Tenement Buildings Research Articles

Migration History in Five Stories (and a Basement): The Lower East Side Tenement Museum

IN LATE 2012, JOHN SCHNEIDER’S SALOON on Manhattan’s Lower East Side reopened—nearly a century and a half after Schneider first set up shop—and this time, without the beer. Schneider, a Bavarian immigrant, and his Westphalian wife, Caroline, ran their lager beer Lokal out of the basement of a tenement building at 97 Orchard Street from 1864, just after the building’s construction, to the mid1880s. Today, a reconstruction of Schneider’s front barroom, complete with polished bar top, beer Steine, and a “free lunch” table with (plaster) comestibles, greets visitors to the “Shop Life” exhibit at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Shop Life, now in its third year, exemplifies the approaches that have made the Tenement Museum one of the most innovative and compelling interpretive sites of immigration and urban history in the United States. Located in perhaps the longeststanding immigrant neighborhood in the country, and centered on the fivestory tenement built at 97 Orchard in 1863 (fig. 1), the museum uses period reconstructions of tenants’ apartments to explore the lives of some of the thousands of newcomers who rented there between 1863 and 1935, when the upper floors became a warehouse. Shop Life goes downstairs to examine the immigrant businesses that ran out of the building’s basement over a century—Schneider’s saloon, Lustgarten’s kosher butcher shop, Marcus’s wholesale auction house, and Meda’s discount underwear store, among others. In its use of one locale to explore a facet of immigrant life across multiple groups and a stretch of time reaching down to the present, Shop Life reflects the museum’s focus on immigration history as a multiethnic matter that should involve visitors making connections between their own and their families’ experience and the nation’s immigrant past and present. This article provides an overview of the Tenement Museum, its history and recent initiatives, and its potential as a resource for college and university teachers, along with some observations about the challenges it faces in pursuing a public immigration history. That pursuit has involved a notable

Morphological Processes in the Spatial Structure of the Southern District of Wrocław City

Abstract The paper analyses the morphological changes in the spatial structure of the southern district of Wrocław city (Lower Silesia, Poland). The district developed from the former villages of vegetable-growers, which in the Middle Ages bordered directly with the city as set out in the charter. In the second half of the 19th century, the villages were incorporated into the city, and after a while, they started their metamorphosis. Rectangular urban blocks were formed on the basis of medieval axes in the villages. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the blocks were successively filled with typical tenement buildings. As a result of World War II, existing buildings were totally destroyed. In the 1960s, they started re-construction of the district, which led to its second metamorphosis. The new constructions resembled typical, socialist apartment projects in other Polish cities. The prestige the district enjoyed before World War II was lost together with its style and character.

Experimental Engineering Investigations of a Two-Layer Bed Formed from a Sand Cushion and Loess-Like Soil

Results are presented for a large-scale field experiment wherein experimental and theoretical horizontal and vertical pressures are compared in a two-layer bed. Rational methods are proposed for the design of a sand cushion with the introduction of correction factors. The economic effectiveness is analyzed in an example of the bed of a multi-story tenement building in Barnaul.

REGIONAL PATTERN OF HOUSING FUND OVERHAULING

Establishment of modern efficient management system of housing sector restructurisation and financing of housing fund overhauling requires integration of efforts and agreed actions of authorities, financial institutions, companies of different forms of incorporation and private persons. Data about state of housing fund have been given; increase of slum dwelling volume and number of emergency objects subject to demolition has been shown. References to regulatory documents governing performance of overhaul repair of common property in tenement buildings have been given; a method of calculating subsidy for maintenance and repair of common property of tenement house has been offered; composition, functions and targets of the main participants of financing of overhaul repair of dwelling houses have been defined.

Shallow Strip Foundations Joined by Gently Inclining Envelopes on Highly Compressible Soils

Computed behavioral characteristics are presented for a soil bed subject to nonuniform loading, and a computational model and method of controlling interaction between shallow strip foundations and the soil bed with use of strip foundations connected by gently inclining envelopes are proposed. Results are cited for experimental investigations. Computational data and results of geomechanical monitoring of the construction of a 17-story tenement building are presented.

Капитальный ремонт многоквартирных домов и его значение для поддержания качества среды обитания человека

The article is devoted to the role and contribution of major repairs of tenement buildings for sustaining a comfortable human living environment, which is directly linked to a region’s living standards. The
 author identifies the constituents of a living environment and the factors influencing its maintenance in the framework of normative regulation. Major repairs include the maintenance of the performance properties — eliminating the physical deterioration and obsolescence of a tenement building, as well as ensuring the tenants’ and other persons’ safety (in terms of a wide variety of microclimate-creating factors like the quality of breathing air, lighting, noise, vibration, etc.) during and after the repair works. However, it does not target the principal technical and economic characteristics. In compliance with legal and normative regulations, major repairs programs target parts of hard assets and public premises of a tenement building.
 The author proposes a methodological approach to the assessment of the factors affecting the quality of life during and after the major repairs. The approach is based on the well-known method of socio-economic
 research involving a systemic analysis, which incorporates the multitude of interdependent and interrelated living-environment-forming factors.

Indigenous Approaches to Housing-Induced Domestic Conflict Management in Ondo City, Nigeria

This paper presents the results of a questionnaire survey of households and housing facilities carried out in 2007 in six wards of Ondo city in Ondo State of Nigeria. A total of 421 (2.39%) residential buildings were sampled. The study revealed that domestic conflict occurs most in tenement buildings where residents have to share facilities and amenities. This paper examines the nature, causes, and consequences of domestic conflict among residents and the methods of resolving such conflicts. It argues that indigenous strategies of conflict management work best in traditional societies and advocates their application in settlements with similar indigenous culture.

Fan and Tsai: Intracommunity Variation in Plant-Based Food Consumption at the Market Street Chinatown, San Jose, California

Most archaeobotanical research on Chinese immigrant communities in North America has relied on aggregate, site-wide data sets. The question of foodways variability within Chinese immigrant communities has been relatively neglected. An intrasite comparative approach is used here to investigate differences in plant-food consumption between residents of merchant households and those of tenement buildings in the Market Street Chinatown, a major urban Chinese immigrant community in San Jose, California, from 1866 to 1887. Residents of both household types consumed a nutritious diet rich in vegetables and fresh fruits; however, some merchant households consumed greater varieties of cereal grains, while residents of some working-class tenements consumed a wider range of legumes, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. These class-based differences were not consistent, however, suggesting that specific occupation, more than class position, may have influenced access to or preference for certain plant foods.

Excavations at Jeffrey Street, Edinburgh

Excavations on the site of a former tannery to the rear of Edinburgh's High Street (NGR: NT 260 737) produced evidence for the infilling of medieval burgage plots from the 16th century onwards. Walls defining a terrace and a burgage plot boundary suggest a considerable investment in at least some of the backlands during the medieval period, but these structures later went out of use, corresponding to a widely documented decline in Scottish towns during the 14th century. During the late 16th century, substantial buildings with cellars on either side of a paved close represent the first appearance of the multi-storey tenement buildings that characterise much of the Old Town. These buildings provide the basis for a discussion of the character of urbanisation in late 16th- and early 17th-century Edinburgh. The cellars were demolished and backfilled with refuse at different dates between the 1640s and 1740s. Finds from these refuse deposits are highly significant as a sample of changing consumption patterns during this period. During the 18th century the area appears to have declined in status and taken on a more industrial character; later, a tannery was established on part of the site by the 1830s, which expanded to cover much of the site by the 1880s.

An Environmental Study on the Collapse of a Tenement Building in HK

On 29th January 2010, a tragedy took place before the blissful Chinese Lunar New Year. An old tenement building in Ma Tau Wai collapsed in a sudden, causing 2 deaths and 4 injuries. Not only did this raise peoples concerns to investigate the reasons the collapse of the tenement building, it also raised their awareness on old tenement buildings as well as protecting them from collapsing. In view of this, this paper investigates on condensation and how it might shorten the service life of that old tenement building.

Crooked and Narrow Streets

In The Crooked and Narrow Streets of the Town of Boston (1920), historian and social reformer Annie Haven Thwing documents the development of Boston’s streets in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She illustrates her text with stock photographs depicting these ancient alleys lined with nineteenth-century tenement buildings. This juxtaposition of colonial and modern Boston through text and image privileges the city as a historical site, significantly doing so at a time when Bostonians were grappling with the concerns of twentieth-century urbanism, such as overcrowding, urban reform, and historic preservation.

Marlin's Wynd

The 17th-century Tron Kirk, on the High Street, Edinburgh (NGR: NT 2592 7363), is built over the remains of tenement buildings that were pulled down to allow its construction. The re-development of the building provided an opportunity to complete the earlier excavations carried out between 1974 and 1983 and a more complete footprint of the tenements emerged, together with a fragment of the old High Street. The archaeological investigation has been complemented by documentary research which has populated the tenements with colourful occupants as far back as the late 15th century. The artefact assemblages from both the recent and earlier excavations contain only material of 16th- and 17th-century date, which suggests that the tenements had been redeveloped during the late 15th/early 16th centuries, thus removing all but a trace of the earlier medieval settlement.

Koncepcje odbudowy szczecińskich zabytków po 1945 roku i możliwość ich realizacji

Th e concepts for the reconstruction of Szczecin monuments aft er 1945 and possibilities of their realizationThe first professionals dealing with an inventory and protection of cultural monuments arrived in Szczecin in the second quarter of 1946. The group included Leopold Kusztelski (PhD), art historian, who became the Voivodeship Restorer of Monuments on 8 April. In 1953 the decision was made to get rid of war damage in the Old Town, and reconstruct only the most precious monuments, not maintaining the historical urban planning. It was also planned to widen the streets and erect modern residential buildings near the cathedral. The following monuments were included in the reconstruction plan: the medieval churches of St. Jacob the Apostle, of SS. Peter and Paul, of St. John the Evangelist, The Old Town Hall, the early modern palaces of Grumbkov and Velthusen, the Berlin and Royal Gates, the Panieńska tower, the castle of the Pomeranian Dukes, and tenement houses in Kusnierska street. Th e second stage of restoration activities took place at the beginning of the 1990s and it included the area of Podzamcze. It was to be conducted according to the concept which won the tender announced by the city in 1983, and which assumed the reconstruction of the historical network of streets and squares with a historical division of the area. The planned contemporary architecture was to refer to the 17th and 18th centuries, which was why the buildings were to have 3–4 storeys. Baroque tenement buildings, known for their iconographic materials, were also included in the reconstruction plan as the nearest surrounding of the monumental Town Hall. Serious restoration works embraced also the revitalization of the city centre, including 56 quarters with about 1000 tenement buildings from the end of the 19th century, situated on the area of 105 hectares. Another restoration activity consisted in considerable investments started in the years 2004–2006 owing to the funds of the European Union. They included the cathedral of St. Jacob the Apostle with the reconstruction of the spire to the height of 110 metres and the conversion of the tower into a scenic overlook, the renovation of the Church of St. John the Evangelist and buildings of the National Museum, the conversion of the abandoned tram depot in Niebuszewo into the Museum of Transport and Technology. The obligation to prepare the investment process and to define the new functions made the owners of the monuments prepare to give answers explaining not only how to restore the buildings, but also why the restoration of a given building was necessary or whether the suggested function would meet the needs of the public.

Malamud's “Subject Matter”:

Malamud's “Subject Matter”:

A feasibility study on solar-wall systems for domestic heating – An affordable solution for fuel poverty

A Solar Wall Heating (SWH) system was developed to provide low cost space heating in traditional solid stone-walled tenement buildings in Scotland. The SWH system uses the internal solid walls to store the solar heat collected during the day and heat the bedrooms during the night.A physical laboratory model with attached solar hot water system and a computational model of it were developed to investigate the dynamic performance of the system in use and test the cost benefits of iterations of its modes of use. The temperatures throughout the wall structure were measured under the variant solar input of a 24-h cycle. An unsteady state CFD model was developed and validated using the measured data and setup to test a number of key variables of the solar wall heating system in use. These included optimisation control strategies and maximisation strategies for the collection and storage of solar heat under various conditions. This paper presents the modelled results of the solar thermal storage and optimisation system and strategies for internal solid stone walls in a typical Scottish tenement flat in the Scottish climate.In addition the study analysed the solar availability, heating demand and domestic water supply of two typical dwellings based on two reliable methods: (a) a purpose built dynamic thermal model and (b) data collected in previous studies.The study demonstrated that the solar collection of current solar hot water systems can be improved upon so that, even in Scotland, more solar power can be harvested to contribute not only to domestic hot water, but also domestic space heating, particularly in buildings occupied over 24h with heavy thermal mass. The cost analysis of the system in use suggested a 16year payback period for such a system for a tenement flat.

Posters for Housing and Health

THE 1930S POSTER IMAGE contrasts a modernist public housing development with conditions in a tenement district. In the latter, a woman pushes a baby carriage through a neighborhood that at the time would have been considered unhealthy.1 She approaches overflowing garbage cans; laundry lines fill the tall, narrow space between tenement buildings; and an old water tank tops a roof. An elevated train can be seen in the distance. The image, in gray-blue and gold, is crossed out. Eliminating these types of neighborhoods as a means to promote health has been a goal of housing and health advocates since the time of Thomas Southwood Smith and Edwin Chadwick in the 19th century.2 The modernist housing development, rendered in four colors, sits on a superblock with no through traffic; each building has ample access to sunlight and green space but not to streets. Long, narrow buildings, designed to maximize ventilation, contain many corner units. Residents would have views of nature and plenty of opportunities for outdoor recreation. The poster's text reads: “BETTER HOUSING: THE SOLUTION TO INFANT MORTALITY IN THE SLUMS.” This poster was produced by the federal Works Progress Administration–Federal Art Project sometime between 1936 and 1938. During its years of existence between 1935 and 1943, more than 2 000 000 copies of approximately 35 000 distinct posters were produced, but fewer than 2000 have survived.3 At least a half dozen of these involved housing and health themes. Some promoted overall public housing goals of clean, safe living; others celebrated the opening of individual developments. In addition, some posters were dedicated to other health-related topics, including syphilis, workplace injuries, tuberculosis, and hand washing. Overall, the Works Progress Administration program produced posters dedicated to everything from travel and tourism to book readings and war bonds.4 Many of the posters had designs similar to the one pictured here with simple graphics; clean, bold lettering; and socially oriented messages.5 Better housing: the solution to infant mortality in the slums, one of a series of posters promoting health through new forms of housing, 1930s. The idea for this publicly funded program to support unemployed artists began in New York City as an initiative by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia; in 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal took over the program and expanded it across the United States. The New York poster program was administered by Richard Floethe, an artist who had trained at the influential Bauhaus School in Weimar, Germany. He illustrated many popular children's books before and after his work in the program. The artist who designed the poster was Anthony Velonis, a master printmaker who helped elevate the process of silk screening to an art form he called serigraphy.6 Velonis eventually cofounded a printing firm that would produce work for many famous artists in the decades after World War II. The poster program operated by accepting requests from public and nonprofit agencies for a poster on a specific topic.7 Floethe would post the topic request along with some parameters for the project, and individual artists on staff in the department would submit designs. A winning design was then produced for the client.8 This poster was produced for the New York City Housing Authority, which may have intended to use it to promote its plans for slum clearance and public housing construction. It was a unique time in the history of health and housing; an early phase of the New Deal had produced about 35 000 units of public housing, many modeled on European models of new architecture, and Congress was about to pass the 1937 Wagner-Steagall Act, which would dramatically expand the program to eventually produce almost 1.2 million units.9,10 The new housing development in the poster reflects the values of modern architects who believed that the incorporation of strong design elements would achieve important social and health goals.11,12 These modernist ideals would dominate public housing architecture for decades despite a growing disillusionment with the social effects of these designs that began in the 1950s.13 Some of the health assumptions that underlie the poster, including the superblock as a preferred way to provide access to open space and reduce traffic conflicts, would not be totally challenged until the growth of the built environment and health movement in the 1990s.14 By the beginning of the 2000s, a new consensus as to what constituted a healthy neighborhood—one that features fine-grained development, mixed uses, street connectivity, and other features that promote walking, healthy eating, and social capital—would emerge.15,16

Use of plane jacks to eliminate tilts over and above allowable values for block buildings

Experience acquired with elimination of tilts exceeding regulated values for a nine-story tenement building with an annex by leveling them with two independent jacking systems is cited.

Andrássy út 96.: egy másik Herzl Tivadar háza. A Herzl-Hernádi – Szász-Koburg – Gothai hercegi – ideiglenes köztársasági elnöki palota

Abstract Two centrally symmetrical squares, Octogon and Rondeau divide into three sections the representative avenue of Budapest, Andrassy ut, lined mostly with neo-renaissance buildings. The two s...

In the Centrifuge of History

In the Centrifuge of History Ravi Vasudevan (bio) This article uses the cinemas of South Asia to outline an argument for how to think of film history outside the familiar paradigms of national cinemas, and of global cinemas that take Hollywood as their main reference point. At the outset, I will outline a certain conundrum that defines the trajectory of Film Studies and history in this part of the world. As part of a broader postcolonial agenda, the emergence of an academic field for Film Studies in India was caught up with understanding the complexity of aesthetic and political challenges faced by Indian filmmakers under colonialism. This involved exploring how traditions of iconography and representation, of performance and audience cultures came together with new technologies of mechanical reproduction and new capacities to generate audiences.1 Subsequently, art historical and visual studies and anthropological research have demonstrated the wide range of interrelated transformations taking place in the aesthetic sphere under colonialism, challenging hermetic approaches to film history.2 Along with the new skills associated with the camera, it was recognized that a host of others, in visual figuration, melodic [End Page 135] articulation, set design, and so on, arose from a complex matrix of traditions that left their imprint on a range of media, from radio and gramophone to popular print culture and cinema. It is now possible to see these currents of research mapping a distinctly centrifugal logic for the field: history is intelligible as distributed into various elements, which in turn, implies several histories; this means that an understanding of the object, cinema, can only emerge from its dispersal. This poses a further question: If the object can only be adequately accessed through a web of diverse practices, then why should it be worthy of singular attention? What is the rationale for film history as opposed to, say, the history of art, popular visual, narrative, and performance cultures under regimes of mechanical production, reproduction, and extended circulation? Even if we keep our sight lines focused on the cinema, we increasingly discern a powerfully decentered logic of practices. In this short essay, I will focus on how the cinema in the subcontinent was defined by, among other features, differences in the technologies and reception contexts through which film circulated, featuring the apparently obsolete alongside the novel. If the temporality of the cinematic institution and apparatus comes under review in such a centrifugal history, I will also consider how cinema as a form and institutional matrix becomes dispersed in space, as constituent elements in its makeup are distributed in a wide territorial network. I will conclude by coming back to my opening question: What is the status and value of a film history as opposed to a more general and dispersed field of exploration? "Microcinema" and Heterogeneous Time. Researching the history of that early form of film projector, the bioscope, and its afterlives in the subcontinent, Sudhir Mahadevan argues for the "obviation of obsolescence."3 His research not only maps early cinema practices but also proposes a specific angle, the small-scale technology of the early projector, and the wider phenomenon of the traveling cinema, as ways of navigating cinema history. In Mahadevan's work, the bioscopewallah is not something residual, a leftover curiosity, or marker of cinematic cultures in "backward" or "developing" cultures. He also provides a way of thinking about cinema, exhibition, and viewership through a specific dynamic. At one level his work involves altering focus to capture cinema at the interstices of laws, institutions, and settled formats, thereby generating a perspective for the field that shifts from the formal institutions of cinema—the licensed, permanent cinema theater subject to various types of regulation—to informal, small-scale gatherings at street corners and inside tenement buildings. Add to this the persistence of traveling cinemas that cater to small-town and rural markets, and he presents us with more than simply a minority practice. Furthermore, it might be argued that the bioscope carries genealogical features that relate it to a host of practices that weave into the contemporary film/media sphere. Mahadevan's work on this early technology showcases a particular [End Page 136] coordination of the elements which compose...

Excavations at Low Fisher Gate, Doncaster, South Yorkshire

The excavations at Low Fisher Gate, Doncaster, South Yorkshire, produced a sequence of urban deposits dating from the late eleventh/twelfth to the eighteenth century. These included riverside structures of early thirteenth-century date, made in part from reused boat timbers, together with a series of superimposed tenement buildings of thirteenth- to sixteenth-century date and some post-medieval features. The site seems to have had mixed domestic and industrial functions throughout its history.