| At the time of Richard Morris Hunt's 1869 Stuyvesant Apartments, so often called the first New York middle class apartment house, there were already years of multi-family living in the city. Subdivided and boarding houses, hotels, tenements and second class dwellings with flats had provided housing for a great range of income levels including families of the middle class. Apartment houses grew in both size and reputation in 1870s New York, and included residential hotels, bachelor flats and French Flats. There was a surge of such building beginning in the 1870s and rising during the 80s and 90s to almost totally supplant new construction of private houses as a middle class dwelling type in New York.;Questions of physical design and social mores combined in the development of acceptable apartment buildings, leading, by 1905, to an articulated set of 'proper' planning practices for buildings as a whole and for individual family units. Modern equipment such as central heating, elevators, bath and kitchen equipment combined with telephone, refrigeration and laundry systems to create a fully serviced dwelling in which the economies of collective use made modern life a reality.;New York apartments were designed at first hesitantly since tenants' needs were not very clear and architects lacked experience with the problems of multi-family middle class housing. During this period, European models provided a useful reference point for both architects and tenants who saw the potentials and picked out the faults in apartment life through looking at Paris, Vienna and London dwelling types. As architects gained experience through the 1880s and 90s and shared information, so too did tenants whose needs became clearer as their expectations became more realistic. |
