Old Law Tenement

[2] Responding to the new requirements, a magazine, Plumbing and Sanitation Engineer, held a tenement design contest in 1879.

James Ware's winning dumbbell design represented a compromise between legal health standards and commercial viability.

The three-foot indentation required only a minimal sacrifice of rent-revenue space, placating the landlords, and provided just enough aperture for ventilation and natural, if not direct, light.

Though each uniformly occupies a twenty-five-foot lot just like the pre-Old Law tenement, the Old Law facade – with its fanciful sandstone human and animal gargoyles (sometimes in full figure), its terracotta filigree of no apparent historical precedent,[citation needed] its occasional design aberrations (e.g., dwarf columns), and its often varicolored brick – departs radically from the plain, dignified simplicity of the unassuming and largely unornamented older structures.

The entrance opened to the kitchen containing a bathtub that had a lid that could be lowered to form a working surface, alongside a sink opposite a wood-burning stove feeding into a flue.