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Housing
Contents
Apartment Houses > Before
the Tenement Housing Options in the 1860s > Tenements
> Public Housing > Housing
Abandonment > Gentrification
> Homelessness > Immigrant
Housing today > Housekeeping
in the Tenements > Rent, Wages and
the Cost of Living
Apartment Houses
Tenements were the first buildings in America
built specifically for more than one family to live in independently.
Apartment houses, however, were the first built for more than one
"respectable" family to live in independently. When 97
Orchard Street was built in 1863-64 there was no such thing as an
"apartment house" in New York City. While upper class
New Yorkers did sometimes live in boarding houses and hotels, they
tried to avoid "setting up House" in anything but single
family row houses and mansions.
America's first apartment house, the Stuyvesant, was built on East
18th Street in 1869. Designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the first
American to study architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris,
the building was meant for young "respectable" couples
and families. The idea caught on and other apartments quickly followed
the Stuyvesant.
The apartment houses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries were often built with grand staircases, marble fireplaces,
brass fixtures, elegant bathrooms, and separate servant's quarters.
Elevators became common in the 1880s, and some apartment houses
had electricity before many of the city's private homes. Perhaps
because upper-class New Yorkers were skeptical of the respectability
of multi-family dwellings, apartment houses were often built to
surpass the city's single family homes in their opulence. Apartment
houses had all the amenities that tenements lacked and more.
But apartment houses did possess some of the same design problems
as tenements. Many of them had dark rooms with insufficient light
and ventilation (though the problem was generally not as acute as
that in tenements). Yet apartment houses were generally not subject
to the tenement legislation which began to affect multi-family rental
buildings after 1867. Some apartment houses evaded these restrictions
because the residents owned their apartments (cooperatives). Others
provided concierge services and claimed exemption as apartment "hotels."
Some restrictions were placed on apartment houses in 1916, but it
was not until the passage of the Multiple Dwellings Act of 1929
that all multi-family housing was subject to the same legislation.
Elizabeth Hawes, New York, New York: How
the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City, 1869-1930
(New York , 1993)
Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City (New
York, 1990)
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