The Tenement House Problem. Including the Report of the New York State Tenement House Commission of 1900 by various writers

First edition. 2 vols. 8vo. Original green cloth. The foundational document of American housing reform. Lawrence Veiller (1872–1959), working through the Charity Organization Society, mounted a Tenement House Exhibition in 1900 - over a thousand photographs, maps, charts and a vast cardboard model of a Lower East Side block, seen by ten thousand visitors - which secured the support of Governor Theodore Roosevelt and led to the creation of a state Tenement House Commission with Robert W. de Forest (1848–1931) as chairman and Veiller as secretary. Veiller did most of the work; the resulting investigation ran to nearly a thousand pages and produced the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901, which set standards for ventilation, sanitation, fire safety and occupancy limits in multi-family dwellings and became the model for comparable legislation across the country. The work sits directly alongside Riis's How the Other Half Lives as a primary source for Progressive Era social conditions, and is the more substantial of the two documentarily, though far less often seen in commerce as a set. Bookplate and ink name to front endpapers, minor toning to text-blocks;minor rubbing to extremities. …