In the 19th century, people started crowding the city in hope of having a better life than the one that they had left behind. New York City began to expand very rapidly and living environments became extremely overcrowded. Buildings that had once been single-family dwellings became tenements to accommodate the growing population. The wealthier people moved up North and the poor immigrants moved into tenements. These were buildings that were built on a standard lot twenty-five feet (eight meters) wide and one hundred feet (thirty meters) deep. Each building usually had four floors, and each apartment usually had dark, unventilated, interior rooms. Many of the buildings didn't have running water. Tenements provided housing at $2 to $3 a room a month for poor and working class immigrants living and working in lower Manhattan, mostly on the Lower East Side.
Though tenements were able to accommodate many people, it was not a safe nor sanitary environment to live in. In order to improve tenements and tenement life, there was a competition that was sponsored by the magazine The Plumber and Sanitary Engineer. Plumber and Sanitary Engineer competition was supposed to provide clean and comfortable housing for New York City's growing immigrant population. The initial goal was to increase the landlord's profits and to make the tenement life more suitable. Creating a design that would do this was hard to do after the tenement law of 1879 that constrained the Manhattan lot size 25 by 100 feet. The law also forbade the construction of rooms that didn't have a window source of air. That led to the Board of Health reject plans for buildings that would cover more than 65 percent of a lot. The winner of the competition was James E. Ware. James E. Ware invented the dumbbell design.
The design was called a dumbbell because of its narrow air shaft running through the middle of the building on each side. There were indoor toilets with plumbing, an airshaft, a vent, two beds, a living room, and a kitchen.
