The building at 65 Mott Street, between Canal and Bayard Streets in the Chinatown neighborhood of Manhattan, was built c.1824 and is the first tenement building in New York City, and possibly the first in the United States. Prior to this, people who did not own a home live in rooming houses or single-family houses that had been converted (sometimes minimally) for multiple family use. 65 Mott was the first building deliberately constructed to house multiple families, with two apartments on each floor, one in the front and one in the back, each of which had a parlor, living room and two bedrooms. Outhouses were in the "yard" in the back. 65 Mott had a smaller footprint that the tenements (which were originally called "tenant houses") that came after, which followed approximately the same model, but which were later regulated by law to provide sufficient light and air to all the residents. With the great influx of immigrants into New York, the tenement provided the solution to the problem of housing them.
1st Tenement house constructed specifically to provide low income housing and improve on the jerrybuilt ‘rookeries’ which often had windowless railroad ats, communal water taps and outdoor privies.
65 Mott Street “was apparently the very first New York building built specifically to serve as a tenement,” wrote historian Tyler Anbinder in his 2001 book, Five Points—his study of the horrific slum neighborhood this stretch of Mott Street used to be part of. “Historians have generally cited a building erected on the Lower East Side in 1833 by iron manufacturer James P. Allaire as the city’s first designed tenement…” Anbinder wrote. “But the building at 65 Mott almost certainly predates Allaire’s structure by nearly a decade.” “Its seven stories—a height then unprecedented for a dwelling place—dwarfed the surrounding wooden two-story homes and must have made quite a spectacle when it was first built.”
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