- Hi, I'm Michael Wyetzner.
And I've been an architect in New York City for 35 years.
Today, I'm gonna break down the architectural details
of some of New York City's most popular apartment layouts.
First up, the brownstone apartment.
So a brownstone is just one house
in a series of row houses along the street
that's actually made out of brownstone
which is a type of sandstone.
So where do you find brownstone?
You find them all over New York.
You find them all over Brooklyn,
the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, Harlem.
They were the residence of choice of developers
in the mid 19th century.
Let's take a look at one at 29, West 88th street.
Quite often, these brownstones were built as developments.
That means they built multiple ones at once.
You could see every other one
has these arch windows at the top floor
that they were all built together.
Each entrance has the same sort of treatment around it.
And every other bay has a bay window.
All that indicates that they were all built together
as one design.
So this row of brownstones has four floors above grade,
one on grade,
and then there's usually a cell below that.
And typically, the main entrance was on, what we call,
the parlor floor or one floor above the ground level.
And there's a big stoop that leads up to it.
Stoop is just a Dutch word for staircase.
Servants usually entered down on the ground floor.
And the family entered on what was called the parlor floor.
And the parlor floor is elevated
just to avoid all of the horse manure
that filled the streets of mid 19th century New York.
So between each individual unit
is what's called a a party wall.
And it's much easier to see from an overhead view.
So one of the main characteristics
of a brownstone apartment though
is that you can only get light from the front or the back
because of these party walls.
You can't get it from the sides
unless, of course, you're the end house on the block.
And as you could see,
each house is set back from the rear,
and it creates this whole rear yard that's over here.
And here's the street.
So New York City's laid out a grid.
So essentially, what you have is, between the avenues,
you have a 200 foot block and then a 60 foot street
and then another 200 foot block and another 60 street.
And so they took that 200 foot block right here.
That's 200 feet.
And then they took a 60 foot street.
And they took that 200 foot block,
and they divided it in half,
and they made a hundred foot deep lots,
and they basically divided those lots into 25 foot slivers.
So that's the basic building block of a New York City block.
And each one of these is 25 feet.
And 200 plus 60 is 260.
And if you multiply that by 20,
you pretty much get a mile,
and that's why 20 New York City blocks
is considered one mile.
So you'll notice in these overhead shots
that there's no alleyways behind these rows of houses.
And that's the reason why you see all the trash
piled up on the front side of the street,
because there was no alleyway to put the trash in the back.
So in 1811, when they laid this out,
people didn't really have that much garbage.
I mean, there was a privy in the backyard.
And you used nearly everything.
Any food that you didn't use went to the livestock.
And people didn't have nearly as much
as what we all have today.
So it's a common site in New York
to see these mountains of garbage along the curbs
every other day of the week.
And it's because we don't have alleyways.
Now let's look at railroad apartments
and tenement buildings.
So a railroad apartment is essentially just an apartment
where one room leads into the next room
like in a railroad car,
you go from one car to the next.
As an overhead view,
you have one room leading into another room.
So if this was the flat, like that,
there'd be one room here and another room here,
another room here.
So if I'm in this room,
in order to get to any other room,
I've gotta pass through each room
if I wanted to get to the back room.
Where in a typical apartment,
there would be a corridor on the side,
and you would circulate into each room
from that corridor, like that.
Okay. Let's take a look at one at 39, Henry Street.
Okay. This is a building that was built
in the late 1800s on Henry Street on the Lower East Side.
My grandmother was born in this building in 1899.
And the building is still there.
At that time, the street would've been filled
with push carts and horses and throngs of people.
Now it's just cars parked.
So tenement houses were built for the lower classes,
mainly for immigrant groups.
So imagine in these earliest apartments,
having a family living in each one of these rooms,
it would be very crowded,
and there'd be absolutely no privacy.
At grounder level, that's called enfilade.
And, you know, you could see that in famous museums
where you go from one gallery to the next gallery
without going out into a corridor.
But here, at a much smaller scale.
It's how the apartments were set up.
And usually, there were just like three rooms.
There was a bedroom, a kitchen,
and maybe there was another room between them.
Quite often, it was just two rooms.
So originally, when these were built,
a lot of these rooms didn't have any light and air.
So light and air means natural light
and operable windows to let fresh air into the rooms.
A lot of these apartment had rooms with no windows at all
and were inhabited by multiple families.
And so obviously, they were breeding grounds for disease.
But at the time, there were no laws about that.
It wasn't until about 1901 that New York City passed a law
that said you must include air in these rooms.
And so they created what's called these air shafts.
And if we look at an overhead shot,
you could see right here
that these air shafts were then included,
and they're very narrow.
So the air shafts added light and air
to a lot of these apartments.
But at the same time,
they also created other problems,
because trash would pile up in them,
and stagnant water would be there,
and it would create a whole other source for disease.
But by inserting these air shafts,
you created what's called a dumbbell plan,
because the shape that was left
was sort of shaped like a dumbbell.
So early on, an entire family of six or eight people
would live just in one room.
And there was a famous book by Jacob Riis called
How the Other Half Lives.
So people's eyes were open to the sort of squalor
that people were living in.
And that was what prompted change.
And when these apartments were built, there was no plumbing.
So there was still outhouses in the backyard.
And when that law was passed for the air shaft,
they also insisted
that you had to have a toilet in each building,
and no more than 20 people could share that toilet,
which is quite astounding today.
A lot of these apartments,
people wonder why were there bathtubs in the kitchen.
And there were bathtubs in the kitchen,
because there was no other place to put them.
The apartments were so small,
they didn't have room for a proper bathroom.
And so the kitchen, if it had any plumbing,
already had a sink,
and so it made sense
that that's where the bathtub would go,
next to the existing plumbing.
Even today, a lot of those apartments
still have that weird arrangement of plumbing.
And you could see bathtubs still in some kitchens.
People did all sorts of elaborate things
with these bathtubs.
They had these coverings
so that it became more counter space.
And then they would take that covering off
and use it as a bathtub.
So as time were on, starting in the 1930s,
conditions were so deplorable in these tenements
that a new paradigm was invented.
And the idea was to create these new housing projects
that were built around courtyards
that were filled with light and air.
And the intention was to provide much healthier living
for the working class people of New York City.
So a lot of these tenements were just knocked down,
and they built these housing projects.
Today, housing projects have this terrible reputation,
but that's because all the funding for them
has been systematically cut off,
and so they've been starved,
and they have no money for basic repairs.
And because of that,
they deteriorate and fall apart.
And people are left living in conditions
that were almost as bad as the tenement apartments
that they were made to replace.
So railroad apartments still exist.
But quite often today,
the bathrooms have been added to them.
But because you have to walk from one room to another,
privacy is really compromised.
Next, the classic six layout.
So where do you find the classic six?
Typically, they're found on the Upper West Side
or the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
They're called classic sixes,
because, typically, there were six rooms.
Let's look at one building called the Dartmouth
at 509, Cathedral Parkway in Manhattan.
We're just gonna talk about this apartment here on the left.
This one's actually a classic seven,
which is another typical kind of apartment.
And as you could see, there's a main living room
or a parlor,
a separate and distinct dining room, a kitchen.
Here, it's three bedrooms and then a maid's room.
And that's what makes the seven.
Or you subtract one of those bedrooms,
and it becomes a classic six.
You should note though that the kitchens are actually
much smaller in these apartments originally.
And that's because really only the maid used the kitchen.
Most families in this station had servants.
And the maid had their own room,
and they were live-in,
and they cooked the meals for them.
The other thing you should note
is the maid had her own bathroom.
And then there was one bathroom
shared by the rest of the family.
And the other thing you should note is that
they typically had very little closet space.
And that's because when most of these were built,
which I would say is in the 1920s,
some were built a little before,
some were built a little after.
But the 1920s with a heyday of this type of apartment.
People just had a lot less.
They didn't have huge wardrobes.
And they didn't have a lot of possessions.
And so subsequently,
they didn't need nearly as much storage space.
So what was really nice about these apartments
is quite often, they had a really gracious foyer.
And then there was a corridor that led to all the rooms.
Unlike a railroad apartment
where you'd go from room to room to room,
here, you'd step out into a beautifully detailed corridor
and go from room to room in your own apartment.
A lot of these buildings were built
before current zoning laws
where today windows facing one another like this
would have to be 30 feet apart.
Here, it appears it's less than 20,
which makes the rooms down at the end of these courtyards
somewhat dark, especially if you're on a lower floor.
But again, today it would be much wider,
and they'd be much brighter.
So what prompted these buildings actually
or what helped prompt these buildings
was the invention of the elevator.
So all of a sudden, it became worthwhile
to build multi-unit apartment buildings
on 10 or 12 stories high.
And without the elevator, they couldn't have done that.
Before that,
the highest you could go with six stories with a walk up.
And now, once the elevator was invented,
you could go up as high as you need to be.
But typically, they built 10 to 15 stories.
I mean, this was a new style of living
that sort of the Dakota helped bring about.
And elevators were part of that new style.
And that technology was instrumental
in creating this new style of living.
So here's a view of the exterior of the Dartmouth.
And you could see that narrow courtyard
that we were talking about before,
and how those windows would be kind of dark
because of the shadow.
The other thing you might wanna notice is that
the air conditioning units,
which is also a ubiquitous thing
in New York City apartment living,
because these apartments were so old,
there was no air conditioning yet.
And so in a modern apartment now,
there's usually a unit under your window,
like in a hotel,
where you could heat and cool from the same unit.
Back then, these apartments were only built with heat.
It was steam heat,
and it was very ample, and still is.
New York City is known for the super warm apartments.
But air conditioning wasn't something that they had,
and so window units became the way
that people cool their apartments in the summer.
Next up, loft apartments.
So loft apartments really started in Soho
which means south of Houston Street in Manhattan.
So essentially, loft apartments are just wide open spaces
with really big windows.
Originally, all these loft apartments
were actually manufacturing spaces.
As manufacturing moved out of Manhattan,
these spaces were empty,
and landlords didn't know what to do with them.
And artists started moving in,
'cause they were like,
hey, these spaces are great for making art.
They're big, they're filled with light.
What could be better? They're rough.
I don't have to worry about keeping it clean.
And so landlords were happy
to have the artists come in and move in,
'cause they were at least collecting some rent
on what was before just vacant and empty spaces.
A lot of them were done in these beautiful,
old cast iron buildings
which were built in the late 1800s.
Cast iron was a new technology at the time,
and it allowed you to make these really big windows.
You could see the technology had changed,
and now we have big sheets of glass.
And it created these beautiful light-filled spaces.
So here's a great example of one of these lofts.
This is a building that was owned
by the famous artist and critic Donald Judd.
And you could see it's a cast iron building
with these really nice big windows
letting light into all these floors.
So these artists moved into these spaces,
because these spaces became available at the same time
that art and paintings were getting bigger and bigger.
No longer were people just doing easel paintings.
Now they were doing these big wall paintings.
And these spaces were perfect for that.
And so these artists started fixing all these spaces up
and putting in plumbing and putting in heating.
Eventually, they lobbied Albany to change the laws
to allow people to live in these areas
that were originally zoned for manufacturing.
And you actually had to register with the state
as an artist in residence to be able to live there.
And then they would actually have a sign out front
that said AIR which meant artist in residence,
and so the firemen would know
that people were actually living there
if case there was a fire in the building.
All these artists made all these great living spaces.
And then all these galleries moved in
to show the art that these artists were creating.
And it became this great vibrant arts community.
But then as soon as that happened,
people with much greater wealth
started to move in and buy these lofts,
'cause they were such great spaces to live in.
And eventually, that pushed all the artists out.
They could no longer afford to live in these spaces.
And the whole neighborhood changed almost overnight.
All those galleries just got up and moved
in the early 90s and went to Chelsea.
And so what's left in Soho now
is just a lot of really wealthy people and very fancy shops
instead of the galleries and bookstores
that used to be on all the streets there.
So the exteriors are still intact,
and they still are beautiful,
filled with all these cast iron
and industrial-looking buildings.
But what happens inside them is now completely different.
Currently, the city is talking about rezoning yet again Soho
to allow more inclusive,
affordable housing and new buildings.
And the people who live there are against it
for a variety of reasons.
One being they don't want to destroy
the beautiful historic character of the neighborhood.
But the other and a more cynical reason
is I think people are afraid
that their real estate values will go down.
Studio apartments.
So what do people think of
when you say studio apartment today?
Well, usually it just means a one-room apartment
that used to be called efficiency apartments.
But it's just one-room,
and the kitchen is sort of attached to that room.
It's rarely even separate.
Obviously, there's a bathroom.
But it's just your bedroom,
your living room and your dining room all in one.
And if you need to live alone,
it's probably the least expensive way to live.
So what I love about the term studios is that
it originally came from super rich artists
who came from really wealthy families in the late 1800s
who built these studio apartments for them.
But in fact, they were multi-room,
double-height, really posh, beautiful spaces.
But they call them studios,
because it was like an art studio,
and you were intended to make art in them.
Let's take a look at one of the most famous studios,
Hotel Des Artistes.
This is located just off Central Park West
on Manhattan's West Side.
So even before lofts,
these were the original residences
that were built for artists in New York City.
What's interesting about Hotel Des Artistes,
it was built by a group of artists who had gotten together
and built this 20-story building
with this sort of Gothic feel to it,
as you can see here in this image
and with the pointed arches.
And what they did was
they dedicated 10 floors to studios for making art
and another 10 for just typical apartments.
And yet, even as beautiful as these are,
they still have the ubiquitous
window air conditioning units.
And so you could see in this photograph,
the double-height windows
that the double-height studios are in.
And these are fantastic spaces.
And there's a number of examples of these.
There's one on West 77th.
There's others on West 67th.
And these were beautiful apartments
intended for people from really wealthy families
who had an interest in art.
And then over time,
the real estate industry took that term,
'cause it had this certain romantic flavor to it,
and applied it to one-room apartments,
because it had this very Bohemian feel
that the one-room studio
that artists inhabited could be similar.
But the one-room studios
that the real estate industry were describing
were actually in much more modern buildings
that had much lower ceilings.
They were just a single room
of just a few hundred square feet.
They weren't anything
compared to the original studio apartments
that were built in New York City.
So today studio apartments aren't nearly as grand
as what they started out as,
but they're still a very efficient way to live.
So there you go.
Those are some of the most popular apartment types
in New York City
and how they came to be
and how they shaped the way we live today.
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