Too Crowded Tenement
Tenement housing wasn’t affordable for everyone. It wasn’t unusual to find several beds or mattresses on the floor rented for pennies a night. Some tenants took in these ‘visitors’ to supplement their income. In this image, inspectors found seven beds in a small room. This exceeded the occupancy limits, so they ordered them to be removed. It may have been boarders, or extended family, or perhaps there were numerous children.
The context of this image is lost to time. Whichever the situation, in 1894, the New York State Assembly Tenement House Committee found 38,000 tenement buildings in New York. The Lower East Side had up to 700 people per acre residents per acre by 1894, an extraordinarily high population density for such a small area.
