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Tenement   Listen
noun
Tenement  n.  
1.
(Feud. Law) That which is held of another by service; property which one holds of a lord or proprietor in consideration of some military or pecuniary service; fief; fee.
2.
(Common Law) Any species of permanent property that may be held, so as to create a tenancy, as lands, houses, rents, commons, an office, an advowson, a franchise, a right of common, a peerage, and the like; called also free tenements or frank tenements. "The thing held is a tenement, the possessor of it a "tenant," and the manner of possession is called "tenure.""
3.
A dwelling house; a building for a habitation; also, an apartment, or suite of rooms, in a building, used by one family; often, a house erected to be rented.
4.
Fig.: Dwelling; abode; habitation. "Who has informed us that a rational soul can inhabit no tenement, unless it has just such a sort of frontispiece?"
5.
A tenement house.
Tenement house, commonly, a dwelling house erected for the purpose of being rented, and divided into separate apartments or tenements for families. The term is often applied to apartment houses occupied by poor families, often overcrowded and in poor condition.
Synonyms: House; dwelling; habitation. Tenement, House. There may be many houses under one roof, but they are completely separated from each other by party walls. A tenement may be detached by itself, or it may be part of a house divided off for the use of a family. In modern usage, a tenement or tenement house most commonly refers to the meaning given for tenement house, above.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Tenement" Quotes from Famous Books



... when physiologists study the living brain of an ape, they have no grounds for supposing that they are dealing with a dual structure. The brain is not a tenement inhabited by a spirit or soul. The spirit or soul is but a name for the manifestations of the living brain. The leading neurologists of the world are agreed that the same is true of the human brain. It was only when they abandoned the dual conception—an inheritance from the ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... heart! Sorrow has not hitherto been able quite to burst this frail tenement. I almost fear that joy,—so strange to me is joy, and so far, so very far, beyond my notions of possibility was your return,—I almost fear that joy will do what sorrow ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown

... most frangible of heaven's dower, With thee may what remains of life be spent; Cease not upon me, thus, thy gifts to shower, And in my soul to find a tenement. ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann

... other hand we must not forget that the tenement-houses of our great cities have been crowded in the nineteenth century with people more miserable than ever was serf of the middle ages. The serf, at any rate, had the open air instead of a factory in which to work. When times ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... serving in the army of the Archduke; and on his return to England he was joined by Thomas Percy, a cousin of the Earl of Northumberland and a pensioner of the king's guard. In May 1604 the little group hired a tenement near the Parliament House, and set themselves to dig a ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green

... every condition required of their double and their intimate conjunction. He would have arrived at humanity without its gross beginnings, and have veiled his Godhead for a while in a pure though mortal tenement. He would have participated in all the tenderness of woman's nature, and thus have reached the keenest ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... noises ceased and the other inhabitants of the tenement had all yawned and shut their doors. Then he crawled upstairs with the caution of an invader of a panther den. Sounds of labored breathing came through the broken door-panels. He pushed the ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane

... stopped the woman motioned to him with an imperative gesture, and then as they reached the sidewalk, she pointed to a fruiterer's stand on the outside of a tenement near the corner. ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

... planned a constitution just like a house, according to the latest, simplest, and most attractive plan; and there were several under consideration—the mansion of a marquis, the house of a common citizen, the tenement of a laborer, the barracks of a soldier, the kibbutz of a socialist, and even the camp of savages. Each claimed that his was "the true habitation for Man, the only one in which a sensible person could live." In my opinion, the argument was weak; personal ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... trains in the tubes, cranes laboring in the port, rotary engines drilling, turbines churning are woven through them. Blankets of fog descend upon the river; menacing shapes loom through it; rays of red light seek to cut the mist. Flowers that are gray and black blossom on the ledges of tenement windows giving on bare walls. And human souls and songs that are gray and black like them bloom in the blind air, open their velvet petals, their lustrous, soft corollas, from crannies and windows into this metal, this dun, this ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... on the 25th of October, 1400, in his little tenement in the garden of St. Mary's Chapel, Westminster, and left his works and his fame to an evil and unappreciative age. His monument was not erected until one hundred and fifty-six years afterward, by Nicholas ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... the father, such care as the mother and children might need, along with a proper situation for the girl herself. In evidence of her purpose, she took her engagement-book from her bag, and set down the street and number of the East Side tenement where the family possessed the one room that mocked the word home, and she gave a banknote to the girl to ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana

... the broken flags, which formed a rude sort of pathway to the door, she waited until the wood was emptied near by, and paying the man, requested the sawyer to commence sawing it forthwith; then lifting the latch softly, she entered the humble tenement. It contained one small room, poorly furnished, and with but few comforts. An old negro woman sat shivering over a few coals on the hearth, trying in vain to warm ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey

... circumstances. Notwithstanding his advice and consolation to "Chips,'' in the steerage of the Alert, and his story of his runaway wife and the flag-bottomed chairs (ante, p. 318), he confessed to me that he had tried marriage again, and had a little tenement just outside the gate of ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... his wife thought their home ought to be more comfortably furnished. It was a hired house; and when two hundred dollars had been expended in furniture, Squire Moses declared that Joel had "lost his senses." But the tenement was made very comfortable and pleasant; and still Joel had four hundred dollars in cash. While he was thinking what he should do with this money, his father reproached him for his extravagance, and told him he ought to have built a house, instead of fooling ...
— The Coming Wave - The Hidden Treasure of High Rock • Oliver Optic

... Denton, with a smile of satisfaction. "What do they know, indeed? Why, they are nearly all of them from the garrets of some tenement or other. They have never been accustomed to anything better, nor ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon

... laid by the side of his sleeping wife, he heard a frightful sound from below, as of some one tearing his beloved violin to pieces. No sound of rending coffin-planks or rising dead would have been so horrible in the ears of the soutar. He sprang from his bed with a haste that shook the crazy tenement to its foundation. ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... serious conflict. They are all settled at once by arbitrators, who are guided in their decisions by the accounts of the Putwaries of villages and Canoongoes of districts. These men have the detailed accounts of every tenement for the last hundred years; and, with their assistance, village traditions, and the advice of their elders, all such boundary disputes and misunderstandings about rights to water are quickly and amicably adjusted; and the landlords are strong, and able to enforce whatever decision is pronounced. ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman

... Since the musician's tenement had crumbled and the soul of the violinist had gone forth, gone to the unseen assessors who pityingly, with indulgent hands, weigh our stupid sins, since then a week had passed. During it, a paper signed by the ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... building, than to begin a new one? Often, I assure you, for the returns are quicker and you get a great deal at half price. Now, the man whom I recommend to you is a practical architect, and was employed by a certain baker to build a tenement building in one of the new quarters. The baker dies, the house is unfinished, the heirs wish to sell it as it is—there are at least a dozen of them—and meanwhile the work is stopped. My advice is this. Buy this house, go into partnership ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford

... year. It will be seen that the humane and benevolent intentions of Congress in providing, by the act of May 20th, 1826, for the erection of a penitentiary in this District have been accomplished. The authority of further legislation is now required for the removal to this tenement of the offenders against the laws sentenced to atone by personal confinement for their crimes, and to provide a code for their employment and ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Quincy Adams • John Quincy Adams

... dreary little room upstairs in a noisy tenement house. A pale, thin woman on a shabby lounge vainly trying to quiet a fretful child. The child is thin and pale, too, with a hard, racking cough. There is a small fire in the stove, a very small fire; coal is so high. The medicine stands on the shelf. "Medicine won't do much good," the doctor ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various

... little room of a tenement row Of the city, Maurice sat alone. It was so (In this nearness to life's darkest phases of grief And despair) that his own bitter woe found relief. Joy needs no companion; but sorrow and pain Long to comrade with sorrow. The flowery ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... body, but with the body now so spiritualized and refined as to suit the heavenly existence. The second of these two periods, coming between the first and the third, is therefore fitly called the intermediate or middle state, the state in which the disembodied soul dwells apart from its material tenement. {15} ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson

... Morton and Mr. White do, sometimes," Cora suggested. "They aren't like the rest. I thought that tenement-house work they told us about was most interesting. But they would call if they wanted ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various

... spot of earth all styles flourish: the contrast of fancy, the chateau throwing the English cottage in the shade; the Louis XIII. dwelling hobnobbing with the Flemish house; the salamander of Francis I. hugging the bourgeois tenement; the Gothic gateway opening for the entry of the carriages of the courtesan. A town within a town. Something novel, white, extravagant, overdone: the colossal in proximity to the attractive, the vastness of a grand American hotel casting its shadow ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie

... little girl from the glass works for a bright bit of sewing upon which she was working, a woman from Violet Hogan's room with a heartbreak in her problem, a group of women from little Italy with a complaint about a disorderly neighbor in their tenement, a cripple from the mines to talk over his career, whether it should be pencils or shoe strings, or a hand organ, or some attempt at handicraft; the head of a local labor union paying some pittance to Laura, voted by the men to help her with her work; a shy foreign woman with a badly spelled ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... From tenement sordid, from cheerless room, From bonds of toil, from care and annoy, From gable and roof's o'er-hanging gloom, From crowded alley and narrow street, And from the churches' awe-breathing night, All now have come forth into the light. Look, only look, on nimble feet, ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... Wingfield, was born here at Ditchingham, and in this very room where I write to-day. The house of my birth was built or added to early in the reign of the seventh Henry, but long before his time some kind of tenement stood here, which was lived in by the keeper of the vineyards, and known as Gardener's Lodge. Whether it chanced that the climate was more kindly in old times, or the skill of those who tended the fields was greater, ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard

... one, out into the very bowels of darkness, whiffing, wheezing, shooting a million sparks from the stack, paving the path of startled night with a galaxy of stars. Over the house-tops to the north, a volcanic burst of flame shoots out, belching with blinding effect. The sky is ablaze. A tenement house is burning. Five hundred souls are in peril. Merciful Heaven! Spare the victims! Are the engines coming? Yes, here they are, dashing down the street. Look! the horses ride upon the wind; eyes bulging ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... a tenement-house should notify the owner of the existence of a smoldering fire in the basement, and if the owner, instead of taking measures to extinguish the fire, should have the janitor locked up for giving information ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various

... confine itself to service in its building alone, but sends its workers wherever called, to mansion or tenement. The "Sisters" are trained for field service or for any national calamity such as floods, earthquakes, forest fires, epidemics, etc. When neither war nor calamities require their presence, they devote themselves to the service of the needy poor, or wait upon the rich, if called. The heroic ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen

... stories, with none higher. At least 12 in every 13 inhabitants live in one-story houses; and as the total civil, military, and transient population exceeds 200,000 there are more than 12 inhabitants to every house. Tenement houses may have many small rooms, but each room is occupied by a family. Generally the one-story houses have four or five rooms; but house rent, as also food and clothing, is rendered so expensive by taxation, by export as well as import duties, that it is rare for workmen, even when paid ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead

... on the walls, with a dais and a throne; an open loggia full of flowers; above all this again, raftered bedrooms smelling of lavender. A roomy, stately place for those whose lives move easily in such surroundings; for Ippolita, the girl of the people, happy in her dark tenement in the Vicolo, gossip of the upper windows, shy beckoner to the street, burnisher of doorposts at sundown—for Ippolita this windy great house was a prison, neither ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... YARD AND AREA DRAINS.—All yard, area and court drains when sewer-connected must have connection not less than 4 inches in diameter. They should be controlled by one trap—the leader trap if possible. All yards, areas and courts must be drained. Tenement houses and lodging houses must have yards, areas ...
— Elements of Plumbing • Samuel Dibble

... he could hardly get out of the house, till Moriarty promised to return for the boy, and carry him over in the boat often, to see Mr. Ormond. Moriarty would not stay in the islands himself, he said, after Harry went: he let the cabin and little tenement which O'Shane had given him, and the rent was to be paid him by the agent. Ormond went, for the last time, that morning, to Ormond's Vale, to settle his own affairs there: he and Moriarty took an unusual path across this part of the island ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth

... body he looked at. Had it already passed into the body of some animal? Was it still disconnected and searching for an abode? Through what changes would it pass and how long would be the time before it returned to this human tenement? For the three thousand years was believed to be the shortest period of transition through the various changes in the case of the man of the purest and most blameless life, while in other cases the period was ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty

... Argaeus deem enough to sty Me in his prison, let him take away This noisome life. Nor yet may Heaven deny Its meed, though ill the world my work appay. And yet he who condemns me may, when I Am parted from this tenement of clay, Perceive that he has wronged me in the end, And shall bewail when ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... From the same city on January 12, a press despatch was sent out over the country of a case reported by Dr. A. E. Daniel, of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. The case was that of a babe, eighteen months old, who earned by its labour fifty cents per week in a tenement sweat-shop. ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... sight as this is very rare in our busy New England, where everything is turned to advantage, and where the thrifty owner of a tenement too old for habitation is sure to tear it down and convert the materials of which it is built to some other use. My curiosity was, therefore, at once excited regarding this place, and I turned to my uncle with an inquiry as ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various

... but she's sick. She, lives up in a room in the tenement, and I lives in the garret near by. She ain't got no father, and her mother don't get much work, for she can't go out to work and take care of Jessie, too. She cries a good deal when Jessie don't see her, 'cause she thinks she is going ...
— The Children's Portion • Various

... he had eluded, seemed awed as the little spirit burst from its tenement, and a transcendent smile settled on the thin, waxen face, and the white hands folded themselves across the breast with an air ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn

... reached the tenement where Tony lived, and Carmen asked the priest to go up with her. He raised ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... costly home was literally an unguarded fold, many a laborer, living in a tenement house, doing more to shield his daughters from ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe

... could not give. It worked well. At the end of the year, when we would have shut up shop, we found ourselves with three hundred families on our hands, to leave whom would have been rank treachery. So we took a couple of rooms in a tenement, and held on. And from this small beginning has grown the King's Daughters' settlement, which to-day occupies two houses at 48 and 50 Henry Street, doing exactly the same kind of work as when they began in the next block. The flowers were and are the open sesame ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis

... end of the thirteenth century Schydyerd Street and Cat Street, the centre of University life, were the homes of many people engaged in bookmaking and selling; the former street especially was frequented by parchment makers and sellers. In this street, too, "a tenement called Bokbynder's is mentioned in a charter of 1363-4; and although bookbinding may not have been carried on there at that date, the fact of the name having been attached to the place seems sufficient to justify the assumption that a binder or guild of binders ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage

... make a man quote STERNE, even if he'd never read his masterpiece. House in Committee on Budget Bill. STOREY moved Amendment on Clause 26, dealing with exemption from Inhabited House Duty of tenement buildings. CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER taken part in the Debate. CHARLES RUSSELL said a few words. House in most serious, not to say depressed mood. Subject particularly inviting for JESSE; always advocated welfare of Working ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various

... "chiel" will take notes to the effect that while a friendly game of pinochle was in progress in the tenement rooms of Mrs. Andy McCarty, a lady guest named Ruby O'Hara threw a burglar down six flights of stairs, where he was pinioned and held by a two-thousand-dollar English bulldog amid a crowd of five ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry

... found the "reeking little tunnel." It is merely a stone-paved passage about four feet wide through the ground floor of a tenement. House doors open into it. A lamp hangs over the entrance. A rusty iron gate closes it at the farther end. Here is the "pestiferous and obscene churchyard," completely hemmed in by the habitations of the living. Few of the graves are ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... 1565, a Mr Edward Taylor willed to the Leathersellers' Company a messuage, tenement, and melting-house, in the parish of St Olave, and other messuages in the same parish, upon condition that they should, quarterly and for ever, distribute among the poorest and neediest people in the Poultry Compter one kilderkin of beer and twelve pennyworths of bread, and the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various

... College, Oriel is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, and, also like New College, the name of "St. Mary's" early gave way to a popular nickname. The College at once on its foundation received the gift of a tenement called "L'Oriole," which occupied its present site, and its name has displaced the real style of the College ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells

... of the religious papers of New York City told of the death of a maiden lady named Elizabeth Pellit. Her home was in the hall-room of a tenement-house, and at her death all her earthly possessions could be put into one common trunk. No executor or administrator was needed. Living in narrow circumstances, her friends thought she had denied herself all luxuries and even many comforts. ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon

... without reason, you despise and dislike. Well, the first two cannot be changed except for the worse; the second can be, and already is, buried beneath the gold and ermine of wealth and titles. What does it matter if I am the son of a City clerk who never earned more than L2 a week and was born in a tenement at Battersea, when I am one of the rich men of this rich land and shall die a peer in a palace, leaving millions and honours to my children? As for the third, my occupation, I am prepared to give it up. It has served my turn, and after next week I shall have ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard

... landlord wants the rent Of your humble tenement, When the Christmas bills begin Daily, hourly pouring in, When you pay your gas and poor rate, Tip the rector, fee the curate, Let this thought your spirit cheer— Christmas ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley

... of their being so frequent, with probable Means to prevent 'em. To which is added, three short Treatises: 1. A Warning for Travellers; with Rules to know a Highwayman and Instructions how to behave upon the occasion. 2. Observations on Housebreakers. How to prevent a Tenement from being broke open. With a Word of Advice concerning Servants. 3. A Caveat for Shopkeepers: with a Description of Shoplifts, how to know 'em, and how to prevent 'em: also a Caution of delivering Goods: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various

... for health or salubrity, as the breath of the ague-haunted tules in the outlying Stockton marshes swept through the valley; it could not have been for space or comfort, for, encamped on an unlimited plain, men and women were huddled together as closely as in an urban tenement-house, without the freedom or decency of rural isolation; it could not have been for pleasant companionship, as dejection, mental anxiety, tears, and lamentation were the dominant expression; it was not a hurried flight from present or impending calamity, for ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte

... in the grip of an idea). A king! Polly, some people hold that the soul but leaves one human tenement for another, and so lives on through all the ages. I have occasionally thought of late that, in some past existence, I may have been a king. It has all come to me so naturally, not as if I had had to work it out, but-as-if-I-remembered. 'Or ever the knightly years were gone, ...
— The Admirable Crichton • J. M. Barrie

... a model tenement on the lower East Side. The scene shows the living-room, furnished very plainly, but in the newest taste; "arts and crafts" furniture, portraits of Morris and Ruskin on the walls; a centre table, a couple of easy-chairs, a divan and many book-shelves. The entrance from the outer hall is at ...
— The Machine • Upton Sinclair

... her to her home and then hastened to his own humble domicile. When he got there he found the sidewalk in front of the tenement piled up with furniture. Two families were being ejected for non-payment of rent—$9 each. The landlord was there directing the officers. Bob looked on for a few minutes, and then quietly handed a ten-dollar bill to each of ...
— Halsey & Co. - or, The Young Bankers and Speculators • H. K. Shackleford

... situated in the Amen-Corner of Paternoster Row. Like most of the houses of old London, its lower half was brick, and its upper, English oak. It had been built in the time of the first Tudor, but, being still a substantial tenement, was purchased some ten years before the period of this narrative, by two brothers named Christopher and Hubert, who carried on their business there. They were of English blood, but had been born in Germany, their grandfather having fled thither in Queen Mary's day under strong suspicion of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various

... purity—like a stream which has been made turbid by its earthly channel. The lower serves its purpose as a stage to the higher, then it falls away, the higher surviving. Hitherto, the final outcome of evolution is the soul in a bodily tenement. May it not be that the perfected soul alone survives in the last step of the struggle ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing

... a tenement in Barrel Alley, where his mother had died and from which his good-for-nothing father had disappeared. For a while he had been a waif and a hoodlum, and by strict attention to the code of Barrel Alley's gang, he had risen to be king of the hoodlums. No one, ...
— Tom Slade at Black Lake • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... tenement requires, And seldom needs a laboured roof; Yet is it to the fiercest sun Impervious, ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various

... records it is invariably called "la Real," "la Reole," "la Riole," or "la Ryal or Ryole;" and it is described simply as a "tenement;" I have never found an instance of its being called a "tower". At the close of the reign of Henry III. it was held by one Thomas Bat, citizen of London, who demised it to Master Simon of Beauvais, surgeon to ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.22 • Various

... into a guffaw and executed an impromptu double-shuffle of delight. They were at the door of a tenement house with steep stairs leading into darkness. Up three flights pounded the two pairs of heavy boots, till they reached a half-open door, whence issued the clatter of a sewing-machine and the voices of children. Sam stood on the threshold grinning debonairly, with hands thrust into his pockets. ...
— The Christmas Angel • Abbie Farwell Brown

... name read as chief heir of the vast estate, she was stunned, but if she was stunned, the rest of the family were paralyzed. Legacies were left to many, small in amount, save in the case of the other three sisters, who were to have a certain tenement and land in Harlem and three thousand a year for life out of the estate. None of those present thought for a moment of questioning either the genuineness of the will or the validity of the testaments, save only a poor relation, a nephew, whose name was down for $500. He was indignant ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell

... thee but Egyptian villeinage. Thou dost this body, this enhavocked realm, Subject to ancient and ancestral shadows; Descended passions sway it; it is distraught With ghostly usurpation, dinned and fretted With the still-tyrannous dead; a haunted tenement, Peopled from barrows and outworn ossuaries. Thou giv'st us life not half so willingly As thou undost thy giving; thou that teem'st The stealthy terror of the sinuous pard, The lion maned with curl-ed puissance, The serpent, and all fair strong ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson

... the Swedish bakery gave her an address of a Mrs. Landman, a practical nurse who might consent to board the infant of an employed parent. So on the very day of the lawyer's encounter there was another sickening journey to what proved to be a tenement in West Fifty-third Street. The newel post to the entrance was defaced with obscene handwriting, the hallways were like cellars, and there was a sign in the window, "Madam ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... wants the rent Of your humble tenement; When the Christmas bills begin Daily, hourly pouring in; When you pay your gas and poor rate Tip the rector, fee the curate, Let this thought your spirit cheer— Christmas comes but ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... clothes, and conveyed to its last resting-place on an iron bier; meat and drink are placed at hand for three days, as during that time the soul is supposed to hover around in the hope of being reunited to its late earthly tenement. ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various

... taken his receipt for ten dollars, and thereafter had received one dollar every Monday morning, repeated the operation and returned in ever-increasing numbers. From having his office "in his hat," he took an upper room in a small two-story house at 144 Floyd Street, Brooklyn—an humble tenement, destined to be the scene of one of the most extraordinary exhibitions of man's cupidity and foolishness in modern times. At first he had tramped round, like a pedler, delivering the dividends himself and ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train

... room, in still another tenement, I found a very decent woman with five children,—the last a baby, and she herself a patient of the parish doctor,—to whom, her husband being in the hospital, the Union allowed for the support of herself and family, four shillings a week and five loaves. I suppose when Thisman, M.P., ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... beside it and around it too, a big one, but it was everywhere poisoned and polluted with roses. The very Horses and Dogs had the wrong smells; the whole country round was a repellent desert of lifeless, disgusting gardens and hay-fields, without a single tenement or smoke-stack in sight. How she did hate it all! There was only one sweet-smelling shrub in the whole horrible place, and that was in a neglected corner. She did enjoy nipping that and rolling in the leaves; it was a bright spot in the grounds; ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton

... nothing on earth could justify. And, not finding the milk and honey flow out to lave our ship, we start depressed and resentful. We land in a strange country with only a word of its language. No one greets us, no one holds our fumbling hands. By dirty ways we slink to dirty tenement houses to hide ourselves—where disloyalty is the air we breath, discomfort our bed, and robbery our experience—robbed by the very friends who preceded us. Half-cowed, lonely, cursing in silence the drudgery that faces us, we learn to live for ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan

... widow of a late clergyman at Fairport, who had been reduced by her husband's untimely death, to that state of straitened and embarrassed circumstances in which the widows of the Scotch clergy are too often found. The tenement which she occupied, and the furniture of which she was possessed, gave her the means of letting a part of her house; and as Lovel had been a quiet, regular, and profitable lodger, and had qualified the ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... brick, ramshackle tenement diagonally opposite the apartments in which the gang had found shelter that day of the cucumber fight. Once, the flats had been advertised as being the utmost in modern conveniences, but that had been ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely

... and ready to pray and listen to my teaching. I was most thankful, and greatly relieved after the night's restlessness. I had much happiness in pointing out the way of salvation as an experimental thing. She knew, before I did, the doctrine of the A tenement, but she had had no experience of its real efficacy. Now that her eyes were opened, she was in right earnest to know the reality of sins forgiven. Soon she found this, though not yet the joy of deliverance; she knew ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam

... farther up the street was the court-house, a square wooden box with a crib that housed a cracked bell, rising from a gable end. The judge's pulse quickened. What a location, and what a fortunate chance that Mr. Norton was the owner of this most desirable tenement. ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester

... we escaped the accusation that we use the poor simply as a means of self-improvement. An old Irish woman in a tumble-down tenement house once said to me: 'Ye'll have no chance to work out your salvation doing for me.' I believe that there are many of the poor who more or less consciously have the same idea. They think that we make visiting them a sort of penance, and they resent it. I am not sure that I can find it in my ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates

... languid curiosity; but that was all. She had put herself in this man's hands; resistance was at an end, and a reckless indifference to her fate the new attitude of a soul as utterly overtaxed and exhausted as its tired tenement of clay. ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung

... wife, found a dinner, an apartment, great civility, and a romantic view of the Arab landscape by moonlight. They heard the drums and pipes of one of the regiments, and were "startled by the loud report of a cannon, which shook the frail tenement, and resounded with a lengthened echo through the hills. It was the eight o'clock gun, which stood only a stone's throw from the house, and on the same rock." The lady, as a soldier's wife, ought to have been less alarmed; but she was in a land where every thing was strange. "We were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various

... stone's throw of the tenement occupied by the Boriskoffs; but, in truth, it knew very little of him. They called him "The Hunter," in the courts and alleys round about; and this was as much as to say that his habits were predatory. He loved ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton

... a plain considerably above the level of the lake; the winding Cuyahoga River divides it into two parts, and the industrial quarters are on the lower level of its banks; the city is noted for its wealth of trees in the streets and parks, hence called "The Forest City," and for the absence of tenement houses; it has a university, several colleges, and two libraries; it is the terminus of the Ohio Canal and of seven railways, and the iron ore of Lake Superior shores, the limestone of Lake Erie ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... tenement in Fall River contains from three to five rooms with toilet, and the rents range from $1.25 to $4 per week. For the larger sum, a bath would be included. There are very few heated apartment houses and rents for these would be more than $20 a month. The majority of wage-earners probably ...
— The Cost of Living Among Wage-Earners - Fall River, Massachusetts, October, 1919, Research Report - Number 22, November, 1919 • National Industrial Conference Board

... in the place! For five years he had been one of them, sharing their interests, part and parcel of the life of the community. Now he was an outcast, an alien, as much a stranger to friendly faces as the lad who had knelt long ago at the window of a great tenement and had ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice

... farms, amounting in all to some 300 acres of land, and employs on them twenty regular hands. He is the owner of ninety-eight tenement houses and is still adding to the list, having in his employ at this time twenty carpenters and eight or ten brick ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 3, March, 1889 • Various

... from the garden with Offitt, and turned down a filthy alley to a squalid tenement house,—called by its proprietor Perry Place, and by the neighbors Rook's Ranch,—to the lodge-room of the Brotherhood of Bread-winners, which proved to be Offitt's lodging. They found there a half dozen ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay

... they have commuters' tickets. Many schools are near enough to be reached on foot. The children do not loiter on the way, but when school is out they hurry "home" to begin work in the garden, or to sit down to a meal on the veranda, which is relished far more than a meal in a city tenement house filled with fetid air and wanting in light. Nearly every one of these gardens has a flagpole, and at night a Japanese paper lantern with a tallow dip in it illuminates the veranda. These, ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall

... incapacitated to hold pleas of the crown, and shall not put any person upon his trial from rumour or suspicion alone, but upon the evidence of lawful witnesses. No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or dispossessed of his free tenement and liberties, or outlawed, or banished, or anywise hurt or injured, unless by the legal judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land; and all who suffered otherwise, in this or the two former reigns, shall be restored to their rights and possessions. ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume

... you don't live in a tenement house. Pa objects to my going to tenement houses. There's no knowing what disease there may ...
— Cast Upon the Breakers • Horatio Alger

... certainly to have a touch of truth, for if ever any body of men resembled the unfortunate victims of rural landlords it was these wretched victims of the tenement slums, the denunciation of which seemed to have no part in the official Parliamentary programme, so much so as to compel Labour to create its own party and evolve its own leader, which it had accordingly done in the person of ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard

... the tenement houses in New York city, a doctor was sent for. He came, and found a young man very sick. When he got to the bedside ...
— Men of the Bible • Dwight Moody

... nobody would have lived in it, who had cared to have a cheerful home, I might almost have said, a respectable one, I fancy ours was nearly the only house in the block occupied by its owner; the others, equally large, were rented for tenement houses, or boarding-houses, and perhaps for many things worse. It was probably owing to this fact, that my uncle gave orders, once for all, I was never to go into the street alone; and I believe, in my whole life, I had never taken ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris

... colossal gradient way, towards the glowing Basilica. It seemed to her, as she continued climbing, that she was growing stronger and stronger, that her legs, so long lifeless, became firmer at each step. The little car which she victoriously dragged behind her was like the earthly tenement of her illness, the inferno whence the Blessed Virgin had extricated her, and although its handle was making her hands sore, she nevertheless wished to pull it up yonder with her, in order that she might cast it at last at the feet of the Almighty. No obstacle ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... village with the money, and gave a copy-hold tenement to each of the men Bassett had got imprisoned. So they and their sons and their grandsons lived rent free—no, now I think of it, they had to pay four pence a year to ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade

... village was also in use. In 1585 the English sent an expedition to the coast of North Carolina. An artist attached to this expedition left some cuts, one of which represents a village near Roanoke. It is surrounded, as we see, by a row of palisades, and contains seventeen joint tenement houses, besides the council house. The historians of De Soto's expedition make frequent mention of walled and fortified towns. "The village of Mavilla," from which comes our name Mobile, says Biedman, "stood on a plain surrounded ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... who was not trying to shoot him, or who had not been warned by some action against Buck that would call for it. He minded his own business, never picked a quarrel, and was quiet and pacific up to a certain point. After that had been passed he became like a raging cyclone in a tenement house, and storm-cellars were much ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford

... kill monstrous births, (as we call them,) because of an unordinary shape, without knowing whether they have a rational soul or no; which can be no more discerned in a well-formed than ill-shaped infant, as soon as born. And who is it has informed us that a rational soul can inhabit no tenement, unless it has just such a sort of frontispiece; or can join itself to, and inform no sort of body, but one that is just ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke

... lodged was in the lordly quartier of the Faubourg St. Germain; the neighbouring streets were venerable with the ancient edifices of a fallen noblesse; but their tenement was in a narrow, dingy lane, and the building itself seemed beggarly and ruinous. The apartment was in an attic on the sixth story, and the window, placed at the back of the lane, looked upon another row of houses of a better description, that communicated with one of the great ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... not to her words, till he had spent all the ready monies he had, when he fell to selling his jewels and spending their price, until they also were all gone. Then he sold his houses, fields, farms and gardens, one after other, till they likewise were all gone and he had nothing left but the tenement wherein he lived. So he tore out the marble and wood-work and sold it and spent of its price, till he had made an end of all this also, when he took thought with himself and, finding that he had nothing left to expend, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... night, he searched until he found another tenement, and, with his own hands, moved their scanty household goods to it, leaving behind him no address. Naturally a sweet and unsuspicious soul, he had never dreamed of treachery upon the part of the ingratiating youth; now suspicion's seeds were sown in his old mind and fertilized ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey

... railway station. For a moment I was startled, as we hoped our residence was fixed for the term of life; but my mind soon fell into a profitable train of reflection. I thought, ere this term has expired, a higher mandate may be sent to quit my clay tenement, when I must give up my account. My heart feels it is well, and will be well.—This morning I traversed the haunts of the 'navvies' to give tracts to as many as I could. It has been my purpose this day to surrender the powers of my body and soul to God; ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth

... has been the scene of some memorable crimes, and among them that of the Chinaman who slew his Irish wife, after the manner of "Jack the Ripper," on the staircase leading to the second floor. A notable change has taken place in the tenement since Mattie and Em have lived there, and their gentle influence is making itself felt in the neighbouring houses as well. It is nearly eight o'clock when we sally forth. Each of us carries a handful of printed slips bearing a text of Scripture ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth



Words linked to "Tenement" :   tenement district, apartment building



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