The windows over the doorways in our apartment -- little wood-framed panes of glass, some now painted over -- are called "transoms." They tell a story.

We live in a tenement. That word -- from the Latin for "holding" -- conjures up images of Dickensian nightmare flats, where rats prowl the crumbling stairwells and starving families sleep four to a bed. And indeed, some of the earliest tenements in Brooklyn (where our tenement is) were every bit as bad, the result of trying to pack as many immigrants as possible into a space confined by water on three sides and the limits of 19th-century transportation on the fourth.

So by the time the 1860s rolled around, the respectable classes were getting antsy for reform. This resulted in the Tenement House Laws of 1867 and 1879, which set minimum standards of light and air.

Landlords, always quick to find the path of least legal resistance, immediately invented ways around the new laws: "dumbbell" buildings that featured tiny airshafts to ventilate the inner rooms, and transoms to admit light throughout the apartment. Nearly 20,000 of these "old law" buildings were erected in Manhattan and the Bronx during the 1880s and '90s; countless others went up in the city of Brooklyn, which would not join Greater New York until 1898.

(The Consolidation of 1898 was bitterly opposed in some circles, with Manhattanites worrying over dilution of their power, and Brooklynites fearing the influence of Manhattan's notorious Tammany Hall political machine. Queens County, to our north and east, was literally split in two over the decision, with its eastern half taking the name Nassau County and remaking itself as the staging ground for a hundred Levittowns.)

When the old law tenements turned out to be not much better to live in than the pre-law buildings, reformers pushed through the Tenement House Law of 1901, which set stricter standards for light, air, and sanitation: side courts a minimum four feet side, backyards at least 11 feet deep, and so on. But another development that year had a more profound impact on New York City housing conditions: the breaking of ground for the city's first subway, which would go on to open up new regions to settlement (and land speculation) in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, reducing the overcrowding in the older tenement districts. By 1930, the population of Manhattan's Lower East Side had dropped from more than half a million to less than a quarter in the span of just twenty years.

Our apartment, then, is a tribute to the 1879 law. The transoms, if not for the paint applied in intervening years, would admit a smidgen of light into the interior rooms. An airshaft (also painted over) bisects the apartment -- we're reminded of its existence only by the occasional sound of falling snow during winter melt-offs. Our back wall does an unstately jig to provide windows (one apiece) to our dining room, bathroom, and kitchen, the last of which is, as a result, just large enough to turn around in (but not while carrying groceries), and our bathtub is the perfect size for someone four feet tall and six inches deep. It is a tribute to the limitations of reform in the face of capitalism that we have two airless rooms in a building designed to provide air.

The laws have changed since 1879, but landlords haven't -- at least, not judging from ours.

In one corner of our tiny kitchen, there's a little niche that looks as if it should house shelves. (It does now, but only because we bought a set of our own.) And until a few years before we moved in, that just what was there -- until the three siblings who own the building discovered that the kitchen was just barely too small to be considered a "room" by the city's Department of Housing and Community Renewal. Without the kitchen, a five-room apartment became a four-room apartment, and the legal rent they could charge would drop. Out came the shelves; presto, instant room.

Where tenants used to look to the likes of Jacob Riis to protect them from the whims of landholders, now they look to rent control. Instituted in 1920 (in part to ward off the growing power of Socialist tenant unions), dropped eight years later, then picked up again during the post-war housing crunch, the laws governing rent control and its less robust sibling, rent stabilization, have been fought over, weakened, shored up, and debated countless times since then. Every year, pitched battles break out over the ruling of the Rent Guidelines Board over how much rents will be allowed to rise for leases signed that year.

Our rent, thanks to a wrinkle in the rent laws and our landlords' own greed, has actually gone down since we moved in. A decade before our arrival, the siblings had some renovation work done on our apartment-to-be, replacing some flooring and, perhaps, painting the transoms. The rent laws consider this sort of thing a "major capital improvement" -- an "MCI" in housing court lingo -- and a judge agreed, granting a modest rent increase over and above that year's standard rent increase for rent-stabilized apartments.

Displeased with the size of the rent hike, though, our landlords resubmitted new invoices to the court, seeking a further increase. Unfortunately for them, these invoices were oddly similar to the original ones -- identical, in fact, save for the dates. Worse luck, the judge took notice, and promptly told our intrepid trio that not only weren't they getting a rent increase, but they would have to refund tenants the additional rent they had already charged.

Our landlords once asked us if we wouldn't like to pay a higher rent anyway, "to be fair."

All the people who live in our house are white. As long as we've lived here, they have always all been white. In the last buildings we lived in, all the tenants were white.

Brooklyn is 34.7% African-American, 20.1% Hispanic, and 4.8% Asian/Pacific Islander, according to the most recent census data. Except for the initial flush of black Harlem, it has always been New York City's most African borough. In the first years of the 19th century, according to official figures, more than one-quarter of the population of Brooklyn was made up of slaves.

A couple of years ago, a local realtor, just five blocks from our house, was found to be secretly coding certain apartments with a "23"; this designation meant "no blacks, no Hispanics," according to a former employee who ratted out the agency when she found out about the scheme. For a few weeks, protestors ringed the corner outside the realtor's offices, and one of the local tabloids featured it on its front page. Then the reporters went away, and the demonstrators soon followed.

The realtor is gone now (replaced by another realtor -- or perhaps it's the same one by a different name; no one seems sure), but there's little question that the spirit of Code 23 lives on in our neighborhood. We saw it in the landlady at one of our prior apartments, who stopped us in the stairwell after we'd interviewed a young African-American woman for a summer sublet, asking with hand-wringing concern, "Was that a colored girl? I only want nice people in my building." We hear it in the voices of the Puerto Rican friend who was asked by her landlord, "Is that a Spanish name?" and of the friend of a friend who tells prospective landlords who call, "I'm black. Is that a problem?" figuring that it's easier to avoid awkward questions later.

Our neighborhood is built on (and draws its name from) a hill that runs down from the park nearby to the canal where our long-dead dockworker neighbors worked a century ago. You can walk the two long blocks up the hill to our house and watch the complexions lighten. By the time you've reached our block, there's a good chance that any black or brown faces you see belong to one of the African-American kids who populate the nearby high school (they pour in by bus and subway from their non­Code 23 neighborhoods in the mornings, and are shipped back out at night); one of the workers at the hospital next door to the school, who cluster at the bus stops at quitting time; one of the panhandlers who set their own schedule to commute to this motherlode of nickels and dimes; or one of the nannies who push white babies in strollers down the avenue all day, then are bustled off to their own children at night.

It is two years before the 21st century.

Our house is cluttered, but relatively spacious, as these things go in New York City in the 1990s. We pay about 15% of our income on rent, which is far, far less than some of our friends and neighbors, who can work the first three weeks of the month before paying off their tithe to the landowners. The heat works, as does the hot water (usually), we've never been robbed (though our neighbors have), we don't wake up in the night to the sound of gunshots. The police do not tear down our building in the dead of night so the city can build luxury condominiums or a highway through our living room. We have a roof, and windows, and walls. For us, housing is a mere necessity, not an Issue that screams of Race, Homelessness, Segregation.

If you look up at the transoms just right, though, you can see what else is there.

Comment on this article