260
HAMBURG.
Where the court contains a single row of houses its width is smaller
—3 feet and 4 feet being common—and all the rooms of their three or four
stories may lo.>k upon a dead wall of equal height. Often one court leads by a
still narrower passage to another and smaller, and that by zig-zag windings to a
third and fourth, the whole forming a maze of masonry which in the event of
tire might prove the veriest death-trap, and that the more easily since the
walls are often half-timber work and highly inflammable.
Little provision exists for domestic convenience in these courts. As a rule
the water supply is outside, and one tap serves for all the tenements. There is
no room for drying clothes within the tenements, so they are suspended from
wooden racks outside the windows or from cords stretched across the court from
one house to another.
But the old 11 Terraces ” and “ Passages ” are not by any means the only
slum districts in Hamburg. The picturesque structures which line the
" Fleeten,” and often rise to a height of five and six stories, contain tenements
whose dimensions, condition, arid conveniences do not conform with current
hygienic ideas ; and in general the housing arrangements of the Inner Town,
so far as the working classes are concerned, are only kept tolerable by the
strong action of the House Inspection Board. Windowless rooms are one of the
worst defects of the older house property and against tenements containing
such rooms the Board takes stringent action. The investigator may still
come across pitch-dark bedrooms, landings and staircases in which a lamp burns
all day long, and kitchens which daylight never enters, but the number of these
is decreasing, owing to the increasingly vigilant control exercised. Often
the inner rooms of a block of dwellings derive their light solely from a shaft
running through the centre of the block. In general this light shaft is a
makeshift, and, like most makeshifts, inadequate. The latest revision of
the building bye-laws requires a “ light shaft ” to be 63^ square feet in
extent, with a minimum measurement of 4 feet 10¿ inches, but the actual
dimensions are often far less, and a “ light shaft ” 3 feet square is not uncommon.
In one house visited four rooms on each story received light from an inner space
7 feet long by 2 feet 6 inches wide : of the five rooms in one tenement the
“ best ” room and one bedroom were fairly lighted, one bedroom was almost
dark, another wholly so, and the kitchen derived its only light from the open
door. Two rooms in this tenement were let to lodgers for 2s. 6c?. and 3s. per
week respectively.
Before referring to more modern dwellings in Hamburg it may be well
to indicate the main features of the building regulations. 1 hese stipulate that
the usual height of a building may not exceed 97 feet 6 inches in the case of
gable, and 78 feet in the case of other walls ; while the front wall may not be
higher than the width of the street in the suburbs, though in the town and in
bt. Pauli it may exceed the width of the street by 19 feet 6 inches. It is
required that before every wall of a building not lying on the street and
containing windows a space shall be left equal to one third of the height of the
wall in the town and two-thirds in the suburbs, and this space must have an
area of 21P3 square feet.
The maximum number of habitable stories allowed in a front building is
five, in addition to the basement, so long as this complies with the requirements,
and if these are more than five stories, only the lower five may be used for
dwellings. A height of 8 feet inches is required in all stories. The supple^
mentary regulations of the House Inspection Board stipulate that the entire air
space of a dwelling must allow 257^ cubic feet for every child of school age, and
514J cubic feet for every older person, while bedrooms must allow 171| and
343 cubic feet respectively, though in calculating bedroom space, rooms immediately
adjacent may be counted.
Back houses built in the form of “ Terraces,” " Passages,” and the like)
may only have three stories, including the ground floor, and basements are
there prohibited.
Nearly every code of building regulations evolves a type of house
with clearly marked features of its own, and the technical fiction of
the “ cellar ” (a term identified with “ basement ” in this report) is
