Tenement

“ There are flowers before the house and honeysuckles around the door, and everything, even to the garden flags, is white-washed. There are roses under the window—how fragrant! And yet the owner of that little tenement has a hand horny with labor, and not a day passes, summer or winter, but that he is up before dawn, toiling for his richer neighbor. How does he live? Would you know what cottage life is? ”

“ Here we dwell in a tent, there we shall dwell in a building. Here in a house made with hands, a corporeal frame derived from parents by material transmission and intervention; there we shall dwell in a building of which God is the maker. Here we dwell in a crumbling clay tenement, which rains dissolve, which lightning strikes, and winds overthrow, and which finally lies on the ground a heap of tumbled ruin. ”

“ Custom 27. That the lord of the said manor, for the time being, cannot cut down more trees than one, from any one customary tenement in the life-time of any customary tenant thereof, for the repairs aforesaid, nor can he take the loppings, toppings, boughs, or bark of such trees so by him cut down, nor can he carry the same away. ”

“ My lord has heard from the steward that you are an honest tenant, and has directed that any alteration you may require in your tenement shall be attended to, and that the field which lies at the back of your dwelling be added to it without additional rent ”

“ If a tenant has a child, not his heir, an idiot or impotent, and die without disposition of his tenement, the same child shall be sustained out of the said tenement by direction of the steward or his deputy and 4 men sworn in court. ”

“ The agent of the Christian people who built that tenement will tell you that Italians are good tenants, while the owner of the alley will oppose every order to put his property in repair with the claim that they are the worst of a bad lot. Both are right, from their different stand-points. It is the stand-point that makes the difference--and the tenant. ”

“ For the tenement is a great working hive in which nothing has value unless exchangeable for gold. Rose's animal spirits, which long hours and low wages had no power to curb, were exchangeable only for wrath in the tenement. Her noisy feet on the stairs when she came home woke up all the tenants, and made them swear at the loss of the precious moments of sleep which were their reserve capital. ”

“ The tenement family, thrust into the street and stripped of their goods for non-payment of rent, find in ruin an old acquaintance. They take a certain pleasure in the noise and confusion which their uproarious bewailing and beratings create throughout the neighbourhood. They enjoy the passers-by [5] pausing to pity them, a ragged and squalid group, homeless on the curb. They have been ruined many times, will be ruined many times. ”

“ The shop is their house and home. It was once the hall of the tenement; but to save space, enough has been walled in to make room for their bench and bed; the tenants go through the next house. No matter if they are cramped; by and by they will have room. By and by comes the spring, and with it the steamer. Does not the green branch speak of spring and of hope? The policeman on the beat hears their hammers beat a joyous tattoo past midnight, far into Christmas morning. Who shall say its message has not reached even them in their slum? ”

“ No tenant is to stop any common way nor turn aside a beck. Penalty 6s. 8d.
For the tenants.
1. Any tenant, lawfully seised of a messuage or tenement in fee to him and his heirs according to the custom of the manor, might and may lawfully give or sell the same by writing, and that the steward or his deputy ought to be made privy to it at or before next court under penalty of 20s.
The tenant may without the privity of the steward give his tenement in writing by his last will to which of his sons he thinks best, or any other person. ”

“ If any customary tenant die seized of a customary tenement, having no son but a daughter, or daughters, then the eldest daughter being preferred in marriage shall have the tenement as his next heir, and she shall pay to her younger sister, if she have but one sister, 20 years ancient rent, as is answered to her Majesty ”

“ Tēneb′rio, a genus of beetles, including the meal-worm; Tenebros′ity, darkness. [L. tenebrosus—tenebræ, darkness.]
Tenement, ten′e-ment, n. anything held, or that may be held, by a tenant: a dwelling or habitation, or part of it, used by one family: one of a set of apartments in one building, each occupied by a separate family.—adjs. Tenement′al; Tenement′ary.
Tenendum, tē-nen′dum, n. that clause in a deed wherein the tenure of the land is defined and limited. [L., neut. of tenendus, ger. of tenēre, to hold.] ”

“ Ye see, being an inferior tenement or laigh house, we grant ourselves to be burdened wi' the tillicide, that is, that we are obligated to receive the natural water-drap of the superior tenement, sae far as the same fa's frae the heavens, or the roof of our neighbour's house, and from thence by the gutters or eaves upon our laigh tenement. ”

“ Men will not fall into a habit of speaking of 120 arable acres or thereabouts as the tenement of one family or of one householder, unless as a matter of fact the tenement of one family or of one householder has in a preponderant number of cases some such content as this. ”

“ For though the people were only tenants at will in these crazy tenements, yet, through the goodness of the same lord, they were assured that he never turned them out of these habitations before he had on his part provided for them a better, so that there was not such a landlord in the world, and though their present dwelling was but frail, being only slightly run up to serve the occasion, yet they might hold their future possession by a most certain tenure, the word of the lord himself. ”

“ First, with regard to their several sorts or kinds, things real are usually said to consist in lands, tenements, or hereditaments. Land comprehends all things of a permanent, substantial nature; being a word of a very extensive signification, as will presently appear more at large. Tenement is a word of still greater extent ”

“ She was put out by the landlord soon after the accident, as a hopeless tenant, and I thought that she had gone to the almshouse, when by chance I came upon her living quite happily in a tenement on the next block. "Living" is hardly the word ”

“ Lands we must perforce exclude because you have lost no lands. Tenements may be alluded to, however, with absolute fairness because the body is the tenement of the soul. Of hereditaments I am not sure. ”

“ Any species of permanent property that may be held, so as to create a tenancy, as lands, houses, rents, commons, an office, an advowson, a franchise, a right of common, a peerage, and the like; — called also free or frank tenements.
The thing held is a tenement, the possessor of it a "tenant," and the manner of possession is called "tenure."
Blackstone.
3. A dwelling house; a building for a habitation; also, an apartment, or suite of rooms, in a building, used by one family; often, a house erected to be rented. ”

“ Families live in tenements, they live in flats, they live on floors; they are piled layer upon layer in the great tenement houses of our crowded districts, and not only are they piled layer upon layer, but they are associated room by room, so that there is in every room, sometimes, in our congested districts, a separate family. ”

“ More than a working majority of our voters now register from the tenements. I counted the other day the little ones, up to ten years or so, in a Bayard Street tenement that for a yard has a triangular space in the centre with sides fourteen or fifteen feet long, just room enough for a row of ill-smelling closets at the base of the triangle and a hydrant at the apex. ”

“ So one gets a tumble-down tenement, and the rest the money that might make it habitable. Moreover, this continued to the next generation ends in the disappearance of the family from its paternal acres. ”

“ Sometimes, in order to quicken the pilgrim in his preparation, the lord would break down the tenement by slow degrees; sometimes he would let it tumble by its own natural decay; for as it was only built to last a certain term, it would often grow so uncomfortable by increasing dilapidations [Pg 426] even before the ordinary lease was out, that the lodging was hardly worth keeping, though the tenant could seldom be persuaded to think so, but finally clung to it to the last. First the thatch on the top of the tenement changed color, then it fell off and left the roof bare ”

“ There is light and air in abundance, steam heat in winter in the latest ones, fireproof stairs, and deadened partitions to help on the privacy that is at once the most needed and hardest to get in a tenement. The houses do not look like barracks. Any one who has ever seen a row of factory tenements that were just houses, not homes, will understand how much that means. ”

“ If tenement-house life leads to immorality and vice, certainly the fifty-eight lodging-houses in the Eleventh Precinct, furnishing 1,243,200 lodgings in one year,370 must have the same or a worse tendency. ”

“ However, my first visits to the tenement-house districts in question made me feel that, whatever the theories might be, as a matter of practical common sense I could not conscientiously vote for the continuance of the conditions which I saw. These conditions rendered it impossible for the families of the tenement-house workers to live so that the children might grow up fitted for the exacting duties of American citizenship. ”

“ He says we ain't got any idea how folks lives in them tenement houses, hundreds of 'em in one house, and whole families in a room; and it burns in his heart to help 'em like them Fathers, as he calls 'em, that gives their lives to it. ”

“ There must, to follow out the figure of the tenement house, be lights along the corridors, there must be police patrolling the openings, there must be inspection wherever it is known that men may be deceived with regard to the contents of the premises. ”

“ Justices of the Peace who have the power to give restitution of possession to tenants of any freehold estate of their lands or tenements which have been forcibly entered and withheld, shall have like power for tenants for term of years, tenants by copy of court roll, guardians by knight service, tenant by elegit statute merchant and staple of lands or tenements. ”

“ One thing she had not done so thoroughly as she might: and that was, improving the dwellings of the labourers. Repairs she had made from time to time; but the places were really beyond repair. Each tenement wanted one of two things: to be thoroughly renewed and to have an additional sleeping-room added ”

“ Crazy old buildings, crowded rear tenements in filthy yards, dark, damp basements, leaking garrets, shops, outhouses, and stables [3] converted into dwellings, though scarcely fit to shelter brutes, are habitations of thousands of our fellow-beings in this wealthy, Christian city. ”

“ The encroachment of business and the Italian below, and the swelling of the population above, have been the chief agents in working out his second emancipation, a very real one, for with his cutting loose from the old tenements there has come a distinct and gratifying improvement in the tenant, that argues louder than theories or speeches the influence of vile surroundings in debasing the man. ”

“ Skilled and well-paid labor puts its stamp on a tenement even in spite of the open door, and usually soon supplies the missing bell. Gas-houses, slaughter-houses and the docks, that attract the roughest crowds and support the vilest saloons, invariably form slum-centres. ”

“ For when the tenant shall make homage to his lord, he shall be ungirt, and his head uncovered, and his lord shall sit, and the tenant shall kneel before him on both his knees, and hold his hands jointly together between the hands of his lord, and shall say thus: I become your man (Jeo deveign vostre home) from this day forward of life and limbe, and of earthly worship and unto you shall be true and faithfuU, and beare to you faith for the tenements that I claime to hold of you, saving the faith that I owe unto our soveraigne lord the king ”

“ As a rule people used land as holdings, and those were rigidly classified as villein or free tenements. The interesting point to be noticed is that, without any formal break, leasing land for life and for term of years is seen to be rapidly spreading from the end of the 13th century, and numberless small tenancies are created in the 14th century which break up the disposition of the holdings. ”

“ Freeholders of tenements on manors shall have sufficient ingress and egress from their tenements to the common pasture and as much pasture as suffices for their tenements.
"Grain shall not be taken under the pretense of borrowing or the promise of after-payment without the permission of the owner."
"A parent or other who forcefully leads away and withholds, or marries off, an heir who is a minor (under 14) , shall yield the value of the marriage and be imprisoned until he has satisfied the king for the trespass. ”

“ The day is at hand when the greatest of all evils that now curse life in the tenements--the dearth of water in the hot summer days--will also have been remedied, and a long step taken toward the moral and physical redemption of their tenants. ”

“ Yes, ours is the greatest of all times. Since I started putting these pages in shape for the printer, the Child Labor Committee and the Tuberculosis Committee (p. 397) have been formed to put up bars against the slum where it roamed unrestrained; the Tenement House Department has been organized and got under way, and the knell of the double-decker and the twenty-five-foot lot has been sounded. Two hundred tenements are going up to-day under the new law, that are in all respects model buildings, as good as the City and Suburban Home Company's houses, though built for revenue only. ”