New York didn’t invent the apartment. Shopkeepers in ancient Rome lived above the store, Chinese clans crowded into multistory circular tulou, and sixteenth-century Yemenites lived in the mud-brick skyscrapers of Shibam. But New York re-invented the apartment many times over, developing the airborne slice of real estate into a symbol of exquisite urbanity. Sure, we still have our brownstones and our townhouses, but in the popular imagination today’s New Yorker occupies a glassed-in aerie, a shared walk-up, a rambling prewar with walls thickened by layers of paint, or a pristine white loft.
The story of the New York apartment is a tale of need alchemized into virtue. Over and over, the desire for better, cheaper housing has become an instrument of urban destiny. When we were running out of land, developers built up. When we couldn’t climb any more stairs, inventors refined the elevator. When we needed much more room, planners raised herds of towers. And when tall buildings obscured our views, engineers took us higher still.
This architectural evolution has roughly tracked the city’s financial fortunes and economic priorities. The turn-of-the-century Park Avenue duplex represented the apotheosis of the plutocrat; massive postwar projects like Stuyvesant Town embodied the national mid-century drive to consolidate the middle class; and the thin-air penthouses of Trump World Tower capture the millennial resurgence of buccaneering capitalism. You can almost chart income inequality over the years by measuring the height of New York’s ceilings. (...)
The charms of standardization eventually wore thin, and the New York apartment soon experienced a transformation almost as fundamental as it had at the turn of the century. It began when the heirs to the cold-water bohemian culture of Greenwich Village drifted south across Houston Street and discovered a zone of gorgeous dereliction. In the sixties and seventies, the industries that had fueled the city’s growth a century earlier were withering, leaving acres of fallow real estate. At first, nobody was permitted to live in those abandoned factories, but the rents were low and the spaces vast, and artists were no more deterred by legal niceties than they were by graffiti, rodents, and flaking paint. They arrived with their drafting tables, their welding torches, movie cameras, and amplifiers. They scavenged furniture, blasted fumes and music into the night, and gloried in the absence of fussy neighbors. They would demarcate a bedroom by hanging an old sheet.
At a time when urban populations everywhere were leaching to the suburbs, this artists’ colonization had a profound and invigorating effect not just on Soho but on the entire city. The traditional remedy for decay was demolition, but artists demanded the right to stay, their presence attracted art galleries, and a treasury of cast-iron buildings acquired a new purpose. Artists didn’t think of themselves as creating real-estate value, but they did. Few events illustrate the maxim “Be careful what you wish for” better than the Loft Law of 1982, which forced owners to make Soho’s industrial buildings fully habitable without charging the tenants for improvements.
It was a triumph and a defeat. Legal clarity brought another wave of tenants, with more money and higher standards of comfort. As working artists drifted on to cheaper pastures in Long Island City, Williamsburg, and Bushwick, Soho’s post-pioneers renovated their lofts, hiring architects to reinterpret the neighborhood’s industrial rawness, or merge it with cool pop minimalism, or carve the ballroom-size spaces into simulacra of uptown apartments.
Once everyone wanted to be a tycoon, then everyone wanted to be middle-class. Now everyone wanted to be an artist, or live like one. Soho filled up quickly, and the idea of the loft spread, reinterpreted as a marketable token of the unconventional life, promising to lift the curse of the bourgeoisie through the powers of renovation. Realtors began pointing out partition walls that could easily be torn out. Lawyers, dentists, and academics eliminated hallways and dining rooms, folding them into unified, flowing spaces. Happily for those with mixed feelings about the counterculture, loftlike expansiveness overlapped with the open-plan aesthetic of new suburban houses. Whether in imitation of Soho or Scarsdale, the apartment kitchen migrated from the servants’ area to the center of the household, shed its confining walls, and put on display its arsenal of appliances and the rituals of food preparation (not to mention the pileup of dirty crockery). Cooking became a social performance, one that in practice many apartment dwellers routinely skipped in favor of ordering in, going out, or defrosting a package—but at least the theater stood ready.
by Justin Davidson, New York Magazine | Read more:
Photo: Adrian Gaut
The story of the New York apartment is a tale of need alchemized into virtue. Over and over, the desire for better, cheaper housing has become an instrument of urban destiny. When we were running out of land, developers built up. When we couldn’t climb any more stairs, inventors refined the elevator. When we needed much more room, planners raised herds of towers. And when tall buildings obscured our views, engineers took us higher still.This architectural evolution has roughly tracked the city’s financial fortunes and economic priorities. The turn-of-the-century Park Avenue duplex represented the apotheosis of the plutocrat; massive postwar projects like Stuyvesant Town embodied the national mid-century drive to consolidate the middle class; and the thin-air penthouses of Trump World Tower capture the millennial resurgence of buccaneering capitalism. You can almost chart income inequality over the years by measuring the height of New York’s ceilings. (...)
The charms of standardization eventually wore thin, and the New York apartment soon experienced a transformation almost as fundamental as it had at the turn of the century. It began when the heirs to the cold-water bohemian culture of Greenwich Village drifted south across Houston Street and discovered a zone of gorgeous dereliction. In the sixties and seventies, the industries that had fueled the city’s growth a century earlier were withering, leaving acres of fallow real estate. At first, nobody was permitted to live in those abandoned factories, but the rents were low and the spaces vast, and artists were no more deterred by legal niceties than they were by graffiti, rodents, and flaking paint. They arrived with their drafting tables, their welding torches, movie cameras, and amplifiers. They scavenged furniture, blasted fumes and music into the night, and gloried in the absence of fussy neighbors. They would demarcate a bedroom by hanging an old sheet.
At a time when urban populations everywhere were leaching to the suburbs, this artists’ colonization had a profound and invigorating effect not just on Soho but on the entire city. The traditional remedy for decay was demolition, but artists demanded the right to stay, their presence attracted art galleries, and a treasury of cast-iron buildings acquired a new purpose. Artists didn’t think of themselves as creating real-estate value, but they did. Few events illustrate the maxim “Be careful what you wish for” better than the Loft Law of 1982, which forced owners to make Soho’s industrial buildings fully habitable without charging the tenants for improvements.
It was a triumph and a defeat. Legal clarity brought another wave of tenants, with more money and higher standards of comfort. As working artists drifted on to cheaper pastures in Long Island City, Williamsburg, and Bushwick, Soho’s post-pioneers renovated their lofts, hiring architects to reinterpret the neighborhood’s industrial rawness, or merge it with cool pop minimalism, or carve the ballroom-size spaces into simulacra of uptown apartments.
Once everyone wanted to be a tycoon, then everyone wanted to be middle-class. Now everyone wanted to be an artist, or live like one. Soho filled up quickly, and the idea of the loft spread, reinterpreted as a marketable token of the unconventional life, promising to lift the curse of the bourgeoisie through the powers of renovation. Realtors began pointing out partition walls that could easily be torn out. Lawyers, dentists, and academics eliminated hallways and dining rooms, folding them into unified, flowing spaces. Happily for those with mixed feelings about the counterculture, loftlike expansiveness overlapped with the open-plan aesthetic of new suburban houses. Whether in imitation of Soho or Scarsdale, the apartment kitchen migrated from the servants’ area to the center of the household, shed its confining walls, and put on display its arsenal of appliances and the rituals of food preparation (not to mention the pileup of dirty crockery). Cooking became a social performance, one that in practice many apartment dwellers routinely skipped in favor of ordering in, going out, or defrosting a package—but at least the theater stood ready.
by Justin Davidson, New York Magazine | Read more:
Photo: Adrian Gaut
