Tenements Quotes

“The old frame house down near the waterfront had never held so many people since the day it was put up. It must have been a pleasant place fifty years before: trees overhanging the limpid water, cows grazing in the meadows on both sides of the river, little frame houses like this one dotting the banks here and there.

It wasn't a pleasant place any more: garbage scows, coal yards, the river a greasy gray soup. Dead-end blocks of decrepit tenements on one side of it, lumberyards and ice-plants and tall stacks on the other.

The house was set far back from the street, hemmed in by the blank walls that rose around it.

("I Wouldn't Be In Your Shoes")”
― Cornell Woolrich

“Between the meagre curtains I could see people sleeping, eight or ten to a room, huddled close together like baby mice. The alleyways were murky, but there was movement in the shadows. I passed an old woman all in black, dipping and slipping like a wounded crow, carrying a sack on her back that probably contained everything she owned. A little girl ran away from me, hurtling through the doorway of a tenement on bare feet, a cadaver of a place with dark, impenetrable windows like eye sockets long since excavated.”
― Alex Reeve, The House on Half Moon Street

“Greenock lies along the Clyde littoral and is built up onto the hills behind. Thus it is a long lateral town and the streets rise steeply and provide open view of the river and the Argyllshire hills. In the winter there is snow on them and in the summer their great tawny flanks are charred occasionally by heather fires. They are seen across an expanse of roofs and chimneys, the slates dull purple scales and the ridges presided by clumps of lums, cans churning and smoke pennons flying. The buildings are of sandstone block, greybuffs and occasional reds, and are erected in monolithic tenements, achieving their only rhythm in the flowing lines enforced by the land.”
― Alan Sharp, A Green Tree in Gedde