Product Description

Recounts New York City's transformation from a provincial, Victorian town to a bustling city, focusing on the architectural emergence of the apartment building after the Civil War and its influence.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1290352 in Books
• Published on: 1994-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 285 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Originally a piece for The New Yorker , this is the story of the luxury apartment house in New York and how a city of single-family row houses became a metropolis of skyscraper mansions. The story begins with the first appearance of French flats just after the Civil War and takes us through the development of "communal palaces" like the Osborne and Dakota apartments that rivaled the opulence of the robber barons' mansions. A classical urbanism emerged, exemplified by the Apthorp and Belnord apartments, that was inspired by the City Beautiful movement of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. This exuberant era ended with the Crash of '29, and the subsequent production of Art Deco apartment towers. Hawes's account focuses exclusively on the development of luxury buildings and neglects the innovations taking place in other classes of housing. Nonetheless, this is a lively, nonacademic history; recommended to general and informed readers.
- Thomas P.R. Nugent, New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
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) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Architectural history of the New York apartment house
Elizabeth Hawes traces the development of the New York apartment house, beginning with the Stuyvesant (1869), and then discussing the earliest middle-class and upper-class buildings of the 1870s. As Hawes explains how design evolved through the decades, she examines such classic buildings as the Villard Houses (1885), the Dakota (1884), and the Osborne (1885), as well as others of lesser fame. My favorite chapter is the 13th (of 14 chapters), in which Hawes compares three famous architects of the 1920s: Roth, Carpenter, and Candella. As the title indicates, the book's coverage ends at 1930. The author has done more than merely catalogue buildings; instead, she shows how changes in design reflect changes in society and an effort to learn from past design errors. There are 5 floor plans and approximately 50 photographs. As much as I enjoyed this book, I prefer Cromley's 'Alone Together,' which struck me as a slightly better treatment of the same material, with more illustrations. However, Hawes' 'New York, New York' covers the 1920s, a pivotal decade in New York apartment architecture, which was not covered in Cromley's book.

History of Residential Architecture in New York City
This book relates the history of residential architecture in New York City from 1869-1930, the period covering the transition from single family houses to apartment dwellings. The book is into four sections organized by era: Old New York (1869-1879), the Gilded Age (1880-1899), the New Metropolis (1900-1919), and the Manhattan Skyline (1920-1930). According to Hawes, an architect named Richard Morris Hunt was the leader in bringing apartment buildings to New York. Hunt had been educated in Paris, where apartment buildings were the norm. Indeed, when he began designing apartment buildings for New York, they were first called "French flats." Hawes takes us on a tour through neighborhoods where the new apartment buildings were being constructed, and she also describes how the millionaires living on Fifth Avenue were determined to keep apartments out of their neighborhood. She introduces the architects of the time, and provides detailed descriptions of both buildings and the interior layouts of the new luxury apartments. This book is very much about New York City--there is little, if any, discussion of architectural changes in other American cites. The book is amply illustrated with high-quality black-and-white period photographs. End material includes an appendix of extant buildings of the style described in the text, endnotes, selected references, and an index.

Throughout the book, the focus is on housing for the rich and the upper-middle class, those who kept a social distance between themselves and the lower classes who lived in tenements. The book chronicles not only the architects of the time and the buildings they designed, but also how high society gradually accepted and even warmed up to the idea of living in multiple-family dwellings. In order to make the new apartment buildings attractive to upper-class tenants, architects included every luxury they could think of, from ample servants' quarters, to independent electrical power stations and cold storage rooms.

Though the book is well-researched, I'm still not entirely convinced by several of Hawes; claims, however. The book is sub-titled "How the apartment house transformed the life of the city." While the apartment house was certainly a new way of living for the rich, I suspect that the majority of the population did not belong to the upper classes, and did not have access to these buildings. What's more, the shift in architectural style that Hawes describes doesn't seem to be of the type that would filter down to the masses, so it's hard to see how these new luxury apartment houses transformed the life of the city beyond the rich. If the life of the city actually was transformed, it's hard to discover the details in this book, since the book focuses more on the architects and their buildings than on cultural change. Hawes also seems to be at least implicitly claiming that it was the new architecture style that convinced people to live in multiple-family dwellings. She notes that the population of New York exploded during this time period. If so, then land values must have been increasing as well, and there must have been quite a bit of pressure to use the land more efficiently. Hawes notes that as land values went up, some of the very rich finally sold their land, and had the exact layout of their houses duplicated on the uppermost floor of the new buildings that went onto the plots. This suggests that perhaps the shift from single family houses to apartment dwellings may have been inevitable rather than simply following fashion, especially given the limited amount of land that was available in the island setting of the city.