The word “tenement” originally meant any property that was held by a tenant who paid rent, but in late 19th century urban America it began to accrue its current connotations. Legal dictionaries defined it as a multi-family residence with a shared hallway and bathrooms, yet in common parlance it came to refer to crowded multifamily buildings housing poor, immigrant families, regardless of the arrangement of rooms.
When construction began on the Boston Rubber Shoe Company Factory #2 in 1883, the company also began to make residences for their workers, which early maps sometimes labeled “tenements.” The surviving BRSC tenements, 43-49, 35-41, 25-29, and 17-23 Gould Street, and 35-41 and 27-33 Brazil Street, are four-unit structures that share walls and nothing else, meaning that technically they were built as townhouses, not tenements—but class prejudices determined the nomenclature, not the arrangement of rooms.
The 19th century was the heyday of New England industry, and it relied on cheap immigrant labor. Companies were expected to enforce discipline among their workers and promote American values. Providing housing for their employees was therefore both a social good and a way to control their laborers when they were not on the job. As the map indicates, the BRSC was once the largest private landowner in the city, and seems to have had an ambitious plan to create an entire neighborhood to house their workers, with the streets named after the exotic locales where their rubber originated. Only the name of Brazil Street survives from that plan.
The BRSC closed its doors in 1929. It held onto its land for some years afterwards, selling it off by the end of WWII. Its workers are long gone; the housing it built for them is still with us, providing the kind of high density, transit-oriented development for which city planners pine in 2021.
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