The first apartment building in the United States was constructed in 1839 in New York City, marking the beginning of a housing revolution that would eventually reshape global urban living. This structure, known as a tenement, was not merely a building but a breeding ground for social change, crime, and reform. It housed outlaws, juvenile delinquents, and organized crime, while its landlords, such as the infamous Daniel Murphy, exploited tenants through price gouging and neglect. Murphy, who claimed to have made four hundred thousand dollars from his alley and surrounding tenements, became blind in his old age, sharing the hardships of the wretched beings whose lot he had stubbornly refused to better. His story, recorded in How the Other Half Lives, illustrates the stark contrast between the wealth of slum landlords and the suffering of their tenants. The Board of Health eventually compelled him to repair and clean up the worst of the old buildings, but his protests revealed a deep distrust of builders and a belief that his tenants were not fit to live in a nice house. This early era of apartment living set the stage for decades of social struggle and reform, as campaigners like Upton Sinclair and Jacob Riis pushed for changes that would eventually lead to the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901.
Ancient High-Rises
Long before the modern apartment building, ancient civilizations were already experimenting with multi-story housing. In the 10th century, the Egyptian capital of Fustat housed many high-rise residential buildings, some seven stories tall that could reportedly accommodate hundreds of people. Al-Muqaddasi described them as resembling minarets, and stated that the majority of Fustat's population lived in these multi-story apartment buildings, each one housing more than 200 people. By the 11th century, Nasir Khusraw described some of these apartment buildings rising up to fourteen stories, with roof gardens on the top story complete with ox-drawn water wheels for irrigating them. In Yemen, the city of Shibam, known as the Manhattan of the desert, features mudbrick tower houses that rise 5 to 11 stories high, with each floor having one or two apartments. Some of them were over 30 meters high, thus being the tallest mudbrick apartment buildings in the world to this day. These ancient structures demonstrate that the concept of vertical living is not a modern invention but a response to population density and resource constraints that has existed for centuries.The Scottish Tenement
In Scotland, the term tenement lacks the pejorative connotations it carries elsewhere and refers simply to any block of flats sharing a common central staircase and lacking an elevator, particularly those constructed before 1919. Tenements were, and continue to be, inhabited by a wide range of social classes and income groups. In Glasgow, where Scotland's highest concentration of tenement dwellings can be found, the urban renewal projects of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s brought an end to the city's slums, which had primarily consisted of older tenements built in the early 19th century in which large extended families would live together in cramped conditions. They were replaced by high-rise blocks that, within a couple of decades, became notorious for crime and poverty. The Glasgow Corporation made many efforts to improve the situation, most successfully with the City Improvement Trust, which cleared the slums of the old town, replacing them with what they thought of as a traditional high street, which remains an imposing townscape. National government help was given following World War I when Housing Acts sought to provide homes fit for heroes. Garden suburb areas, based on English models, such as Knightswood, were set up. These proved too expensive, so a modern tenement, three stories high, slate roofed and built of reconstituted stone, was re-introduced and a slum clearance programme initiated to clear areas such as the Calton and the Garngad. After World War II, more ambitious plans, known as the Bruce Plan, were made for the complete evacuation of slums for modern mid-rise housing developments on the outskirts of the city. However, the central government refused to fund the plans, preferring instead to depopulate the city to a series of New Towns. Houses and Mansions: Domestic Architecture of Glasgow's South Side 2008-06-03 Again, economic considerations meant that many of the planned New Town amenities were never built in these areas. These housing estates, known as schemes, came therefore to be widely regarded as unsuccessful; many, such as Castlemilk, were just dormitories well away from the centre of the city with no amenities, such as shops and public houses deserts with windows, as Billy Connolly once put it. High-rise living too started off with bright ambition, the Moss Heights, built in the 1950s, are still desirable, but fell prey to later economic pressure. Many of the later tower blocks were poorly designed and cheaply built and their anonymity caused some social problems. The demolition of the tower blocks in order to build modern housing schemes has in some cases led to a re-interpretations of the tenement. In 1970, a team from Strathclyde University demonstrated that the old tenements had been basically sound, and could be given new life with replumbing providing modern kitchens and bathrooms. The Corporation acted on this principle for the first time in 1973 at the Old Swan Corner, Pollokshaws. Thereafter, Housing Action Areas were set up to renovate so-called slums. Later, privately owned tenements benefited from government help in stone cleaning, revealing a honey-coloured sandstone behind the presumed grey tenemental facades. The policy of tenement demolition is now considered to have been short-sighted, wasteful and largely unsuccessful. Many of Glasgow's worst tenements were refurbished into desirable accommodation in the 1970s and 1980s. The Glasgow Housing Association took ownership of the public housing stock from the city council on the 7th of March 2003, and has begun a 96 million clearance and demolition programme to clear and demolish many of the high-rise flats.