Alone Together: A History of New York's Early Apartments

by Elizabeth Collins Cromley

Twentieth-century New York is now famous as the city of "cliff dwellers," but in the second half of the nineteenth century, middle-class apartments in Manhattan were a new―and somewhat suspect―architectural form. Alone Together presents a history of the "invention" of New York apartment houses.

Genres: History, New York, Architecture, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published March 6, 1990

Reviews

[Frank Stein · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is filled with great insights into the social and economic factors that shaped America's earliest apartment houses. Cromley shows that to many New Yorkers, apartments were not simply a new kind of vernacular architecture, they represented all the hopes and terrors of an uncertain future, and the details of their construction and interior layout became subject to intense political debate.

Cromley traces how the increasing demand for family privacy (exemplified by the gradual exclusion of servants and apprentices from family dinner tables in the 1810s and 20s) conflicted with rising land values and shrinking homes on Manhattan throughout the 19th century. Narrower and narrower row houses forced a larger percentage of each house to be taken up by circulation spaces (halls and stairs) and the rising cost of servants made chores increasingly onerous for middle-class housewives. Unfortunately, the only model New Yorkers had for middle-class group living were Parisian flats, which, to the horror of preachers in America, promiscuously harbored multiple classes under one roof, featured concierges who witnessed everyone's comings and goings, and had rooms arrayed "en suite," without halls and without significant privacy and amenities. The first Paris-trained American architect, Richard Morris Hunt, helped make this form acceptable to America in what is widely regarded as the first apartment house, the Stuyvesant Apartments, built in 1869. He used steps to simulate the old Manhattan stoops and a lobby to separate it from poorer tenement houses. His "Parisian flat," featured long hallways separating the kitchen, servant's bedroom, master's bedroom and parlor. He showed that high class living could take place in shared housing that felt something like a home.

Still, the demand for privacy increased. Later apartments divided rooms entirely by function, with completely separate stairs and halls for servants leading directly to the kitchen and pantry, visiting rooms separated in the front, and bedrooms set in the rear.

Building an apartment house in this era must have seemed like completing a complex jigsaw puzzle where sometimes incongruous pieces had to be fitted into an overly constrained space. Public visiting rooms (the "parlor," the "sitting room") needed light as well as a direct connection to the dining room, which itself needed easy access to the kitchen, which needed to be separate and well-ventilated. Servants needed bedrooms near the kitchen but not to close to the family "chambers" so they couldn't overhear family secrets, and these family chambers also had to be kept separate from the visiting rooms. There were many solutions to these dilemmas, some more lasting than others. At the turn of the century narrow courtyard apartments gave way to central courtyards and facades with multiple recesses to provide light. Apartments that earlier tried to mimic multiple row-houses with separate entrances eventually gave way to large, unified, neoclassical designs.

Cromley shows that many commentators of the time thought the apartment houses would destroy families and that the collectively provided servants and kitchens (most early apartments provided cooked meals and laundry service) would eliminate work for housewives and make them lazy and fickle. Some feminists, however, like Sarah Gilman Young, celebrated this transformation and advocated more apartment houses, especially Parisian-style houses, since they would liberate women from the drudgery of lonely housework. (In a similar, though rural, vein, Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe in their "American Women's Home" in 1872 advocated every dozen families banding together to form a community laundry). Reformer Helen Campbell compared the collectivization of apartment living to the increasing collectivization of business "trusts" and celebrated their increasing efficiency of scale.

Although some of the book can be repetitive, this is probably the best vernacular architecture book I've ever read, one that explores the real significance of housing to everyday life.

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book answers a few questions:
1. How did people live before apartments were built? Obviously, the rich lived in houses, as they do in small towns and less dense cities today. Other alternatives included boarding houses (where tenants shared meals) and renting rooms in houses, tenements (poorly made apartments for the working class) and hotels.
2. Why were apartments preferable to these options? Apartments in the modern sense were first built in the 1870s. Apartments provided more privacy than boardinghouses and rented rooms. Also, apartments usually had private bathtubs and toilets, unlike the oldest tenements. Because apartments were on one floor, some people even preferred them to houses, because Manhattan houses usually had several floors, forcing housewives to run up and down stairs to do their job. Hotels were too open to the public for some. Nicer apartment buildings had maintenance staff, thus reducing the need for servants.
3. Why did apartment buildings have height limits as early as the 1880s? In those days, firefighting equipment was not yet adequate to serve tall buildings. (The author also mentions concerns over sunlight, but as a resident of an area with tall buildings and plenty of sun on major streets, I don't take such concerns seriously).
One thing that I didn't like about this book: the prose was sometimes dry, and there was a little too much architectural jargon - for example, the authors refers to "light and air" when she presumably meant "sunlight."

[Dianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

While a bit of a dry, scholarship tome, I was fascinated both by the layouts of early apartments and the sociological/psychological aspects of "privacy" of the family and the final acceptance of apartment living.

[Scott Fuchs · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a very studious, very detailed work focusing in great part on the development and construction of EARLY NYC apartments; very possibly an extended doctoral thesis. Much of the book is centered on issues such as the need of airshafts for sanitary reasons and the perceived 'lack of privacy' concern for people who wanted to leave their four walled homes and live in this new modern concept of 'shared living'.
While interesting on many different levels, it has its share of repetition and quickly becomes dry reading. The many photos and illustrations do allow a respite from the dispassionate prose.
For a much more accessible read go for 'New York, New York - How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City, 1816-1930 [Knopf] by Elizabeth Hawes'. This book's focus is on design and very much the cultural 'phenomenon' of apartment living.

[braden · Rating 2 out of 5]

Smart, thorough preasentation of the evidence. But if you want to people the landscape, you are going to have to do that yourself.