Where two families had lived ten moved in.” Presently it was carried up another story, and another.
To meet the need for quick, cheap housing, Riis reported that the properties “fell into the hands of real estate agents and boarding house keepers… and in the old garden where the stolid Dutch burgher grew his tulips or early cabbages, a rear house was built, generally of wood, two stories high at first. Buildings that once housed comfortable dwellings were cut up and added onto to accommodate the newly arrived immigrants who swelled the city’s population, eventually quadrupling it from 125,000 in 1820 to just under one million by 1870.
The Municipal Library held a copy of Riis’ book, published in 1890, which noted in chilling detail and sickening photos the conditions of Manhattan’s tenement houses.
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