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 | | The 1901 Tenement House Act
Part Six: Cleaning Up The Toilets
by Andrew Dolkart
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The most important and by far the most controversial change required by the 1901 law was the removal of all school sinks and privy vaults from tenement yards. The law required that:
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| In all now existing tenement houses, all school sinks, privy vaults or other similar receptacles used to receive fecal matter, urine or sewage, shall before January first, nineteen hundred and three, be completely removed...[and] replaced by individual water-closets of durable non-absorbent material, properly sewer connected.
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If necessary, the law permitted water-closets in the yard, so long as they had flush tanks and were protected against frost (an impractical alternative in New York with its harsh winters). Whether inside or outside, one water-closet was to be provided for every two families and each closet was to be placed in a separate compartment. This section of the law was to go into effect on January 1, 1903. The provision that water closets be constructed inside the tenements required substantial structural changes to old buildings since water and sewage lines would have to be constructed and the space required for the water closets would have to be taken from the apartments.
Most of the owners did not undertake the changes required for toilet facilities and in 1903 the Tenement House Department brought a legal action against Katie Moeschen, owner of a tenement at 332 East 39th Street, for failure to comply with the requirements of The 1901 Act. The United Real Estate Owners' Association made this a test case to determine the legality of this provision of the law. An agreement was reached between the Owners' Association and the city's Corporation Council stipulating that the case would be framed in such a way that a final decision would apply to all buildings in the city with outdoor toilets. It was also agreed that no matter what the decision of the Municipal Court, the case would be automatically appealed.
A jury trial (Tenement House Department of City of New York v. Moeschen) was held at the Municipal Court. The defendant's lawyer asserted, among other things, that the tenement house act was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution because it deprived an individual of property; that it imposed an unreasonable, arbitrary, improper, and unfair requirement on owners without due process of law or adequate compensation and was, therefore, an illegal taking of private property not for public use; and that the school sinks were legal since they had been installed prior to 1890 in response to an order from the Board of Health.
The jury at the Municipal Court held for the city and the case was appealed. All decisions in the state courts were unanimous in upholding the tenement law. Finally, the case was appealed to the United States Supreme Court which, in 1906, upheld the rulings of the New York State courts.
Some buildings did not remove their outdoor toilets for many years, perhaps because owners chose to weatherproof their backyard toilets, or because they were able to get away with simply ignoring the law. A resident of a tenement at 90 Orchard Street reported that as late as 1918 she was using a backyard toilet. At 97 Orchard Street, two water closets and an adjoining fireproof shaft of steel and terra cotta were constructed on each floor in 1905, in space that had previously been part of the inner bedrooms of the apartments along the south side of the building.
The toilet rooms and shaft occupied a substantial part of the old bedrooms of 97 Orchard Street and similar buildings, making these inner rooms uninhabitable. To alleviate this problem, but keep a three-room arrangement in each apartment, the partitions in all of the south apartments at 97 Orchard Street were rearranged. Each of the new inner bedrooms was provided with a window onto the new shaft.
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6: The Toilets