Issues With Tenement Housing
Along with the staggering amount of other issues with tenement housing came safety hazards. The way that these tenements were constructed was as quickly and cheap as possible which brought on numerous safety hazards that were often overlooked until the Tenement House Act of 1901.
One of the many hazards was how residents got to and from their rooms. With how tall some of the buildings were, residents had to climb poorly built stairs in dark windowless halls. Making it easy to fall down the stairs or get lost. Not to mention, many of these stairs were made of wood, which over time could have become unstable and were also a fire hazard.
Speaking of fire hazards, the whole building itself was a fire hazard. In many tenements the lower floors were home to bakeries, and storehouses for highly combustible hay or feed. None of the doors were fireproof, and the walls were poorly built and thin. The fires that took place in tenements were extremely hard to contain, and even harder to exit the building if a fire did take place. Many of the fire escapes throughout the buildings were being used as extra storage for residents. 10 The tenements were also so close together in some areas that it was possible for the fire to spread to another building. Below is a page from the Bromley Fire Insurance map from 1925. The tenements are in pink. This illustrates just how close these buildings were and how hard it would be to stop a fire spread.
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.