Manhattan: 2nd Avenue - 97th Street (East)
Second Avenue, east side, north from E. 97th Street, showing tenements interspersed with clearances which are the result of the enforcement of the multiple dwelling law and thereby eliminating squalor, vice and disease. These Harlem rookeries, built en masse over swampy areas have been a perpetual eyesore, being uniformly of the dumb-bell plan which originated from the competition of 1879, after the repeal in 1872 of the 1st tenement house law of 1867. Under Mayor LaGuardia and his Tenement House Commissioner, Langdon Post these are gradually coming down. Overhead is the Second Avenue "El" indicating by its height the low elevation of this former swamp; thru which flowed the riverlets that formed Harlem Mere. September 14, 1938. P.L. Sperr
Photo from the New York Public Library - Milstein Collection
