Affordable Housing Institute : US

If the American apartment has a birthplace, it is New York City, specifically the island of Manhattan.

 

Manhattan, 1764: it all started here

 

By ‘apartment’, I mean specifically the high-rise flat occupied by choice not economic necessity. 

 

High-rise, TriBeCa

 

(The birthplace of American affordable housing is Boston … but that’s another story.)

 

Before Manhattan apartments, the rich simply demanded their own personal dwellings, as evocatively described by Steven Gaines in his tell-all gossip-fest about Manhattan housing (including co-ops, about which I previously posted), The Sky’s the Limit:

 

Communal living was unacceptable in the rigid formality of nineteenth-century Manhattan, where unrelated people did not live together under one roof, except in tenements.  The rich lived in their own houses, always, and even the upper middle class owned or rented modest houses.  Two families occasionally subdivided Manhattan brownstones, but it was looked down upon.  At worst, if unmarried or from out of town, respectable people lived in a boarding house, of which there were 10,000 in 1869.   (Page 75)

 

Until the mid-twentieth century, the rooming house was a perfectly acceptable alternative for those of no family and modest means, so the city consisted of four tiers of housing:

 

• Affluent mansion houses (including New York’s magnificent multi-story brownstones).
• Smaller homes on the outskirts (such as Brooklyn, which until 1898 was an independent city).
• Rooming houses and their equivalent. 
• Tenements, which were little more than stacked slums.

 

As Jacob Riis wrote, the city filled and over-filled:

 

Still the pressure of the crowds did not abate, and in the old garden where the stolid Dutch burgher grew his tulips or early cabbages a rear house was built, generally of wood, two stories high at first. Presently it was carried lop another story, and another. Where two families had lived ten moved in. The front house followed suit, if the brick walls were strong enough. The question was not always asked, judging from complaints made by a contemporary witness, that the old buildings were “often carried up to a great height without regard to the strength of the foundation walls.” It was rent the owner was after; nothing was said in the contract about either the safety or the comfort of the tenants. The garden gate no longer swung on its rusty hinges. The shell-paved walk had become an alley; what the rear house had left of the garden, a “court.”  Plenty such are yet to be found in the Fourth Ward, with here and there one of the original rear tenements.

 

Tenement yards, New York CIty

 

As Gaines vividly describes it:

 

These filthy tenements — so called because the first ones were originally single-family homes that had been subdivided into ‘tenant houses’ by greedy landlords — had for the previous fifty years absorbed over 1.5 million hapless newcomers to America. 

 

Jacob Riis, Five cent lodging, 1889

 

They were located in greatest density on the Lower East Side — incidentally on land owned by John Jacob Astor, who was the city’s biggest slumlords of the nineteenth century — but eventually ran by the East Side of the city, with pockets on the West Side, too. 

 

By 1900, as discussed in Bob Bruegmann’s book Sprawl, the Lower East Side was probably the most densely settled place on Earth, most of it in these squalid tenements:

 

They typically housed twenty different families who shared one toilet, and in winter influenza swept through the freezing rooms and thinned the population for the next year’s wave of newcomers. 

 

For some, tenements were at least an improvement over housing for the poor prior to the 1850s, when 20,000 New Yorkers were literally submerged and lived in cellars or unheated shacks in and around Five Points (new Foley Square), New York’s notorious first and worst slum. 

 

The Old Brewery, Five Points

(setting for Martin Scorcese’s Gangs of New York)

 

In this, they were not so very different from the current inhabitants of Nairobi’s Kibera and similar spontaneous communities around the major cities in fusion countries:

 

By 1890, when the police reporter and photographer Jacob Riis published his watershed book about the degradation of tenement life, How the Other Half Lives, there were over 32,000 tenement houses in New York with 1.25 million people living in them.  [40 people to a tenement. -- Ed.]

 

Children sleeping on Mulberry Street, 1889

 

The legacy of New York tenement life is so haunting that there is now the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a tribute to the millions of immigrant Americans who escaped them.  (Pages 72-73)

 

Gotham Court, 1890, Jacob Riis

 

The word itself comes from:

 

The French word appartements, as they were called in the Palace of Versailles, where members of court were given their own private suite of rooms in which to live.   (Page 75)

 

Though there was plenty of Manhattan housing demand, the apartment as we know it required a technological breakthrough:

 

Apartment-house living got a literal boost when the first elevator — introduced by Otis in New York at the Crystal Palace of 1853 — was put into operation in the seven-story-tall Equitable Life Assurance Building.  (Page 75)

 

Elisha Otis demonstrating his elevator

 

The elevator was a critical invention that turned desirability literally upside down.  Before the elevator, buildings went no more than six stories, and the highest floors were the worst; after him, the highest were best.

 

Huge demand plus discontinuity in supply cost equals housing boom:

 

In 1869 there was one rental apartment house; in 1872 there were two; and in 1874 the first apartment building ever to cost $1 million was built on Twenty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue.  By 1885 there were 300 apartment buildings.   (Page 77)

 

Why did the apartment flourish first in New York City?  Several ‘perfect storm’ elements combine in Manhattan:

 

1. A city’s economy.   With the 1825 Erie Canal, New York City assumed economic primacy in America, an engine that never stopped working, especially during the Civil War.
2. Demographic growth (through Ellis Island) drove demand upwards, especially in the mid-nineteenth century.
3. Hard boundaries to expansion.  Manhattan is an island, settled steadily from south to north, reachable at the time only by ferry.  (The Brooklyn Bridge would not open until 1883.)

 

Brooklyn Bridge under construction in 1881

4. Granite foundation.  Almost unique among Eastern seaboard cities, Manhattan is solid granite, the perfect foundation for building upwards.
5. No sanctuaries from development.  Unlike Beijing (with its Forbidden City) or Tokyo (with its Imperial Palace), Manhattan was from the beginning a blank slate on which could be scored grid lines, its leaders willing to tear out the railroad tracks to make Park Avenue.  Even today, the city is seemingly a continuous construction site.

 

“Give me your renters, your …”

 

New York City was also the birthplace (and is today the main redoubt) of the housing co-operative:

 

The original intent of the co-operative plan was actually quite utopian.  It was the idea of a forty-nine year old architect named Philip Hubert, who first proposed it in a pamphlet he published in 1879 as a way to life a million immigrants out of more than 20,000 tenement houses, the great shame of the city.  (Page 72)

 

Even today, New York City continues to lead American innovations in multifamily living and urban land use management, such as air rights.

 

Thus it’s entirely fitting that in his four-volume masterwork, Cities in Flight, James Blish told his story of galactic migrant cities from the perspective of the mayor of a flying city who once posed to a fellow mayor this riddle:

 

“What city has two names twice?”

 

Here’s to you, New York City.

 

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