NEW YORK, NEW YORK

HOW THE APARTMENT HOUSE TRANSFORMED THE LIFE OF THE CITY (1869-1929)

by Elizabeth Hawes ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 20, 1993

Hawes's fine book, her first, employs architectural criticism, economic chronicle, and urban sociology to create a picture of how Manhattan turned from a series of pastures broken by single-family dwellings into a breathtaking erector set of multiple dwellings: a shift to modernity as a reliable indicator of ``the workings of the urban mind.'' Prior to 1869, anyone who didn't have to live communally in a single building certainly never would. Ensconced in their brownstones around Gramercy Park, the social elite believed in a lack of ostentation, in tempered privacies. But that would change. An architect like Richard Morris Hunt would introduce the ``French flat'' to New York as an alternative to the residential hotel—and for decades thereafter, apartment living became the choice of the bohemian, artistic, nonconforming crowd—safely removed from Society by its eccentricity. (The entire West Side—considered before the turn of the century akin to living in Montana—started off as blithely self-regulating as it essentially has remained.) But then the great mansions of Vanderbilt, Tiffany, and Villard went up in Midtown, and suddenly blue-blood New York had to cope with display and grandeur—and this in time broke down the walls: Polite people perhaps could live in something visually assuming, ornamented, lush, maybe even overlush. The family would not fall apart if domiciled above another, similar family; the subway made the far reaches of uptown livable; and the rebuilding of the city in an image of multiples began. Hawes valuably includes a list of the great apartment houses still standing—but more valuably still creates a context for how a city imagines itself in space (inextricable from the American city's special problem of staying classless while enforcing social hierarchies), employing the novels of Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells, and a wealth of forgotten socioarchitectural journalism so bracing it's a shame the craft has fallen into disuse. A wonderful book. (Sixty-six photographs, drawings, and floor plans)

Pub Date: April 20, 1993

ISBN: 0-394-55641-0

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION