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From the Hartford (Ky.) Herald, June 14, 1916


THE POPULATION OF MANHATTAN
More Dense Than Anywhere Else in the World
Brooklyn Rates as Second
In Tenement Districts the Population in 1915 was 724 Persons Per Acre
People Live Close Together

Tenement congestion in Brooklyn is rapidly approaching in density that of Manhattan, which leads the world. Statistics compiled for the Tenement House Committee of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities show that the average density of tenements erected in Brooklyn in 1915, based on data for each tenement actually completed that year and counting 4.6 persons to a family, was 724 persons an acre. The maximum density was over 1,600 an acre. This refers to land actually used for new tenements, excluding streets. Any tenement house locality would show lower figures than these because no section is built up solidly with new tenement houses.

The greater density of population of Glasgow is 350 persons an acre; in London, 365; in Paris, 424, and in Prague, 485. These are the densities of the most congested spots in European cities.

A population of approximately 160,000 was housed in the new tenements erected in Brooklyn from 1912 to 1915. Persons accommodated in the 1912 tenements were housed at an average density of 643 persons an acre, in the 1913 tenements 550 an acre, in the 1914 tenements 724 an acre. The average land congestion during the short space of these four years increase 12½ per cent.

Nowhere in the world, except in Manhattan and The Bronx, is land utilized as intensely as in Brooklyn. Tenements are now being erected in practically all parts of Brooklyn.

People living in the eight, nine, ten and twelve-story apartments of Manhattan are not housed any more densely than the people living in the four-story tenements of Brooklyn.

In fact one-fourth of the residents of the tall fireproof elevator apartments of Manhattan are not housed any more compactly than the inhabitants of the three-story, six-family tenements in the outskirts of Brooklyn.

In Manhattan the six-story tenement has a higher range of density than the most populated skyscraper apartment on either West End avenue, Riverside Drive or Broadway. It is the most congested house in Manhattan, and yet it is not so congested as the six-story tenement in Brooklyn. In Manhattan only one-third of the apartments in the tenements of this height have a density exceeding 230 families a net acre. In Brooklyn five-sixths of the apartments exceed this density.

The fact is due to the prevalence of elevator apartments in Manhattan. The six-story elevator house in Manhattan has a density varying between 160 and 185 families per net acre, a density no greater than that of the four-story, twenty-family house of East New York. The six-story non-elevator house in Manhattan has as a rule a density equal to,, and in some instances exceeding, the density of the same house in Williamsburg, the section containing most of the new six-story tenements in Brooklyn. -- [American Contractor.]

 

 

 

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