New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City (1869-1930)The so-called Great Era of Luxury Apartment Building, 1869 to 1929, marked New York City's evolution from town to city, from the tradition-bound to modernity. In her first book, Hawes, a former New Yorker staff writer, tells the story in an understated, detail-rich style. She ranges from Richard Morris Hunt, the architect whose Paris sojourn shaped his views of urbanization, to the growth of the utopian-influenced cooperative apartment complexes in the 1880s. She offers histories of famous buildings like the Dakota, named in 1881 for its remoteness on the still rural Upper West Side, and the Waldorf-Astoria, ``a microcosm of the urban good life.'' She explains how the subway stimulated apartment building, how architects adapted classic vocabulary for their projects and how real estate agents hyped these new properties. By the 1920s, an apartment ``had become a symbol of the stylish life, '' Hawes writes; in an appendix, she lists the 86 buildings of the era still standing in Manhattan. |
Contents
Old New York 18691879 | 11 |
RICHARD MORRIS HUNT | 25 |
FRENCH FLATS AND OTHER FIRST THOUGHTS | 35 |
Copyright | |
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57th Street 72nd Street aesthetics Age of Innocence American Ansonia apartment buildings apartment hotel apartment house architects architecture artists Astor Beaux-Arts bedrooms Broadway brownstone builders built Central Park West century classical cooperative corner courtyard critics culture Dakota decade decoration designed dining room drawing room duplex Edith Wharton elegant elevator facade fashionable Fifth Avenue fireplace floor French flats gardens grand height Henry Howells Hubert Hunt's kitchen living looked luxury apartment Madison Manhattan mansion marble McKim Mead and White ment modern multiple dwellings neighborhood Osborne palace Paris Park Avenue parlor private house Real Estate Record Renaissance residence residential rich Richard Morris Hunt roof row houses Schwartz and Gross seemed shape social society space Square stories structures studio building Stuyvesant style suites taste tenants tenements tion towers Upper West Side uptown urban Vanderbilt house Villard Houses well-to-do William William Dean Howells York Yorkers