Gas House District Tenements, 1945
As the number of poor residents of the city increased due to immigration, the
squalid living conditions of the Lower East Side spread northward. In the 1850s
and 1860s, large concentrations of the poor and working class moved above 14th
Street, and much of the area east of Third Avenue became a tenement neighborhood.
In the period following the Second World War, many of these tenement areas were
demolished as part of urban renewal projects and replaced with large apartment
towers to provide housing for the lower and middle classes.
