<em>Tenements </em>or slum<em> </em>was the name given to low cost family dwellings in the city in the late 1800s.
Many people in middle and upper class society were unaware of the alarming conditions in the slums among poor immigrants.After the Civil War,the country transformed into an industrial superpower and became largely urban.A wave of unskilled Southern European,Eastern European,Asian and Jewish immigrants came to settle in the promised land of the United States.
By 1900,more than 80000 tenements were constructed in the New York city.Those tenements housed a population of 2.3 million people,a full two thirds of city's total population of around 3.4 million.
Tenements were first built to house the waves of immigrants that arrived in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s,and they represented the primary form of urban working class housing until the New Deal.A typical tenement was from five to six stories high,with four apartments on each floor.
