Health Issues

Among all the previously mentioned issues with tenements, the easy disease spread is definitely the worst. Disease was spread through tenement housing more often than fires. This was due to a few reasons. The first reason was the poorly ventilated rooms. With not a lot of the rooms having access to fresh air and windows, people were often just circulating around the same air over and over again. This led to people continuously being sick and flooding teh nearby hospitals only to come back and get sick all over again. These were not common colds either, the diseases ranged from minor illnesses all the way to deadly diseases such as tuberculosis. ¹⁰

Another big factor to the disease spread throughout tenements were the horrible social conditions throughout the city. With most tenements lacking indoor plumbing, people were forced to use public outhouses like the one pictured above. As disgusting as the public bathrooms were, nobody really got around to cleaning them or they weren’t cleaned as often as they should have been. According to a New York Times article from 1865, the bathrooms were usually emptied into a shallow gutter cut that went from behind the tenements to the streets. The article then goes on to state how these gutter cuts would get clogged by semi-fluid filth, so the alley and the parts of the yard that ran through it were frequently overflown and submerged the surrounding area several inches. In order to get into the tenements the families would then have to walk through the several inches of filth water, which led to it being tracked back into the tenement. ¹¹Not only were the bathroom facilities a hot spot for catching a disease, but the living areas were not any better. With how crowded they were it was almost impossible to not get sick when someone you were living with got sick as well.

The map above is a Sanitary and social chart of the Fourth Ward of the City of New York which added on top a report of the 4th Sanitary Inspection District. In yellow are all of the tenement houses in this district, and the stars on the map correlate to a different level of inability. As you can see nearly all of the stars land within tenement housing. One star indicates insalubrious localities. Which just means dirty or likely to cause disease. Two stars represent houses where Typhus, or Typhoid fever has occurred during just the past year. Three stars represent houses where Smallpox has occurred also during the past year. This map helps illustrate just how many tenement houses were affected by disease and how hard it was to escape. It also helps illistrate how disease spread to other close tenements, because in some instances you can see that there are the same stars next to another tenement. 

^Footnotes

¹⁰ Filiaci, Anne M. “The Tenement House Committee of 1894 (Gilder Committee).” Lillian        Wald Public Health Progressive, 2016, https://www.lillianwald.com/?page_id=403.

¹¹ “Our City's Condition.; The Tenement Houses and Their Inhabitants. Frail Structures, Small Rooms, Foul Smells, and Disease Breeding Receptacles.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 12 June 1865, https://www.nytimes.com/1865/06/12/archives/our-citys-condition-the-tenement-houses-and-their-inhabitants-frail.html.