the exhibition.) However,
though popular with housing reformers, proposals requiring radical changes to the
city’s morphology had little chance of success in New York City. As leading architec-
ture critics of the day, including Montgomery Schuyler and Herbert Croly, pointed
out, attempts to significantly alter the city’s restrictive grid plan were severely limited
by political reality.22 Along with the relatively weak municipal government, the domin-
ant liberal framework for urban development constrained thinking about the future of
mass housing.

Republicanism and the Planning of New York City

In New York City, the turn of the twentieth century tenement house reform movement
may be understood as a confrontation between the progressive philosophy of modern
liberalism and the republican tradition. Historian Elizabeth Blackmar’s analysis of New
York City housing in the nineteenth century helps explain the basis of this confronta-
tion. As Blackmar notes, the original 1811 grid was, “a statement of faith in equal
access to property.”23 Commissioned by the city’s republican leaders in 1807, the ori-
ginal plan organized the territory north of the city (above present-day Houston Street)
via an enormous array of small, narrow lots almost identical in size and shape, inter-
rupted by only a very few larger public spaces.24 With public space limited, the rights
of property were privileged. As a spatial diagram this grid may be understood as a
framework with no fixed content: individual landowners were free to do as they liked
within their property.25 This hierarchical relationship between private and public space
was consistent with the founding document of the American republic: under the
Constitution, private property holders were understood to be a representative public,
acting in the interests of the public good.26 With the land commodified into small par-
cels, the real estate market was assumed to be an equalizing mechanism overcoming
the strict social hierarchies of the colonial era.27 Urban development involved individ-
ual improvement of private property and very limited municipal and state regulation.
However, as Blackmar observes, the assumption that the real estate market would act
to preserve republican ideals turned out to be false as the city adapted to serve the
emerging industrial economy.28
 ARCHITECTURAL THEORY REVIEW 9

Despite the egalitarian aims of the grid, by the middle of the nineteenth century,
renting was common, and housing became one of the city’s major commodities. The
republican goal of individual home ownership “gave way to a liberal agenda of eco-
nomic growth.”29 Following the economic boom of the late 1820s, the city’s artisan or
craft households (in which apprentices were housed and fed by their employers)
declined in number. Independent household production could not compete with new
industrial methods, particularly the semi-industrialized subcontracting or “sweating”
system.30 This method of production depended on the minute subdivision of labor and
access to a large labor pool living within walking distance of numerous small manufac-
turing workshops. Theoretically these wage earners could eventually buy their own
homes; however, with wages low and the supply of housing limited, there was a profit
to be made in working class housing, resulting in the creation of a permanent class of
tenants.31 Richard Plunz has described the results for the built environment.32 With
wealthier residents moving to newly developed residential districts uptown, the older
housing stock downtown was divided and sub-divided to meet the demand for cheap
rental housing. Property owners erected makeshift dwellings in rear yards, significantly
densifying the landscape. The 1840s saw the appearance of the first purpose-built tene-
ments, four and five story buildings erected on the standard 25 by 100-foot lots, con-
taining 12–24 apartments apiece. By the middle of the century a standard tenement
type had emerged. Occupying up to 90% of their lots, these narrow five to six story
high buildings had rooms arranged in series, with little or no access to natural light
and ventilation, and limited sanitary facilities. Municipal authorities undertook peri-
odic reviews of tenement housing culminating in the first tenement house law being
enacted in the city in 1867. This law outlawed cellar dwellings and mandated fire-
escapes and one WC for every twenty tenants. Other modifications to housing law fol-
lowed but they were not strictly enforced. More effective was the so-called “new law”
of 1879, which legislated a narrow airshaft between houses, creating the ubiquitous
“dumb-bell” plan shown in fig. 4.
The new law coincided with a period of rapid economic growth and an explosion in
immigration, with Italians and Eastern Europeans supplementing the Irish and
Germans who had arrived earlier in the century. As a result of increased demand for
cheap rental housing, many of the early-nineteenth-century makeshift tenement houses
known as “rookeries” were demolished, and much of the Lower East Side was given
over to a new class of purpose-built tenements. The developers who built and operated
these tenements were not usually uncaring absentee landlords, as reformers often
claimed, but immigrants who lived and worked in the same area. Undermining the
canonical reading of this class of building as unsanitary and exploitative, Zachary
Violette has argued that it significantly improved upon its predecessors, with better
amenities including gas lighting, running water, flushing toilets and a sewer connec-
tion.33 Influenced by European precedents, polychromic brick and brownstone build-
ings, complete with decorative sheet-metal cornices and ornamental paint schemes,
were constructed in compliance with the expectations and tastes of their immigrant
owners and occupants. Motivated by middle-class anxiety over growing ethnic work-
ing-class culture, housing reformers saw nothing positive in this new class of building,
however. Strategically conflating the tenement with the rookery, they did not want to
10 MERWOOD-SALISBURY

Figure 6. Alfred Corning Clark Buildings, Model Tenement of the City and Suburban Homes
Company. Jacob Riis, A Ten Year’s War: An Account of the Battle with the Slum in New York (New
York: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1900). Image credit: Museum of the City of New York.

acknowledge this mode of agency, in which immigrants had taken control of tenement
house design and construction. Mounting a campaign against tenement building, they
rejected the type as “unutterably monotonous and dreary,” and demonized tenement
builders (whom they called “skin-builders”) as incompetent and dishonest.34

Housing Reform Through Investment Philanthropy

Concern about the proliferation of the vernacular tenement type, and fear that it was
about to become a permanent feature of the city, precipitated a change in approach:
the construction of philanthropic model tenements was no longer considered sufficient
to address the scale of the problem. In 1901 the sociologist Francis Cope was one of
many to argue: “the housing problem can be solved only by economic methods.”35
Promoting the idea that the construction and management of reformed housing could
be a profitable investment, the 1900 Tenement House Exhibition prominently dis-
played projects by Gould’s City and Suburban Homes Company, designed by architects
Ernest Flagg, James E. Ware and others (fig. 6).36 Housing reformers believed that the
company’s alignment with the market was the key to its success. In a review of the
 ARCHITECTURAL THEORY REVIEW 11

work of City and Suburban Homes, Cope wrote: “That such a reform of the living con-
ditions of the working classes is not only possible, but also profitable in the largest and
perhaps the most corrupt city in America, it is the object of the present paper to
show.”37 Gould argued that the quality of tenement housing could be improved while
keeping the rental cost low, and at the same time offering the investor a modest annual
return on investment, generally in the 5% range. He called this “investment philan-
thropy.” An adaptation of prior charitable strategies, investment philanthropy aimed to
promote the construction of philanthropic housing by framing it in terms of both
social and monetary returns.
Architects and architecture critics believed the construction of improved tenement
blocks built on this model would not only accrue value to investors, it would also nor-
malize sanitary design across the market. Promoters spoke of these models as catalysts,
lifting the quality of the average tenement by example. As the Architectural Record put
it, projects such as Grosvenor Atterbury’s Phipps Houses on East 31st Street were,
“demonstrations of ways of profitable construction in line with a rising standard.”38
Similarly, Flagg argued, “the chief benefit which should accrue from the work of the
builders of model tenements is its influence in raising the standard of tenement con-
struction by ordinary builders.”39 However, as Violette has claimed, the terms under
which reform-minded architects engaged with the problem—understanding the tene-
ment as a class of institutional building quite separate from the middle-class apartment
building—resulted in the kind of functional planning and stripped back aesthetic
expression associated with typologies such as hospitals, military barracks, prisons, and
workhouses.40 Rooms were smaller, living rooms and kitchens were combined, and
aspirational spaces such as dining rooms and parlors were omitted. Similarly, overt
ornamentation and color were rejected, while materials such as glazed white terracotta,
signifying health and hygiene, were favored. As Atterbury put it: “Flourishes are not
wanted any more than they can be afforded.”41 This comment is evidence of the fact
that their designers saw model tenements as literal “reformatories” intended to discip-
line both the taste and the behavior of their inhabitants. As such they were unlikely to
be the first choice for immigrant tenants who shared the same social aspirations and
participated in the same economy of conspicuous consumption as New Yorkers of
other classes.42

Legislating Housing Standards

The success of the Tenement House Exhibition depended on two strongly contrasting
images: photographs designed to present existing tenements as deplorable, and archi-
tect’s renderings of sanitary alternatives. Although this contrast was useful for publicity
purposes, the organizers did not envision the mass construction of model tenements,
focusing instead on more direct engagement with the rental housing market. Model
tenements built on the investment philanthropy model attracted lots of publicity, but
they had a limited impact on the built environment. While it was possible to turn a few
budding investors towards investment philanthropy, De Forest and Veiller did not trust
the result would be appealing (either financially or aesthetically) on the scale necessary
to solve the problem. Instead the two men shared a belief in the power of the regulated
12 MERWOOD-SALISBURY

market to effect change in the way that philanthropy could not. De Forest set out the
argument for tenement house regulation in 1902:
In some quarters benevolent people are proposing to model tenements. That is good as
far as it goes, but if at the same time other people, not benevolent, who have no motive
but for themselves, are permitted to build tenements … , the extent of progress is very
limited. What we must do first and foremost, is to secure proper legislation, using that
in its broadest sense, to include city ordinance, as well as state Legislation to regulate
building, so as to secure for new buildings proper air and light space and proper
sanitation; legislation that regulates, in buildings old and new, their maintenance so that
conditions may be improved and at least not be impaired; legislation, moreover, that
provides the means for its own enforcement, by proper inspection.43
In looking to municipal and state governments to produce and enforce housing legisla-
tion in the interests of the public good, De Forest and Veiller proposed not only new legal
standards for housing but also a governmental system for enforcing those standards.
This strategy aligned with the progressive philosophy of modern liberalism. Moving
away from the suspicion of the “tyranny of government” that had had characterized
American politics since the late eighteenth century, progressive reformers sought to
reinforce the American system of liberal democracy by accepting certain restraints on
personal freedom.44 An emerging class of qualified professionals would strengthen and
perfect the system of municipal government in order to help weaker citizens, ill-
equipped by poverty and lack of education, to help themselves. De Forest and Veiller
were acutely aware that their proposal for a legislative approach to housing control
entailed restrictions to an historically liberal urban policy, but, as De Forest argued, “the
property rights and liberty of one neighbor must be limited to protect the property rights
and liberty of another.”45 Reviewing the Tenement House Exhibition, Gould asked,
“What should be the relation of the state or the municipality to the tenement-house
problem?” His answer was that, first, a Commission of Inquiry should be appointed to
review the situation, and second, the State should provide a tenement house “sanitary
and building code” for general application to large municipalities. This code should
carefully limit danger from fire and must require ample safeguards for health and morals …
[It should] provide for the periodical inspection of tenements … Such inspection should be
conducted by a numerous and efficient corps of sanitary police … 46
If this system were put in place, Gould argued, there was no need for municipalities
to build and operate tenement houses as was common in Europe.47 Instead the city or
state would devolve the provision and operation of worker housing to the rental mar-
ket, at the same time maintaining responsibility for setting and policing appropriate
standards of construction and behavior.
The argument for stronger housing laws was tied to a wider progressive agenda to
create “minimum standards” regulating life and labor, freeing workers from exploit-
ation, ensuring minimum levels of health, and ensuring individuals would become pro-
ductive members of society.48 Prompted by the political philosophy of Michel Foucault
and other scholars exploring the implications of his writing for architecture and urban-
ism, we might understand this approach to housing as an example of the systematic
diffusion of power away from a centralized authority characteristic of liberal modern-
ity.49 Rather than building and operating tenements, municipal authorities would enact
 ARCHITECTURAL THEORY REVIEW 13

legal regulations intended to promote the mass uptake of middle-class values of health,
cleanliness, and familial morality. The inhabitants of properly regulated tenements
were encouraged to wash and bathe regularly, and to keep family life separate from the
public realm. Legislation would ensure access to washing facilities, sunlight and fresh
air, and it would ensure appropriate social separation—family members from non-
family members; girls from boys; and domestic work from industrial production. In
Foucauldian terms, applied to the private housing market a professionalized state
apparatus (including building codes and sanitary inspectors) would discipline urban
subjects more efficiently than model tenements built and operated by the city or by pri-
vate charities. This disciplining was made palatable to consumers of rental housing
because it did not police class boundaries as overtly as the model tenements designed
by reform architects. While persuading tenement-dwellers to adopt middle-class stand-
ards of hygiene and personal conduct, housing laws did not deny them access to archi-
tectural features (such as fashionable decoration and reception rooms) that signified
aspiration to middle-class status.

Legal, Architectural and Urban Outcomes

As De Forest and Veiller had hoped, the legislative approach won out. The 1900
Tenement House Exhibition attracted thousands of visitors and broad support in the
press; within weeks a new Tenement House Law had been drafted. However, their
efforts to push through legislative change were vigorously opposed by the local building
industry, by landlords, and by the Tammany controlled (Democratic) city government.
Their efforts only gained traction through the efforts of the Republican-controlled New
York State legislature which was sympathetic to the reformist agenda. Republican
Governor Theodore Roosevelt, who had been greatly impressed by the exhibition, set
up the New York State Tenement House Commission to enact its recommendations.
In 1901 the New York State legislature passed the Tenement House Act, which applied
to cities “of the first class” (defined by population, this meant Buffalo and New York
City).50 That same year the state established the New York City Tenement House
Department to enforce the new law, and appointed De Forest as its Commissioner and
Veiller as the Deputy Commissioner. Under the Act, building height and lot coverage
were restricted; outdoor privies and rooms without windows were abolished; an indoor
toilet was mandated for every two apartments; and airshafts were increased in size. The
law applied not only to new buildings, it also mandated changes to existing buildings.
As a contemporary commentator noted, the Act “set a standard of construction closely
approximating in many respects that of the model tenement already built by private
enterprise.”51 In turn, the law encouraged more architects to enter the tenement-design
business. As the Architectural Record put it, the law made it economically feasible to
build large multi-unit dwellings covering several lots, and these complex buildings
were more likely to require the expertise of a professional architect.52 With the tene-
ment bought into closer alignment with middle-class apartment building, the planning
attributes of the model tenement had become standard. While some critics charged the
results did not go far enough, this market-led approach to housing policy found favor
beyond the crowded urban centers of the East Coast: the passage of the Act and the
14 MERWOOD-SALISBURY

founding of the Tenement House Department established a precedent for housing laws
and processes of municipal management nationwide.53
Dependent on a healthy economy, however, this approach faltered during periods of
economic uncertainty. For example, high inflation during the First World War created
stress on the housing market, particularly in New York. Prompted by lobbying from
private organizations including the Regional Planning Association (RPA), New York
State implemented a law enabling more direct state and municipal involvement in
housing provision in 1926. Following the passage of this law, the urban landscape of
the Lower East Side became a locus of urban renewal, at least in theory. Prompted by
the RPA and encouraged by the administration of Mayor James “Jimmy” Walker, this
renewal depended on public–private development. The city would condemn tenements
to build infrastructural projects including bridges, parks and highways, leaving private
developers to construct modern apartment blocks around them.54 Aimed at middle-
class tenants working in the nearby Financial District, these blocks would displace
working-class tenement dwellers to the outer boroughs. For complex reasons, not least
the onset of the Depression, very few of these plans were realized. As Suzanne
Wasserman has pointed out, local families were more tenacious than authorities pre-
dicted.55 Showing a strong attachment to their homes, they organized in order to resist
rent increases and other efforts at relocation. Though some new apartment blocks were
constructed, the area was not gentrified in the way reformers and planners had hoped.
During the Depression, with the private housing market under severe stress, the muni-
cipal government broke with its established practice to establish a municipal housing
program under the leadership of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.56 In 1934 the city estab-
lished the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). Utilizing Federal relief funds
to bypass the State housing law, the NYCHA began a program to build and operate
social housing projects, including several in the Lower East Side. After World War
Two federal laws aimed at the renewal of under-capitalized urban centers enabled
NYCHA to create the kind of superblock sites favored by modernist planners, and to
build large-scale housing blocks complete with the unornamented aesthetic favored by
modernist architects.
From the work of Atterbury, Flagg and Phelps Stokes, to that of NYCHA, model
tenements and modernist public housing are featured in architectural histories dispro-
portionate to their actual impact on the built environment. Few model tenements were
built. Even at the height of their popularity in the mid-twentieth century, European-
style municipal and federal-operated housing programs accounted for only a fraction
of the housing in New York City. Returning to the question of architecture’s role as a
catalyst for social and urban policy, it is instructive to consider how the image of sani-
tary, or improved, housing was deployed as part of a wider effort to impose reform
more systematically. The 1900 Tenement House Exhibition marked a turning point
away from nineteenth-century philanthropic projects towards a market-centered
approach. Publicizing methods of data-gathering and analysis drawn from the recently
established science of sociology, De Forest and Veiller featured a survey of model tene-
ments from Europe and the United States. In this context proposals for sanitary hous-
ing drawn up by reformist architects were not necessarily intended for widespread
deployment. Rather they served two linked purposes: they provided compelling images
 ARCHITECTURAL THEORY REVIEW 15

to drum up public support for housing reform; and they acted as exemplars from
which quantitative standards (largely related to planning) could be drawn by municipal
authorities. When interpreted through legal rather than design mechanisms, the unpal-
atable aesthetic of the sanitary tenement was eliminated, leaving architects and building
contractors free to give their buildings stylistic expression desirable to the market.
With the unappealing moralizing associations of sanitary models removed, the spatial
and technical modernizing strategies featured in the 1900 Tenement House Exhibition
were more easily absorbed into the real estate market. Rather than following the
European example of large-scale municipal housing schemes, in the United States mod-
ernizing strategies were imposed on tenements via legislation. The result was increased
state control of an urban environment where the private real estate market remained
the key mechanism of housing provision throughout the twentieth century.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the symposium “Liberalism and
the Built Environment – Then and Now,” held at the University of Queensland in
2018. I am grateful to the conference conveners, Janina Gosseye, Helena Mattsson,
John Macarthur and Deborah van der Plaat, for their feedback.

Notes on contributors
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury is a Professor of Architecture at Victoria University of Wellington.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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
16 MERWOOD-SALISBURY

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.
 ARCHITECTURAL THEORY REVIEW 17

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.
 18 MERWOOD-SALISBURY

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 College 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, “Deja 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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