I miss the weekly feature, or cannot find it, in which you would pick one interesting historic building, and give its history.
I grew up in a house with an open plan, kitchen, dining area, living room all unseparated. It was horrible. No privacy. One cannot watch a tv show while someone else wants to listen to music while someone else wants quiet. And you cannot hide anything from guests. It is awkward, and the stupidest trend in housing.
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Thank you for a superb New York Today survey of the history of apartments in the city Jonathan in which you link that story not only with the “And Finally” feature but even with the weather.
Lawrence Veiller spearheaded the drive for what became the landmark New York State Tenement House Act of 1901, which outlawed the infamous “dumbbell tenements.” The term came from the narrowing in the center of two side-by-side tenement houses creating an “air shaft” between them, which admitted very little light or fresh air, filled up with garbage thrown from windows, and created a fire hazard. An excellent book on the drive for tenement house reform is Roy Lubove’s 1962 study “The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890-1917.”
Your reference to fire hoses only propelling water up to the fifth floor brings to mind the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of March 25, 1911, in which 146 garment workers, 123 women and 23 men, perished and the commemoration of which is less than a week away. Most of the women were the teenage daughters of Jewish and Italian immigrants. This tragedy became the catalyst behind a raft of progressive reforms, which led Frances Perkins to famously declare that the New Deal began on March 25, 1911.
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You can also visit the City Register offices for each borough. They are in the Department of Finance's business centers. They have books listing the property transfers. And WPA books that summarize the entries for a given address.
First you find the Block and Lot of the property. Lot numbers weren't in use back then. Instead they used the distance from the cross streets. You need to add up from the Tax Plat Map at
http://gis.nyc.gov/taxmap/map.htm the distance from those streets. It will usually be the shorter one used. Also note the lot size as shown on the map. Using Google Streets it might be helpful to have addresses of matching houses built at the same time.
I start by photographing the house's page in the WPA book.
N.B. You often find in the early years they didn't even record the distance to the side street. What you have to do is to find an entry for the house in a later year (from WPA page), then knowing the grantor you go back in time looking for when the grantor was a grantee. To get the earliest entries possible.
Use this page to see whether the property is in a Landmark District. Right click on the property for more info, and be sure to scroll to the other pages.
https://nyclpc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=93a88691c...
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REAL ESTATE RULES
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,”
Wrote Emma Lazarus — but time passes,
And the poor go back to being wretched refuse
For which the condo captains have no use.
And so the needy are forced again to disperse,
To search for ill-lit tenements, or worse,
From which their outcast children may behold
The soaring towers built of glass and gold.
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I like this poem. But I must point out that when the immigrants of my grandparents' generation came this way, they learned English. And their main drive was to get their children an education. Their kids got out of their barrios. New York City public schools were excellent because students were expected to study and to keep up, and woe betide the students whose principals informed their parents otherwise. I should add, of course, that high schools did have tracks -- academic, commercial, and mechanical -- but these were fluid, and a young woman who became a secretary could take college courses.
I don't like unscrupulous developers or Russian LLPs that purchase apartments that are never lived in. But let's not confuse issues.
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Lots of great info, and I especially loved the ghost discussion! I don’t know how people in the walk-ups do it every single time they have to get to work or get anywhere; do they ever really get used to it, or do they stay in more?
Tune of “Movin’ On Up”
I’m walking on up, on the West Side
To our pre-war apartment way up high.
I’m walking on up, on the West Side
I shvitz like heck in my suit and tie.
Rents have soared down in Chelsea
Can’t afford Murray Hill.
Passed on that place in Midtown,
Don’t have a hundred mill.
So I climb with my fitbit.
Up to our fifth floor flat
Long as I live, I know I’ll never
Live like an aristocrat.
I’m walking on up, on the West Side
To our pre-war apartment way up high.
I’m walking on up, on the West Side
The rent is fine, you won’t hear me cry.
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My dad worked for Bell Labs on West Street, at Murray Hill, an engineer.
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I climbed the stairs to a 5th floor walk-up for over 20 years, till my knees gave out. Amazing how an elevator can improve one's quality of life!
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Another great one Freddie—thank you! Allen
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Both Ms. Cromley's book, and "New York, New York" by Elizabeth Hawes are wonderful books about the creation of apartment buildings in New York. Add in James Howard Kunstler's "The Geography of Nowhere" about postwar suburban zoning and you will have some great reading if this subject interests you.
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"The apartment and the tenement" tells part of the story right there. From its very beginnings, Manhattan was a city that people had to live in to earn their livelihoods. But, the wealthy have always kept their "real home" outside the "City" - whether that was in "the Village," "Harlem" or further up the Hudson or out to Long Island.
Ms. Cromley is correct in pointing out that City Building codes allowed the construction of 12 story structures at a time when the Croton Reservoir System still provided only water pressure adequate to reach five stories. But, she neglects to point out that the pressurized "standpipe system" fed from the rooftop water tanks that dates from this modification was designed to provide the hook up for the Fire Department that was the "work around" of such limitations. She also neglects to mention that the introduction of fireproof brick, "fire chases" that house all the pipes connecting different floors, and other safety measures, link from this same period. In the earliest apartment houses, such as the Dakota, the space between floors was packed with dirt from Central Park (as was the case with the Dakota), and later cement rubble. And, the 'wet pipe' sprinkler systems later required of commercial structures, and the public corridors and hallways of residential buildings were all developed to address this very real concern.
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The New York City Planning Commission, the part of NYC's government that is supposed to husband the zoning (New York City Zoning Resolution) has largely devolved into an organization that accommodates developer depredations. While the Board of Standards and Appeals was created to make adjustments to the zoning Resolution that some unforeseen 'hardship" might cause. the Commission has made it less necessary by agreeing to allow density in some neighborhoods exceeding the carrying capacity of the infrastructure leading to over stressed and sometimes impassable streets and a transit system having difficulty keeping up with 'progress.'
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There are few things more depressing about this city when discussing the evolution of the apartment, than the evolution of greed when it comes to being able to afford one.
Just saying.
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That was very much affected by the sharp drop in top income tax rates under Reagan. When we moved from Riverdale into Manhattan in 1970, a new 3 bedroom/3 bath apartment on the Upper East Side (with Trump on the top floor, no less) was $550/month. Not cheap but not out of reach for someone who paid himself no more than $50k per year from his business. Most people, even the very comfortable, didn't have the money to speculate in real estate. After Reagan, the building went co-op and my parents flipped their apartment and moved to California.
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'Reganomics' has no doubt played a role in all this, but there's also the New York City Rent Guidelines Board, which is basically comprised of landlords and Real Estate interests that have helped decimate the stock of affordable housing in the past decades and helps to explain the consistent rise in the city's homelessness rate.
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Yes and all the while repeating the canard that it's rent control laws that prevent the building of affordable housing. Decades of cutting away at rent control has wrought only mega-high-rise "residences" with rents in the mid four-digits. It's past time to call the RE industry on this blatant self-serving deception.
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One of my fondest memories is the 5 years I lived in London Terrace Garden Apartments in Chelsea NYC, which took up an entire city block, 23d/24th Streets, 9th/10th Avenues, with an Olympic-size indoor pool, rooftop play area for children, penthouses, drugstore, florist, dry cleaners, hair salon, post office, furriers, the largest apartment building in the world when constructed in 1931, with a large interior garden. In our building (440 W. 24th, Apt 9F) lived artists, politicians, financiers, actors, gamblers, engineers, opera singers, musicians, models, writers, business executives. The doormen, wearing London bobby uniforms, looked after us children as we played hopscotch and jumprope on the sidewalk. On rainy days we roller-skated in the basement. An entire world on one city block.
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Anne - Your memories of London Terrace might be fond, but it has always been considered five separate buildings and has been filed as such, and was never the largest apartment "building" as a single building when it was constructed on the cusp of the Great Depression (which did not hit real estate full force until 1932, three years after the stock market crash of 1929). You are correct in remembering its doormen wearing London bobby uniforms, however. That was one of the items that attracted Prohibition promoter and Cotton Club Owner and gangster, Owney "Killer" Madden to renting the penthouse there. That, along with the fact that he also rented a roost for his flock of racing pigeons on the roof and could keep an eye on his beer brewery nearby. "Mad Dog Killer" Vincent Coll was riddled by machine gun fire at 23 while lured to a phone call in a booth at 314 West 8th Avenue in a drug store named "London Chemist" on February 8, 1932, making the neighborhood safe once again for Owney to walk its streets. This was right after Coll had beat a murder rap and celebrated with a hot dog. Coll had earned his nom de press from his association with Dutch Schultz who was engaged in a 'war' with the beer trade and had shot a child playing on the street with an errant bullet during a gun battle in 1928 with a soldier of Shultz's crew named Rao (yes the same name as associated with the mobbed up restaurant where Rudy Giuliani and Bo like to hang out together). [NY Times Feb. 8, 1932].
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You are incorrect. Read the official history; LT was the largest apartment building (complex if you wish to use this term) in the world. I knew a gangster lived there, because I witnessed a red-haired woman in a lavendar pegnoir pushed from a window fronting on 24th St, catching her throat on a spike as she fell onto the snowy ground below; whispered she was the mistress of a gangster who shoved her to her death. I will always remember the blood in the snow, and us children hurriedly led inside our building. I also well remember VE Day (or was it VJ Day?) when the end of WWII was announced over the radio, and LT residents spilled out into the street, hugging each other though strangers, and thronging to Times Square to celebrate. As a child, I attended The French School on 23d St in first grade, thence Guardian Angel School on 10th Ave until we moved to NJ when I was 11. I studied drama and dance at Greenwich House in the Village on Saturdays, and was a child model for Conover and Grace Downs. About a decade ago, my play The Porch was performed in LT Gardens, a wonderful time.
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Fascinating about London Terrace!
It's true about our old-time gangsters: While I deplore today's drug-dealer gunplay that catches children in its crossfire, I also remember my father telling me about the shootouts he used to see in Sheepshead Bay.
At the very foot of Ocean Parkway, right at the boardwalk, there was even in my day an old, enormously long, gabled house, that was the scene of at least several gangster fights during my dad's childhood, the late 1920s and early 1930s. My dad used to reminisce about such things as he drove me to a Saturday's outing to the Coney Island pony ride and Steeplechase. To this day, I never pass that corner, now housing a tall apartment building, without "seeing" the long house and gangsters pouring out with their gat guns.
That's the thing about Brooklyn -- it's a palimpsest of both my own memories and my family's.
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