New York’s
Gentrifying
New Law
Tenement

Independent Research Project
2017–2020

Advised by Christine Boyer, Summer 2019

When discussions of gentrification touch upon architecture, it is usually construed as image or as exchange-value (i.e., as real estate). This research project instead seeks to understand architecture’s participation—and agency—in processes of residential gentrification by peeling back the façade to confront the plan and its implications for how residents might live.

The project begins from the premise that renovations of a single, common type of apartment building in New York City might offer an architectural microcosm of residential gentrification. New Law buildings—the four- to six-story apartment buildings legislated into existence by the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901—form the basic residential fabric of many of New York City’s currently gentrifying neighborhoods. Built originally to accommodate immigrant families’ need for flexible sleeping arrangements while conforming to petit-bourgeois standards of propriety, these buildings’ long-hallwayed and highly divided apartments maximized flexibility by minimizing the openness of their plans. These typical arrangements have invited equally typical developer renovations, often attempting to create open plans with interiorized living rooms.

These are fundamental changes, and they implicitly privilege cohabiting singles over families. The result may well be a growing, undetected transformation of the city’s housing stock, on a scale that would far exceed new construction. To be sure, these changes are shaped by neighborhood change, but could they also shape neighborhood change? Examining the gut renovation of New Law buildings provides a window into gentrification’s architectural inscription and architecture’s reciprocal social agency.

The project involved assembling an archive of apartment plans from period pamphlets, recent DOB filings, and apartment listings on StreetEasy, the New-York-only real estate website operated by Zillow. I then visited, measured, and drew plans of apartments “as inhabited”—by myself, friends, and total strangers—in order to record the changing patterns of use that have followed from typical renovations. In parallel, I developed a quantitative approach to identifying typical New Law building forms in NYC DOB data, in order to map their approximate range.