Essays on Tenement

Our university’s recent production of Kurt Weill’s Street Scene showcases a relatively straightforward performance of the opera by Kurt Weill, Langston Hughes and Elmer Rice. The drama of a group of neighbors along an ordinary New York tenement in the 1940s, Street Scene (as produced by the theatre department) seeks to illustrate the inherent drama and tension of ordinary American city life, and the universality of those conflicts to human history. Through the elements of performance and lighting, Street Scene elevates the domestic dramas of these New York characters into universal themes that resonate greatly with the ...

Catharine Beecher

Catherine Beecher was an educator who was years ahead of her time and discussed the importance of educating women. She was also keen on experimenting with food and believed strongly in making palate pleasing food (NWHM). She would converse with Fannie Farmer over her career as a culinary expert and would probably discuss that during her time, women did not have the same opportunities. She could also discuss with Fannie about the relevance of gender roles in the families and how they both remained unmarried but contributed significantly to food in America. With Fannie Rogarshevsky she would discuss the ...

Introduction

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the United States government involvement in housing for the poor became more pronounced, especially in the area of building code enforcement, which required buildings to meet certain standards for decent livability. These standards required landlords to make some modifications to their existing building blocks. The media that time brought considerable attention to the conditions of the slums in the New York City, which sparked the new attention for the improvement housing conditions in the country. Early tenement reform were models which tried to use architectural and management techniques which addressed the physical and ...

The plight of American workers, according to Jacob Riis writing, between 19th century and 20th centuries can be associated with a number of factors among them, the surge of immigrants in America. His writing focuses on the difference between the upper and the middle-class people living in the slums of New York City. The American economy took a different direction as a result of the change from an agricultural to industrial urban nation. Riis tries to bring out the horrible working conditions of American workers living in the tenements and calls for government intervention. Urbanization of the American people and the great ...

Problems

The first problem that came with the rapid growth of American cities in the late nineteenth century was the spread of infectious diseases. During this period, there was immigration of people from rural areas to urban centers. This migration enhanced rapid spread of many infectious diseases since it allowed diseases that were initially localized to spread more quickly. Diseases such as cholera, smallpox, yellow fever, typhoid, tuberculosis, malaria among others became very common in most of the American cities (Jindrich 147). For instance, about two percent of the newborns in the New York City did not celebrate their first ...

- 2.2: Advice - (a). What it should do about the Timms Lease; While chase was making the purchase contract with the smiths, it was not informed of the additional two years of Timm’s lease. Chase has the mandate to sue Timm and prevent him from interfering with the property since they already owned the land, and while performing due diligence, the land had no complications and the process was clear. The reason the company performed due diligence was to avoid situations such as this. Timm being in an unwritten agreement is in no way able to ...

Riis’s idea of housing reforms as a means of producing a moral environmentalist strategy to the poor living in urban is ideal. This could respond to the issue of overcrowding that was the cause of immoral activities. The first tenement New York was a house of evil and their owners were not shocked by the idea of housing a promiscuous crowd. For instance, one room housed five families and twenty persons of both sexes (Riis 17). There was an increased of young criminals who were victims of a decrease in housing facilities and harmful environment. Similarly, overcrowded lodgings and houses brought up the ...

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane explores a theme of naturalism in American literature. Crane uses the third person narrative to tell a story of Johnson family during the startup of industrialization at the end of 19th century. Protagonist Maggy is a small ragged girl, who lives in a grim tenement with her parents, her younger brother Jimmy and a toddler Tommy. She usually looks after Tommy before he dies. “The building quivered and creaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels” (Crane II). She is usually quiet and vulnerable: “Her features were haggard from weeping, and her ...

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams has always been known as an experimenter, an innovator, a revolutionary figure in American poetry. Yet in comparison to artists of his own time who sought a new environment for creativity as expatriates in Europe, Williams lived a remarkably conventional life. A doctor for more than forty years serving the New Jersey town of Rutherford, he relied on his patients, the America around him, and his own ebullient imagination to create a distinctively American verse. Often domestic in focus and "remarkable for its empathy, sympathy, its muscular and emotional identification with its subjects," Williams's poetry is also characteristically honest: "There ...

Jacob Riis – How the Other Half Lives (Opinion and Analysis) In How the Other Half Lives, author Jacob Riis has provided pictures of his main subject – people living in squalor within the area New York City. The photos have served as supplementary materials for all of his readers that actually took interest in the way urban conditions look like during the period. The descriptions Riis has given in discussing details of “the other half” made his written claims more convincing. The visual quality provided by his photos made his accounts more credible (Riis 19). ...

Introduction

Jane Ziegelman grew up in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She currently lives with her husband and two kids at Brooklyn Heights. She studied History in college and worked in publishing before she enrolled in NYU for Urban Anthropology’s graduate program. She founded and directed Kids Cook! which is a cooking program for kids. She is also the director of Tenement Museum's culinary center and the co-author of Foie Gras: A Passion.

97 Orchard was published on October 2, 2001. Ziegelman’s inspiration for the book was the tenements itself . When she was still studying at NYU, she ...

Abstract Shelter is one of the basic human necessities. Provision of decent-quality and affordable housing is one challenge that various authorities have been faced with, and Sheffield is not left behind. Though she has surpassed her average annual housing needs, Sheffield is still struggling to mitigate housing problems. This research project reviews the use of Geographic Information System (GIS) in Sheffield’s housing and how education level affects the adoption of GIS in affordable housing initiatives. In order to achieve this objective, the current state of Sheffield’s housing is exhaustively considered. Using the boundary data from EDINA ...