Excerpt from Tenement House Reform in New York, 1834-1900: Prepared for the Tenement House Commission of 1900 The grave moral evils resulting from the indiscriminate mingling of the sexes in the same room are dwelt upon, as well as the fact that the causes of uncleanliness, poverty and sickness were not so much to be found in the "innate depravity" of the people as in the environment in which they were compelled to live. He urged that the City Legislature should prohibit the use of cellars as dwellings, and that the owner or lessee of every tenement house should be required to keep the outdoor and indoor premises free and clean from everything likely to prove injurious to health, and that an immediate stop should be put to the practice of crowding so many human beings in such limited spaces, arguing that if there were any propriety in the law requiring ocean vessels to carry only a certain number of people, there was equal propriety in requiring that only a certain number of persons should occupy houses of this kind; and that, if a law regulating the construction of buildings in reference to fire was justifiable, one respecting the protection of the inmates from the influences of badly arranged houses and apartments should be enacted. In 1846 the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, a charitable society organized in 1843, took up the question of the housing of the poor people of the city, maintaining that bad housing was the main cause of most of the poverty and sickness that existed. In 1853 they appointed a special committee "to inquire into the sanitary condition of the laboring classes, and the practicability of devising measures for the comfort and healthfulness of their habitations." This Committee rendered a report of thirty-two printed pages in the fall of 1853, which was published in the annual report of the Association for that year. The state of affairs disclosed by their investigations was one which called for prompt and effective remedies, and its effect on the public mind should have been great, for it brought to light the gravest social evils. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Originally published in 1991, Reform in New York City provides an interpretive synthesis of urban progressivism and provides a comprehensive historical look at progressivism in New York City. The book argues that urban reform still poses a major historiographical challenge to historians working today and that there is limited analysis of the social and political action that characterised turn of the century New York. The book addresses the conceptual approaches, interpretive differences, and thematic emphasis of the urban reform agenda.

Authored by prominent scholars, the twelve essays in this volume use the historical perspective to explore American urban housing policy as it unfolded from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. Focusing on the enduring quest of policy makers to restore urban community, the essays examine such topics as the war against the slums, planned suburbs for workers, the rise of government-aided and built housing during the Great Depression, the impact of post–World War II renewal policies, and the retreat from public housing in the Nixon, Carter, and Reagan years.