New York State Tenement House Act

One of the reforms of the Progressive Era, the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901 was one of the first such laws to ban the construction of dark, poorly ventilated tenement buildings in the state of New York. Among other sanctions, the law required that new buildings must be built with outward-facing windows in every room, an open courtyard, proper ventilation systems, indoor toilets, and fire safeguards.

This was not the first time that New York State passed a public law that specifically dealt with housing reform. The First Tenement House Act (1867) required fire escapes for each suite and a window for every room, the Second Tenement House Act (1879) ("Old Law") closed a loophole by requiring windows to face a source of fresh air and light, not an interior hallway. An amendment of 1887 required privies interior to the building. The failures of the Old Law — the air shafts developed to meet the minimum intent of the Act proved to be unsanitary as they filled with garbage, bilge water and waste — led to the 1901 "New Law" and its required courtyard designed for garbage removal.

Prior to these housing laws, most reform was undertaken by philanthropists and private individuals or organizations. This sequence of laws serves as an example of the Progressive belief that cleaner cities made better citizens. Jacob Riis, in his ground-breaking, muckraking journalistic expose of 1890, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York attributes the reform movement to the fear of contagious disease emanating from the ghettos, especially following an outbreak of smallpox, far more contagious than the cholera and tuberculosis that had long dwelt in the Lower East Side of New York, the hub of immigrant ghetto life. He views the laws and the progressive reform movement that motivated them as a confluence of the cynically-minded with the civic-minded, eventually working towards the benefit of the burgeoning city's labor force.

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