If the level of architecture was low in the country, it touched the bottom of the abyss in the city. As early as 1835 the multiple-family tenement had been introduced in New York as a means of producing congestion, raising the ground-rents, and satisfying in the worst possible way the need of the new immigrants for housing. The conditions of life in these tenements were infinitely lower than they had been in the most primitive farmhouse of the colonial period; their lack of light, lack of water, lack of sanitary facilities, and lack of privacy, created an admirable milieu for the propagation of vice and disease, and their existence in a period which was boasting loudly of the advance of science and industrialism shows, to say the least, how the myths which inspired the age stood between the eye and reality, and obscured the actual state of the modern industrial community. To the disgrace of the architectural profession in America, the worst features of tenement-house construction were standardized in the so-called dumb-bell tenement which won the first prize in the model tenement-house competition of 1879; and the tenements which were designed after this pattern in the succeeding years combined a maximum lack of privacy with a minimum of light and air. The gridiron street-design, the narrow frontage, the deep lot, all conspired to make good housing difficult in the larger cities: within this framework good house-design, indeed, still is difficult. The dumb-bell tenement of the Gilded Age, however, raised bad housing into an art; and the acquisition of this art in its later developments is now one of the stigmata of “progress” in a modern American city. I say this without irony; the matter is too grave for jest. During these same ’seventies, the benefits of poor housing were extended in New York to those with money enough to afford something better: the Paris flat was introduced. The legitimate excuse for the small apartment was the difficulty of obtaining household service, and the futility of keeping up large houses for small families: this, however, had nothing to do with the actual form that the apartment took, for, apart from the desire for congestion-rents, it is as easy to build apartments for two families as for twenty. The flat is a genuine convenience for the well-to-do visitor to a city; it gives him the atmosphere of a home without many of its major complications, and those who got the taste for this life in Paris were not altogether absurd in desiring to enjoy the same benefits in New York. Unfortunately, what suits a visitor does not necessarily meet the demands of a permanent resident: one may tolerate a blank wall for a week or a month without being depressed, particularly since a good part of a visitor’s time is spent outside his home; but to live year after year facing a blank wall or an equally-frowning façade opposite is to be condemned to the environment of a penitentiary.