[VIDEO] What It Was Like Living in a House in New York in 1900

This video, using AI reconstruction, offers a glimpse into daily life in New York City in 1900, just two years after its five boroughs were consolidated. It contrasts the opulent, electrified mansions of Fifth Avenue with the crowded, windowless tenement bedrooms of the Lower East Side. The documentary explores the intricate details of tenement life, including "railroad flats," cold-water taps, cast-iron coal ranges, wooden iceboxes, and shared water closets, where a quarter of a million Jewish, Italian, Irish, and German immigrants resided. It highlights the work of journalist Jacob Riis, whose photographs in How the Other Half Lives exposed these conditions. The video also covers the middle-class brownstone rowhouses of Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, and the Upper West Side, detailing their domestic staff and the emerging "national cuisine." It visits bustling locations like the pushcart markets of Hester Street, German bakeries in Kleindeutschland near Tompkins Square, and oyster cellars on Canal Street, showcasing the city's diverse foodscape. The film concludes on the cusp of the New Tenement House Act of 1901, foreseeing the electrification and modernization that would transform New York's domestic interiors and urban landscape.