For a billion $ he could have built a lovely ‘academical village’ with every kind of amenity and a wide variety of rooms for every preference. This is a tenement, a warehouse for living people, in the worst 1900 Lower East Side sense, minus some of the fire and sanitation risk. Suitable for vermin, not scholars.
See also Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 1890.
A citizens’ movement resulted in the organization of a Board of Health and the adoption of the “Tenement-House Act” of 1867, the first step toward remedial legislation. ... The dark bedroom fell under the ban first. In that year the Board ordered the cutting of more than forty-six thousand windows in interior rooms, chiefly for ventilation—for little or no light was to be had from the dark hallways. Air-shafts were unknown. The saw had a job all that summer; by early fall nearly all the orders had been carried out. Not without opposition; obstacles were thrown in the way of the officials on the one side by the owners of the tenements, who saw in every order to repair or clean up only an item of added expense to diminish their income from the rent; on the other side by the tenants themselves, who had sunk, after a generation of unavailing protest, to the level of their surroundings, and were at last content to remain there.