Tenements and Row Houses - cont.
As the number of poor and working class in New York increased, the squalor of the Lower East Side spread northward, overtaking these neighborhoods below 14th in the 1850s. In the 1860s, large concentrations of the poor moved above 14th Street, and the area east of Third Avenue became a tenement neighborhood known as the Gashouse District because of the large gas tanks around 21st Street emitting a foul smell that pervaded the area.
The nineteenth century tenements district of the East 20s and 30s was described in an 1866 report on the sanitary conditions of New York:
That portion of the district lying east of Second Avenue, with the exception of both sides of 30th Street, is inhabited almost exclusively by the laboring class, and as a rule by the lowest grade of that class. The inhabitants, with the exception mentioned, are almost entirely Irish and of Irish descent.The area east of Second Avenue contained buildings rated as third-class tenements, which were described as:
Houses inhabited by the poorest, most filthy, wretched, and degraded class, in bad state of repair, very filthy within, and usually with filthy pestilential surroundings
