![Dudley Drive - geograph](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Dudley_Drive_-_geograph.org.uk_-_580164.jpg)
A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. They are common on the
British Isles
The British Isles are a group of islands in the North Atlantic Ocean off the north-western coast of continental Europe, consisting of the islands of Great Britain, Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Inner and Outer Hebrides, the Northern Isles, ...
, particularly in
Scotland
Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the ...
. In the medieval
Old Town
In a city or town, the old town is its historic or original core. Although the city is usually larger in its present form, many cities have redesignated this part of the city to commemorate its origins after thorough renovations. There are ma ...
, in
Edinburgh
Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian ...
, tenements were developed with each apartment treated as a separate house, built on top of each other (such as
Gladstone's Land
Gladstone's Land is a surviving 17th-century high-tenement house situated in the Old Town of the city of Edinburgh, Scotland. It has been restored and furnished by the National Trust for Scotland, and is operated as a popular tourist attraction ...
). Over hundreds of years, custom grew to become law concerning maintenance and repairs, as first formally discussed in
Stair
Stairs are a structure designed to bridge a large vertical direction, vertical distance between lower and higher levels by dividing it into smaller vertical distances. This is achieved as a diagonal series of horizontal platforms called steps w ...
's 1681 writings on
Scots property law Scots property law governs the rules relating to property found in the legal jurisdiction of Scotland. As a hybrid legal system with both common law and civil law heritage, Scots property law is similar, but not identical, to property law in South ...
.
In Scotland, these are now governed by the
Tenements Act, which replaced the old Law of the Tenement and created a new system of common ownership and procedures concerning repairs and maintenance of tenements. Tenements with one or two room flats provided popular rented accommodation for workers, but in some inner-city areas, overcrowding and maintenance problems led to
shanty towns, which have been cleared and redeveloped. In more affluent areas, tenement flats form spacious privately owned houses, some with up to six bedrooms, which continue to be desirable properties.
![Yard_of_a_tenement_at_Park_Ave](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Yard_of_a_tenement_at_Park_Ave._LOC_det.4a28182.jpg)
In the United States, the term ''tenement'' initially meant a large building with multiple small spaces to rent. As
cities
A city is a human settlement of notable size.Goodall, B. (1987) ''The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography''. London: Penguin.Kuper, A. and Kuper, J., eds (1996) ''The Social Science Encyclopedia''. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. It can be def ...
grew in the nineteenth century, there was increasing
separation between rich and poor. With rapid urban growth and
immigration
Immigration is the international movement of people to a destination country of which they are not natives or where they do not possess citizenship in order to settle as permanent residents or naturalized citizens. Commuters, tourists, and ...
, overcrowded houses with poor sanitation gave tenements a reputation as shanty towns.
The expression "tenement house" was used to designate a building subdivided to provide cheap rental accommodation, which was initially a subdivision of a large house. Beginning in the 1850s, purpose-built tenements of up to six stories held several households on each floor. Various names were introduced for better dwellings, and eventually modern
apartment
An apartment (American English), or flat (British English, Indian English, South African English), is a self-contained housing unit (a type of residential real estate) that occupies part of a building, generally on a single story. There are ma ...
s predominated in American urban living.
In parts of England, especially
Devon
Devon ( , historically known as Devonshire , ) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in South West England. The most populous settlement in Devon is the city of Plymouth, followed by Devon's county town, the city of Exeter. Devon is ...
and
Cornwall
Cornwall (; kw, Kernow ) is a historic county and ceremonial county in South West England. It is recognised as one of the Celtic nations, and is the homeland of the Cornish people. Cornwall is bordered to the north and west by the Atlantic ...
, the word refers to an outshot, or additional projecting part at the back of a
terrace
Terrace may refer to:
Landforms and construction
* Fluvial terrace, a natural, flat surface that borders and lies above the floodplain of a stream or river
* Terrace, a street suffix
* Terrace, the portion of a lot between the public sidewalk a ...
d house, normally with its own roof.
History
![Gladstones Land (4530213293)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Gladstones_Land_%284530213293%29.jpg)
The term ''tenement'' originally referred to tenancy and therefore to any rented accommodation. The New York State legislature defined it in the Tenement House Act of 1867 in terms of rental occupancy by multiple households, as
In Scotland, it continues to be the most common word for a
multiple-occupancy building, but elsewhere it is used as a pejorative in contrast to ''
apartment building
An apartment (American English), or flat (British English, Indian English, South African English), is a self-contained housing unit (a type of residential real estate) that occupies part of a building, generally on a single story. There are ...
'' or ''block of flats''. Tenement houses were either adapted or built for the working class as cities industrialized,
[Bauman]
p. 6
. and came to be contrasted with middle-class apartment houses, which started to become fashionable later in the 19th century. Late-19th-century social reformers in the US were hostile to both tenements (for fostering disease, and immorality in the young) and apartment houses (for fostering "sexual immorality, sloth, and divorce").
Specific places
New York
![Side Sectional View of Tenement House, 38 Cherry Street, N](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Side_Sectional_View_of_Tenement_House%2C_38_Cherry_Street%2C_N.Y.jpg)
As the United States industrialized during the 19th century, immigrants and workers from the countryside were housed in former middle-class houses and other buildings, such as warehouses, which were bought up and divided into small dwellings. Beginning as early as the 1830s in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
's
Lower East Side
The Lower East Side, sometimes abbreviated as LES, is a historic neighborhood in the southeastern part of Manhattan in New York City. It is located roughly between the Bowery and the East River from Canal to Houston streets.
Traditionally an im ...
[ or possibly the 1820s on ]Mott Street
Mott Street () is a narrow but busy thoroughfare that runs in a north–south direction in the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is regarded as Chinatown's unofficial " Main Street". Mott Street runs from Bleecker Street in the north to C ...
,[Plunz, p. 161.] three- and four-story buildings were converted into " railroad flats," so called because the rooms were linked together like the cars of a train,[Plunz, p. 164.] with windowless internal rooms. The adapted buildings were also known as "rookeries
A rookery is a colony of breeding animals, generally gregarious birds.
Coming from the nesting habits of rooks, the term is used for corvids and the breeding grounds of colony-forming seabirds, marine mammals (true seals and sea lions), and ev ...
," and these were a particular concern, as they were prone to collapse and fire. Mulberry Bend
Mulberry Bend was an area surrounding a curve on Mulberry Street, in the Five Points neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City. It is located in what is now Chinatown in Manhattan.
Boundaries
It was bounded by Bayard Street to the north, ...
and Five Points were the sites of notorious rookeries that the city worked for decades to clear.[ In both rookeries and purpose-built tenements, communal water taps and water closets (either privies or "school sinks," which opened into a vault that often became clogged) were squeezed into the small open spaces between buildings.][ In parts of the Lower East Side, buildings were older and had ]courtyards
A courtyard or court is a circumscribed area, often surrounded by a building or complex, that is open to the sky.
Courtyards are common elements in both Western and Eastern building patterns and have been used by both ancient and contemporary ...
, generally occupied by machine shops, stables, and other businesses.
Such tenements were particularly prevalent in New York, where in 1865 a report stated that 500,000 people lived in unhealthy tenements, whereas in Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
in 1845, less than a quarter of workers were housed in tenements.[ One reason New York had so many tenements was the large number of immigrants; another was that the ]grid plan
In urban planning, the grid plan, grid street plan, or gridiron plan is a type of city plan in which streets run at right angles to each other, forming a grid.
Two inherent characteristics of the grid plan, frequent intersections and orthogona ...
on which streets were laid out, and the economic practice of building on individual 25- by 100-foot lots, combined to produce high land coverage. Prior to 1867, tenements often covered more than 90 percent of the lot, were five or six stories high, and had 18 rooms per floor, of which only two received direct sunlight. Yards were a few feet wide and often filled with privies. Interior rooms were unventilated.[
Early in the 19th century, many of the poor were housed in cellars, which became even less sanitary after the ]Croton Aqueduct
The Croton Aqueduct or Old Croton Aqueduct was a large and complex water distribution system constructed for New York City between 1837 and 1842. The great aqueducts, which were among the first in the United States, carried water by gravity from ...
brought running water to wealthier New Yorkers: the reduction in well use caused the water table
The water table is the upper surface of the zone of saturation. The zone of saturation is where the pores and fractures of the ground are saturated with water. It can also be simply explained as the depth below which the ground is saturated.
T ...
to rise, and the cellar dwellings flooded. Early housing reformers urged the construction of tenements to replace cellars, and beginning in 1859 the number of people living in cellars began to decline.
The Tenement House Act of 1866, the state legislature's first comprehensive legislation on housing conditions, prohibited cellar apartments unless the ceiling was 1 foot above street level; required one water closet per 20 residents and the provision of fire escapes; and paid some attention to space between buildings. This was amended by the Tenement House Act of 1879, known as the Old Law, which required lot coverage of no more than 65 percent. As of 1869, New York State law defined a “tenement house” as “any house or building, or portion thereof, which is rented, leased let or hired out, to be occupied, or is occupied as the home or residence of three families or more living independently of each other, and doing their cooking upon the premises, or by more than two families upon any floor, so living and cooking, but having a right in the halls, stairways, yards, water-closets or privies, or some of them.” L 1867, ch 908. The New York City Board of Health
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is the department of the government of New York City responsible for public health along with issuing birth certificates, dog licenses, and conducting restaurant inspection and enforcem ...
was empowered to enforce these regulations, but it declined to do so. As a compromise, the " Old Law tenement" became the standard: this had a "dumbbell" shape, with air and light shafts on either side in the center (usually fitted to the shafts in the adjacent buildings), and it typically covered 80 percent of the lot. James E. Ware
James Edward Ware (1846 – April 14, 1918) was an American architect, best known for devising the "dumbbell plan" for New York City tenement housing.
He was born in New York City in 1846, and studied at the City College of New York. He began h ...
is credited with the design;[*] he had won a contest the previous year held by ''Plumber and Sanitary Engineer'' Magazine to find the most practical improved tenement design, in which profitability was the most important factor to the jury.
Public concern about New York tenements was stirred by publication in 1890 of Jacob Riis
Jacob August Riis ( ; May 3, 1849 – May 26, 1914) was a Danish-American social reformer, "muckraking" journalist and social documentary photographer. He contributed significantly to the cause of urban reform in America at the turn of the twen ...
's ''How the Other Half Lives
''How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York'' (1890) is an early publication of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. The photographs served as a basis f ...
'', and in 1892 by Riis's ''The Children of the Poor.'' The New York State Assembly Tenement House Committee report of 1894 surveyed 8,000 buildings with approximately 255,000 residents and found New York to be the most densely populated city in the world, at an average of 143 people per acre, with part of the Lower East Side having 800 residents per acre, denser than Bombay
Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' financial centre of India. According to the United Nations, as of 2018, Mumbai is the second- ...
. It used both charts and photographs, the first such official use of photographs. Together with the publication in 1895 by the US Department of Labor of a special report on housing conditions and solutions elsewhere in the world, ''The Housing of Working People,'' it ultimately led to the passage of the Tenement House Act of 1901, known as the New Law, which implemented the Tenement House Committee's recommendation of a maximum of 70 percent lot coverage and mandated strict enforcement, specified a minimum of 12 feet for a rear yard and 6 feet for an air and light shaft at the lot line or 12 feet in the middle of the building (all of these being increased for taller buildings), and required running water and water closets in every apartment and a window in every room. There were also fire-safety requirements. These rules are still the basis of New York City law on low-rise buildings, and they have made single-lot development uneconomical.
Most of the purpose-built tenements in New York were not slums, although they were not pleasant to be inside, especially in hot weather, so people congregated outside, made heavy use of the fire escapes, and slept in summer on fire escapes, roofs, and sidewalks.
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, located at 97 and 103 Orchard Street in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, is a National Historic Site. The museum's two historical tenement buildings were home to an estimated 15, ...
, a five-story brick former tenement building in Manhattan that is a National Historic Site, is a museum devoted to tenements in the Lower East Side.
Other famous tenements in the US include tenement housing in Chicago, in which various housing areas were built to the same affect as tenements in New York.
Edinburgh and Glasgow
Tenements make up a large percentage of the housing stock of Edinburgh
Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian ...
and Glasgow
Glasgow ( ; sco, Glesca or ; gd, Glaschu ) is the most populous city in Scotland and the fourth-most populous city in the United Kingdom, as well as being the 27th largest city by population in Europe. In 2020, it had an estimated popul ...
in Scotland. Glasgow tenements were built to provide high-density housing for the large number of people immigrating to the city in the 19th and early 20th century as a result of the Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going f ...
, when the city's population boomed to more than 1 million people. Edinburgh's tenements are much older, dating from the 17th century onwards, and some were up to 15 storeys high when first built, which made them among the tallest houses in the world at that time. Glasgow tenements were generally built no taller than the width of the street on which they were located; therefore, most are about 3–5 storeys high. Virtually all Glasgow tenements were constructed using red or blonde sandstone, which has become distinctive.
In Edinburgh, residential dwellings in the UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...
World Heritage Site
A World Heritage Site is a landmark or area with legal protection by an international convention administered by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). World Heritage Sites are designated by UNESCO for h ...
s of the medieval
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the Post-classical, post-classical period of World history (field), global history. It began with t ...
Old Town
In a city or town, the old town is its historic or original core. Although the city is usually larger in its present form, many cities have redesignated this part of the city to commemorate its origins after thorough renovations. There are ma ...
and Georgian
Georgian may refer to:
Common meanings
* Anything related to, or originating from Georgia (country)
** Georgians, an indigenous Caucasian ethnic group
** Georgian language, a Kartvelian language spoken by Georgians
**Georgian scripts, three scrip ...
New Town
New is an adjective referring to something recently made, discovered, or created.
New or NEW may refer to:
Music
* New, singer of K-pop group The Boyz
Albums and EPs
* ''New'' (album), by Paul McCartney, 2013
* ''New'' (EP), by Regurgitator, ...
(as well as the Victorian city centre districts immediately surrounding them) are almost exclusively tenements.
The Tenement House
A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. They are common on the British Isles, particularly in Scotland. In the medieval Old Town, i ...
historic house museum
A historic house museum is a house of historic significance that has been transformed into a museum. Historic furnishings may be displayed in a way that reflects their original placement and usage in a home. Historic house museums are held to a ...
in the Garnethill
Garnethill is a predominantly residential area of the city of Glasgow, Scotland with a number of important public buildings.
Geography
Located in the city centre, the area borders Cowcaddens to its north, Sauchiehall Street to its south, Cambr ...
area of Glasgow preserves the interior, fittings and equipment of a well-kept, upper middle-class tenement from the late 19th century.
Many tenements in Glasgow were demolished in the 1960s and 1970s because of slum conditions, overcrowding and poor maintenance of the buildings. Perhaps the most striking case of this is seen in the Gorbals
The Gorbals is an area in the city of Glasgow, Scotland, on the south bank of the River Clyde. By the late 19th century, it had become densely populated; rural migrants and immigrants were attracted by the new industries and employment opportun ...
, where virtually all the tenements were demolished to make way for tower blocks, many of which have in turn have been demolished and replaced with newer structures. The Gorbals is an area of approximately 1 km2 and at one time had an estimated 90,000 people living in its tenements, leading to very poor living conditions. The population now is roughly 10,000.
Tenement demolition was to a significantly lesser extent in Edinburgh, thus making its later World Heritage designations in 1985 possible. Largely, such clearances were limited to pre-Victorian buildings outwith the New Town area and were precipitated by the so-called "Penny Tenement" incident.
Apartments in tenement buildings in both cities are now often highly sought after, due to their locations, often large rooms, high ceilings, ornamentation and period features.
Berlin
In German, the term corresponding to ''tenement'' is ''Mietskaserne'', "rental barracks", and the city especially known for them is Berlin. In 1930, Werner Hegemann
Werner Hegemann (June 15, 1881, Mannheim – April 12, 1936, New York City) was an internationally known city planner, architecture critic, and author. A leading German intellectual during the Weimar Republic, his criticism of Hitler and the Naz ...
's polemic ''Das steinerne Berlin'' (Stony Berlin) referred to the city in its subtitle as "the largest tenement city in the world." They were built during a period of great increases in population between 1860 and 1914, particularly after German unification
The unification of Germany (, ) was the process of building the modern German nation state with federal features based on the concept of Lesser Germany (one without multinational Austria), which commenced on 18 August 1866 with adoption of t ...
in 1871, in a broad ring enclosing the old city center, sometimes called the Wilhelmian or Wilhelmine Ring. The buildings are almost always five stories high because of the mandated maximum height. The blocks are large because the streets were required to be able to handle heavy traffic, and the lots are therefore also large: required to have courtyards large enough for a fire truck to turn around, the buildings have front, rear, and cross buildings enclosing several courtyards. Buildings within the courtyards were the location of much of Berlin's industry until the 1920s, and noise and other nuisances affected the apartments, only the best of which had windows facing the street.
One notorious Berlin Mietskaserne was in Gesundbrunnen, which at times housed 2,000 people and required its own police officer to keep order.
Between 1901 and 1920, a Berlin clinic investigated and documented in photographs the living conditions of its patients, revealing that many lived in damp basements and garrets, spaces under stairs, and apartments where the windows were blocked by courtyard businesses.
Many apartments in the Wilhelmian Ring were very small, only one room and a kitchen.[Elkins, p. 189.] Also, apartments were laid out with their rooms reached via a common internal corridor, which even the Berlin Architects' Association recognized was unhealthy and detrimental to family life. Sanitation was inadequate: in a survey of one area in 1962, only 15 percent of apartments had both a toilet and a bath or shower; 19 percent had only a toilet, and 66 percent shared staircase toilets.[ Heating was provided by stoves burning charcoal briquettes.
]
Dublin
By the 19th and early 20th century, Dublin's tenements () were infamous, often described as the worst in Europe. Many tenement buildings were originally the Georgian
Georgian may refer to:
Common meanings
* Anything related to, or originating from Georgia (country)
** Georgians, an indigenous Caucasian ethnic group
** Georgian language, a Kartvelian language spoken by Georgians
**Georgian scripts, three scrip ...
townhouses of upper-class families, neglected and subdivided over the centuries to house dozens of Dublin's poor. Henrietta Street's fifteen buildings housed 835 people. In 1911 nearly 26,000 families lived in inner-city tenements, and 20,000 of these families lived in a single room. Disease was common, with death rates of 22.3 per thousand (compared with 15.6 for London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
at the same time).
The collapse of 65–66 Church Street in 1913, which killed seven residents, led to inquiries into housing. A housing committee report of 1914 said,
Tenement life often appeared in fiction, such as the "Dublin trilogy" of plays by Seán O'Casey
Seán O'Casey ( ga, Seán Ó Cathasaigh ; born John Casey; 30 March 1880 – 18 September 1964) was an Irish dramatist and memoirist. A committed socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes.
...
, Oliver St. John Gogarty
Oliver Joseph St. John Gogarty (17 August 1878 – 22 September 1957) was an Irish poet, author, otolaryngologist, athlete, politician, and well-known conversationalist. He served as the inspiration for Buck Mulligan in James Joyce's novel ...
's play ''Blight
Blight refers to a specific symptom affecting plants in response to infection by a pathogenic organism.
Description
Blight is a rapid and complete chlorosis, browning, then death of plant tissues such as leaves, branches, twigs, or floral organ ...
'', and James Plunkett
James Plunkett Kelly, or James Plunkett (21 May 1920 – 28 May 2003), was an Irish writer. He was educated at Synge Street CBS.
Kelly grew up among the Dublin working class and they, along with the petty bourgeoisie and lower intelligentsia, ...
's novel '' Strumpet City'' ( adapted for television in 1980). 14 Henrietta Street serves as a museum of Dublin tenement life.
The last tenements were closed in the 1970s, families being rehoused in new suburbs such as Ballymun
Ballymun () is an outer suburb of Dublin, Ireland, at the northern edge of the Northside, the green-field development of which began in the 1960s to accommodate a housing crisis in inner city areas of Dublin. While the newly built housing was ...
.
Buenos Aires
In Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South ...
the tenements, called ''conventillos'', developed from subdividing one- or two-story houses built around courtyards for well-off families. These were long and narrow, three to six times as long as they were wide, and the size of the patios was reduced until as many as 350 people could be living on a lot that had originally housed 25. Purpose-built tenements copied their form. By 1907 there were some 2,500 conventillos, with 150,000 occupants. El conventillo de la Paloma was particularly famous and is the title of a play by Alberto Vaccarezza
Bartolomé Ángel Venancio Alberto Vaccarezza (1886–1959) was an Argentine poet and playwright.
Vaccarezza was born in Buenos Aires on April 1, 1886. He is usually credited as the foremost exponent of the sainete genre, having written its mo ...
.
Mumbai
"Chawls" are found in India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
. They are typically four to five story buildings with 10 to 20 ''kholis'' (tenements) on each floor, kholis literally meaning 'room
In a building or large vehicle, like a ship, a room is any enclosed space within a number of walls to which entry is possible only via a door or other dividing structure that connects it to either a passage (architecture), passageway, another roo ...
s'. Many chawl buildings can be found in Mumbai
Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' financial centre of India. According to the United Nations, as of 2018, Mumbai is the second- ...
, where chawls were constructed by the thousands to house people migrating to the large city because of its booming cotton mills and overall strong economy.
A typical chawl tenement consists of one all-purpose room, which functions both as a living and sleeping space, and a kitchen which also serves as a dining room. A frequent practice is for the kitchen to also serve as a bedroom for a newly married couple in order to give them some degree of privacy.
Poland
''Kamienica'' (plural ''kamienice'') is a Polish
Polish may refer to:
* Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe
* Polish language
* Poles, people from Poland or of Polish descent
* Polish chicken
*Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin screenwr ...
term describing a type of residential tenement building made of brick or stone
In geology, rock (or stone) is any naturally occurring solid mass or aggregate of minerals or mineraloid matter. It is categorized by the minerals included, its Chemical compound, chemical composition, and the way in which it is formed. Rocks ...
, with at least two floors. There are two basic types: one designed as a single-family residence, which existed until the 1800s (a burgher house), and the other designed as multi-family housing, which emerged in the 19th century and was the basic type of housing in cities. From the architectural point of view, the word is usually used to describe a building that abuts other similar buildings forming the street frontage
Frontage is the boundary between a plot of land or a building and the road onto which the plot or building fronts. Frontage may also refer to the full length of this boundary. This length is considered especially important for certain types of ...
, in the manner of a terraced house
In architecture and city planning, a terrace or terraced house ( UK) or townhouse ( US) is a form of medium-density housing that originated in Europe in the 16th century, whereby a row of attached dwellings share side walls. In the United State ...
. The ground floor often consists of shops and other businesses, while the upper floors are apartments, oftentimes spanning the entire floor. Kamienice have large windows in the front, but not in the side walls, since the buildings are close together.
The first type of kamienica is most prevalent especially in centers of historical cities such as Kraków
Kraków (), or Cracow, is the second-largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, the city dates back to the seventh century. Kraków was the official capital of Poland until 1596 ...
, Poznań
Poznań () is a city on the River Warta in west-central Poland, within the Greater Poland region. The city is an important cultural and business centre, and one of Poland's most populous regions with many regional customs such as Saint John ...
, Wrocław
Wrocław (; german: Breslau, or . ; Silesian German: ''Brassel'') is a city in southwestern Poland and the largest city in the historical region of Silesia. It lies on the banks of the River Oder in the Silesian Lowlands of Central Europe, rou ...
, and Toruń
)''
, image_skyline =
, image_caption =
, image_flag = POL Toruń flag.svg
, image_shield = POL Toruń COA.svg
, nickname = City of Angels, Gingerbread city, Copernicus Town
, pushpin_map = Kuyavian-Pom ...
, whereas the second type is most prominent in Łódź
Łódź, also rendered in English as Lodz, is a city in central Poland and a former industrial centre. It is the capital of Łódź Voivodeship, and is located approximately south-west of Warsaw. The city's coat of arms is an example of canti ...
. The name derives from the Polish word ''kamień'' (stone) and dates from the 15th century.[Tomasz Torbus]
''Poland''
, Nelles guides, Munich: Nelles, 2001, . Late 19th century and early 20th century kamienice often took form of city palaces with ornamental facades, high floors and spacious, representative and heavily decorated interiors.
Later in the 20th century, especially after the Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, large apartments would be divided into several smaller flats due to general lack of habitable space caused by vast destruction of cities, thus lowering the generally high standard of living in so-called grand city tenements ( pl, kamienice wielkomiejskie). Examples of kamienice include Korniakt Palace and Black Kamienica in Lviv
Lviv ( uk, Львів) is the largest city in western Ukraine, and the seventh-largest in Ukraine, with a population of . It serves as the administrative centre of Lviv Oblast and Lviv Raion, and is one of the main cultural centres of Ukraine ...
. Some kamienice in some areas have a reputation for being inhabited by poor people and families that depend on government money and welfare programs to support them; kamienice are often used as public housing. Those areas are often considered dangerous. The buildings are often neglected, in bad shape (both the exteriors and the interiors), in need of general renovations, sometimes without access to heating or hot water.
See also
* Cortiço
Cortiço (, , ), or gueto ( Portuguese language for "beehive" and " ghetto" respectively; tenements), is a common Portuguese term used in Brazil and Portugal for an area of concentrated, high density urban housing where people live with poor san ...
, tenements in Portuguese-speaking countries
* NIMBY
NIMBY (or nimby), an acronym for the phrase "not in my back yard", is a characterization of opposition by residents to proposed developments in their local area, as well as support for strict land use regulations. It carries the connotation that ...
* Urban decay
Urban decay (also known as urban rot, urban death or urban blight) is the sociological process by which a previously functioning city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude. There is no single process that leads to urban deca ...
References
Notes
Bibliography
*Bauman, John F. "Introduction: The Eternal War on the Slums," ''From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America'', ed. John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian, University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2000, , pp. 1–17.
*Elkins, T. H. with Hofmeister, B. ''Berlin: The Spatial Structure of a Divided City'', London/New York: Methuen, 1988,
*Girouard, Mark. ''Cities and People: A Social and Architectural History'', New Haven, Connecticut/London: Yale University, 1985,
*Plunz, Richard A. "On the Uses and Abuses of Air: Perfecting the New York Tenement, 1850–1901," ''Berlin/New York: Like and Unlike: Essays on Architecture and Art from 1870 to the Present'', ed. Josef Paul Kleihues and Christina Rathgeber, New York: Rizzoli, 1993, , pp. 159–79.
*Riis, Jacob. ''The Children of the Poor: A Child Welfare Classic'', Pittsburgh: TCB Classics, 2018 892
*Worbs, Dietrich. "The Berlin ''Mietskaserne'' and Its Reforms," ''Berlin/New York'', pp. 144–57.
Further reading
* Huchzermeyer, Marie. ''Tenement cities: from 19th century Berlin to 21st century Nairobi'', Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2011, .
* Kearns, Kevin C. ''Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History of the Dublin Slums'', Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1994, repr. 2006, .
* Lubove, Roy. ''The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890–1917'', Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963, .
* Worsdall, Frank. ''The Tenement: A Way of Life: A Social, Historical and Architectural Study of Housing in Glasgow'', Glasgow: W. and R. Chambers, 1979, .
Historiography
* Polland, Annie
"Ivory Towers and Tenements: American Jewish History, Scholars and the Public,"
''American Jewish History'' 98 (2014) 41-47: how museums interpret the tenements in New York City.
* Steinberg, Adam
"What we talk about when we talk about food: Using food to teach history at the Tenement Museum,"
''Public Historian'' 34.2 (2012) 79-89.
External links
*
* ''Kamienice'' category at Polish Wikipedia
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Urban design
House types
Progressive Era in the United States