Prior to the tenement laws, most attempts at housing reform were undertaken by
private individuals or organizations. The sequence of Tenement House Acts serves as an example of the
Progressive belief that cleaner cities made better citizens.
Jacob Riis, in his ground-breaking,
muckraking journalistic expose of 1890,
How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York attributes the reform movement to the fear of contagious disease emanating from the
ghettos, especially following an outbreak of
smallpox, far more contagious than the
cholera and
tuberculosis that had long been present on the
Lower East Side of New York, the hub of poor
immigrant life. He views the laws and the progressive reform movement that motivated them as a confluence of the cynically-minded with the civic-minded, eventually working towards the benefit of the burgeoning city's labor force. The reform movement culminated in a prominent Tenement-House Exhibit of 1899 held in the old Fifth Avenue
Sherry's, a
Gilded Age center of elegant society. The comprehensive exhibit, marshaled by
Lawrence Veiller, covered a wide range of urban concerns including
bathhouses and
parks, pushing reform for the first time far beyond mere building design into the broader concerns of
urban planning. The exhibit was followed by a two-volume report to the New York State and Texas Tenement House Commission, leading directly to the writing of the 1901 New Law. ==Architectural developments==