Whats so significant about the 1901 Tenement House Act?
It’s become sort of a mythical narrative. First, there’s this whole story of the heroic middle-to-upper-class reformists–people like Jacob Riis and Lawrence Veiller–seeing the impoverished Lower East Siders and launching a campaign to lift them up and bring them into the American fold. There’s still this myth that while you want to help people you also want to dehumanize them. There was this giant gap between the reformers and the people they were trying to reform. It would be silly to say the act wasn’t progress, but at the same time we’re able to criticize it.
