History of Crowding Overview

View of the “History of Crowding” wall (left) and the main gallery (right). Photograph by Michael Young.

After the Timeline that outlines the themes and types of housing solutions surveyed in the exhibition – from crowded tenements to new forms of private-market skyscraper complexes such as Tudor City and London Terrace, the invention of large-scale, low-density public housing, and the postwar examples of slum clearance and “tower in the park” publicly-assisted projects – the next section of the exhibit summarizes the analysis of the densities of the examples and presents icon graphics that allow comparisons.

An additional section of the wall mural zig-zags between photographs of tenements at different scales and illustrations and texts that describe the history of tenement crowding and reform movements.