Living Hell: New York’s Tenements were Nightmares in the Early 1900s

Outhouses in the Backyard

Prior to New York City’s requirement that each tenement must have indoor toilets, residents of the overcrowded buildings had to use outhouses in the backyards. The outhouses, like the ones pictured here, were packed into an already tight backyard space. Tenement dwellers might have found four outhouses for every 100 people. They had to endure long lines, little privacy, and weren’t cleaned on a regular basis.

This image shows the filth a tenement dweller would have encountered in their attempts to relieve themselves. In desperate cases or in particularly cold or icy conditions, residents would skip the outhouses altogether and use a chamber pot. While chamber pots could be emptied into the outhouses as they filled up, some residents just dumped the chamber pots into the yard or into the air shaft, adding to the already unsanitary conditions of the area.