Pictorial History of the Tenant Movement

1. NYC's first mass rent strike broke out in 1904 among Jews on Manhattan's Lower East Side...

2. The leaders and organizers of the rent strikes in both 1904 and 1907 were young women...

3. The rebellions by tenants took the Socialist party by surprise...

4. Tenement children, too, were moved by the spirit of the strikes...

5. The strikes of 1917-1920 encompassed many of the neighborhoods of the city...

6. As the strikes spread, evictions multiplied...

7. In the early 1930s rent strikes broke out yet again...

8. Sometimes crowds of the unemployed were attracted to evictions...

9. Nowhere was the resistance to evictions greater than in the Bronx...

10. The middle-class tenants at Knickerbocker Village, Manhattan...

11. In October 1936 the City-Wide Tenants Council supported a demonstration...

12. America's first public housing, First Houses, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, was completed...

13. When, after World War II, the federal administration began to dismantle wartime rent controls...

14. Under state rent control, the chief mechanism for rent increases was tenant turnover...

15. In the winter of 1963-1964 a rent strike erupted in Harlem...

16. As the Harlem rent strike gained momentum and publicity...

17. Urban renewal ravaged poor and working-class neighborhoods in New York...

18. The introduction of the rolling rent strike...

19. When the tenants returned home...

20. The decay of buildings and their abandonment by landlords led young minority tenants to experiment...

21. The small landlords, who typically owned the buildings housing poor tenants, were now pressured...

22. NYSTNC and its organizing and training arm, the People's Housing Network...

23. In October 1977 President Jimmy Carter ... visited the South Bronx...

24. Sweat equity rehabilitation allowed for the rearrangement of interiors...

25. Both tenant and real estate organizations began to pressure the Rent Guidelines Board...

26. In 1978 the city became the largest landlord in New York City...

27. In the ten years after 1973, NYSTNC became a significant force in Albany housing politics...

28. Moving responsibility for the enforcement of rent regulations from the landlord-operated Rent Stabilization Association to the state Division of Housing was seen as a victory...

29. The tide turned on the Lower East Side in the early 1980s...

30. As rent levels escalated as a result of speculation, gentrification, and cooperative conversions, the number of homeless climbed...