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COURT OF THE FIRST
MODEL TENEMENTS IN NEW YORK CITY Court of the First
Model Tenement, variant image At the time of the 1879 Tenement House Act, which first regulated the city's low-income housing, Mayor Edward Cooper invited a group of prominent businessmen to form the Improved Dwelling Association. The Association invested $300,000 in the first model tenement and by law was limited to a five percent return on its investment. Constructed in 1882, the tenement was laid out along the perimeter of First and Second Avenues and 71st and 72nd Streets, with an open courtyard in the center, admitting light and air. Fifty years later, Abbott documented this space as a communal laundry line: ropes with pulleys led from apartments to five-story poles imbedded in concrete. Abbott made two exposures, with the laundry and poles forming different abstract configurations. She later recalled that winter day, the laundry frozen stiff and the children huddled together, too cold to move (McQuaid, 375). In the 1960s, the tenement was replaced with one of the Upper East Side's many full-block, white-brick apartment buildings. Return to North of 59th Street |
