Tenements and Towers

Tenements and Towers

Aerial view of Lower East Side in 1956, looking south to the skyscrapers of the Financial District, showing the tenement blocks replaced by housing projects. In the foreground, Corlears Hook Co-op. NYCHA Collection, La Guardia and Wagner Archives, La Guardia Community College, CUNY.

Manhattan Island today has developed an urban landscape with two distinctly different characters. One is the product of the late 19th- and early 20th-century forces of both expansion and concentration that can be seen equally in the towering skyscrapers of lower Manhattan and Midtown and in the very dense, but low-rise tenement districts that housed the city’s burgeoning immigrant and working-class population. This first pattern of private development, with high lot coverage and limited open space, was already established by the 1880s as tenements and row houses overspread Manhattan.

A second pattern of open space and isolated towers took shape in the Depression and postwar decades and represented a fundamental restructuring of the built environment. From the mid-1930s, government transformed the city according to a vision of reformed residential neighborhoods. Through a range of programs, housing advocates and federal, state, and local officials bought back the land and tenements and organized the creation of affordable housing for working-class and middle-income families. Their work created a new form of large-scale urban housing that dramatically reduced density, both of built area and of people per acre.

HOUSING DENSITY illustrates and analyzes the two characters of New York’s housing stock – privately-developed or publicly- assisted – from the perspective of density and raises questions about how to house the city’s growing populations on its scarce land.