Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [771]
Many abandoned private ownership altogether and became boarders. As commerce marched into Union Square, the rich decamped northward, and their elegant town houses along lower Fifth and Madison avenues were subdivided and converted into respectable boardinghouses for doctors, lawyers, professors, and smaller merchants. Rooms here might cost from twelve to fifteen dollars a week in 1869. Hotels were another option, and those willing to settle for modest accommodations had a wide choice. By 1869 the construction boom had boosted the total number of metropolitan hotels to between seven and eight hundred, many of which offered rooms for residents as well as for transients. Boardinghouses on side streets offered even cheaper accommodations, which salaried clerks could afford. As Dickens observed on his 1867-68 visit, there were “300 boarding houses in West 14th Street, exactly alike, with 300 young men, exactly alike, sleeping in 300 hall bedrooms, exactly alike, with 300 dress suits, exactly alike, lying on so many chairs, exactly alike, beside the bed.”
But the growing middle class did not like such housing. Respectable people lived in a “home” of their own, not jumbled up with strangers. Multifamily dwellings smacked of tenement life. Boardinghouses, with their centrally cooked and commonly eaten meals, threatened family integrity; wives might mingle promiscuously with others while husbands were off at work. Enforced intimacy mocked middle-class values of family privacy and the sanctity of the home.
The first “apartment houses” were built to solve this spatial and cultural conundrum. New Yorkers had been hearing about so-called French Flats, the grand buildings lining Haussmann’s new boulevards, and most of what they heard was negative. French Flats were too public; they came with a nosy concierge; they lacked most features of a proper Anglo-Saxon home. Some magazine writers did note their advantages: everything was on one floor, eliminating the need to squeeze up and down a brownstone’s narrow stairway; they were more spacious and easier to clean; the nosy concierge looked after things when owners summered out of town. Still, prevailing opinion was opposed. “Gentlemen,” as one of the breed irately put it, “will never consent to live on mere shelves under a common roof!”
It took the combined prestige and power of the city’s most francophiliac architect and a gentleman of unimpeachable social standing to pierce the armor of conventional opinion. Rutherfurd Stuyvesant was as patrician as you could get in New York. His father, Lewis Rutherfurd, was merely a distinguished astronomer. But his mother was a direct descendant of Petrus Stuyvesant and had transmitted the family fortune to Rutherfurd (on the condition that he spurn patrilineality and adopt his mother’s last name). Stuyvesant had admired apartment houses in Paris, and in 1869 he hired Richard Morris Hunt, whom he had met in France, to create one for him on a fourrow-house-wide stretch of 18th Street between Irving Place and Third Avenue. Each of the first four floors had four separate apartments, and the fifth was reserved for artists’ studios. To the astonishment of many, the apartments, overseen by a French-style concierge, were rented immediately, by young couples of impeccable “old Knickerbocker” credentials.
Hunt next constructed a far grander apartment house for Paran Stevens (whose wife’s parties were then scandalizing more staid society matrons). The striking marbletrimmed, mansard-capped, eight-story building, when completed in 1872, occupied the entire south side of 27th Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway and was one of the largest buildings in the city.