Architect Breaks Down 5 of the Most Common New York Apartments | Architectural Digest

hi i'm michael weitzner and i've been an architect in new york city for 35 years today i'm going to break down the architectural details of some of new york city's most popular apartment layouts first up the brownstone apartment so a brownstone is just one house in a series of row houses along the street that's actually made out of brownstone which is a type of sandstone so where do you find brownstones you find them all over new york you find them all over brooklyn the upper east side the upper west side harlem they were the residents of choice of developers in the mid 19th century let's take a look at one at 29 west 88th street quite often these brownstones were built as developments that means they built multiple ones at once you could see every other one has these arch windows at the top floor that they were all built together each entrance has the same sort of treatment around it and every other bay has a bay window all that indicates that they were all built together as one design so this row of brownstones has four floors above grade one on grade and then there's usually a seller below that and typically the main entrance was on what we call the parlor floor or one floor above the ground level and there's a big stoop that leads up to it stoop is just a dutch word for staircase servants usually entered down on the ground floor and the family entered on what was called the parlor floor and the parlor floor was elevated just to avoid all of the horse manure that filled the streets of mid-19th century new york so between each individual unit is what's called a party wall and it's much easier to see from an overhead view so one of the main characteristics of a brownstone apartment though is that you can only get light from the front or the back because of these party walls you can't get it from the sides unless of course you're the end house on the block and as you can see each house is set back from the rear and it creates this whole rear yard that's over here and here's the street so new york city's laid out our grid so essentially what you have is between the avenues you have a 200 foot block and then a 60-foot street and then another 200-foot block and another 60 street and so they took that 200-foot block right here that's 200 feet and then they took a 60-foot street and they took that 200-foot block and they divided it in half and they made 100 foot deep lots and they basically divided those lots into 25 foot slivers so that's the basic building block of a new york city block and each one of these is 25 feet and 200 plus 60 is 260 and if you multiply that by 20 you pretty much get a mile and that's why 20 new york city blocks is considered one mile so you'll notice in these overhead shots that there's no alleyways behind these rows of houses and that's the reason why you see all the trash piled up on the front side of the street because there was no alleyway to put the trash in the back so in 1811 when they laid this out people didn't really have that much garbage i mean there was a privy in the backyard and you used nearly everything any food that you didn't use went to the livestock and people didn't have nearly as much as what we all have today so it's a common site in new york to see these mountains of garbage along the curbs every other day of the week and it's because we don't have alleyways now let's look at railroad apartments and tenement buildings so a railroad apartment is essentially just an apartment where one room leads into the next room like in a railroad car you go from one car to the next as an overhead view you have one room leading into another room so if this was the flat like that there'd be one room here and another room here another room here so if i'm in this room in order to get to any other room i've got to pass through each room if i wanted to get to the back room where in a typical apartment there would be a corridor on the side and you would circulate into each room from that corridor like that okay let's take a look at one at 39 henry street okay this is a building that was built in the late 1800s on henry street on the lower east side my grandmother was born in this building in 1899 and the building is still there at that time the street would have been filled with push carts and horses and throngs of people now it's just cars parked so tournament houses were built for the lower classes mainly for immigrant groups so imagine in these earliest apartments having a family living in each one of these rooms it would be very crowded and there'd be absolutely no privacy on a grander level that's called enfalad and you know you could see that in famous museums where you go from one gallery to the next gallery without going out into a corridor but here at a much smaller scale it's how the apartments were set up and usually there were just like three rooms there was a bedroom a kitchen and maybe there was another room between them quite often it was just two rooms so originally when these were built a lot of these rooms didn't have any light and air so light and air means natural light and operable windows to let fresh air into the rooms a lot of these apartment had rooms with no windows at all and were inhabited by multiple families and so obviously they were breeding grounds for disease but at the time there were no laws about that it wasn't until about 1901 that new york city passed a law that said you must include air in these rooms and so they created what's called these air shafts and if we look at an overhead shot you could see right here that these air shafts were then included and they're very narrow so the air shafts added light and air to a lot of these apartments but at the same time they also created other problems because trash would pile up in them and stagnant water would be there and it would create a whole other source for disease but by inserting these air shafts you created what's called a dumbbell plan because the shape that was left was sort of shaped like a dumbbell so early on an entire family of six or eight people would live just in one room and there was a famous book by jacob reese called how the other half lives so people's eyes were open to the sort of squalor that people were living in and that was what prompted change and when these apartments were built there was no plumbing so there were still outhouses in the backyard and when that law was passed for the air shaft they also insisted that you had to have a toilet in each building and no more than 20 people could share that toilet which is quite astounding today a lot of these apartments people wonder why were there bathtubs in the kitchen and there were bathtubs in the kitchen because there was no other place to put them the apartments were so small they didn't have room for a proper bathroom and so the kitchen if it had any plumbing already had a sink and so it made sense that that's where the bathtub would go next to the existing plumbing even today a lot of those apartments still have that weird arrangement of plumbing and you could see bathtubs still in some kitchens people did all sorts of elaborate things with these bathtubs they had these coverings so that it became more counter space and then they would take that covering off and use it as a bathtub so it's time we're on starting in the 1930s conditions were so deplorable in these tenements that a new paradigm was invented and the idea was to create these new housing projects that were built around courtyards that were filled with light and air and the intention was to provide much healthier living for the working class people of new york city so a lot of these tenements were just knocked down and they built these housing projects today housing projects have this terrible reputation but that's because all the funding for them has been systematically cut off and so they've been starved and they have no money for basic repairs and because of that they deteriorate and fall apart and people are left living in conditions that were almost as bad as the tenement apartments that they were made to replace so railroad apartments still exist but quite often today the bathrooms have been added to them but because you have to walk from one room to another privacy is really compromised next the classic six layout so where do you find the classic six typically they're found on the upper west side or the upper east side of manhattan they're called classic sixes because typically there were six rooms let's look at one building called the dartmouth at 509 cathedral parkway in manhattan we're just going to talk about this apartment here on the left this one's actually a classic seven which is another typical kind of apartment and as you can see there's a main living room or a parlor a separate and distinct dining room a kitchen here it's three bedrooms and then a maids room and that's what makes the seven or you subtract one of those bedrooms and it becomes a classic six you should note though that the kitchens are actually much smaller in these apartments originally and that's because really only the maid used the kitchen most families in this station had servants and the maid had their own room and they were live in and they cooked the meals for them the other thing you should note is the maid had her own bathroom and then there was one bathroom shared by the rest of the family and the other thing you should note is that they typically had very little closet space and that's because when most of these were built which i would say is in the 1920s some were built a little before some were built a little after but the 1920s were the heyday of this type of apartment people just had a lot less they didn't have huge wardrobes and they didn't have a lot of possessions and so subsequently they didn't need nearly as much storage space so what was really nice about these apartments is quite often they had a really gracious foyer and then there was a carter that led to all the rooms unlike a railroad apartment where you'd go from room to room to room here you'd step out into a beautifully detailed corridor and go from room to room in your own apartment a lot of these buildings were built before current zoning laws where today windows facing one another like this would have to be 30 feet apart here it appears it's less than 20 which makes the rooms down at the end of these courtyards somewhat dark especially if you're on a lower floor but again today it would be much wider and they'd be much brighter so what prompted these buildings actually or what helped prompt these buildings was the invention of the elevator so all of a sudden it became worthwhile to build multi-unit apartment buildings on 10 or 12 stories high and without the elevator they couldn't have done that before that the highest you could go was six stories with a walk up and now once the elevator was invented you could go up as high as you need to be but typically they built 10 to 15 stories i mean this was a new style of living that sort of the dakota helped bring about and elevators were part of that new style and that technology was instrumental in creating this new style of living so here's a view of the exterior of the dartmouth and you could see that narrow courtyard that we were talking about before and how those windows would be kind of dark because of the shadow the other thing you might want to notice is that the air conditioning units which is also a ubiquitous thing in new york city apartment living because these apartments were so old there was no air conditioning yet and so in a modern apartment now there's usually a unit under your window like in a hotel where you could heat and cool from the same unit back then these apartments were only built with heat it was steam heat and it was very ample and still is new york city is known for the super warm apartments but air conditioning wasn't something that they had and so window units became the way that people cool their apartments in the summer next up loft apartments so loft apartments really started in soho which means south of houston street in manhattan so essentially loft apartments are just wide open spaces with really big windows originally all these loft apartments were actually manufacturing spaces as manufacturing moved out of manhattan these spaces were empty and landlords didn't know what to do with them and artists started moving in because they were like hey these spaces are great for making art they're big they're filled with light what could be better they're rough i don't have to worry about keeping it clean and so landlords were happy to have the artists come in and move in because they were at least collecting some rent on what was before just vacant and empty spaces a lot of them were done in these beautiful old cast iron buildings which were built in the late 1800s cast iron was a new technology at the time and it allowed you to make these really big windows you could see the technology had changed and now we have big sheets of glass and it created these beautiful light filled spaces so here's a great example of one of these lofts this is a building that was owned by the famous artist and critic donald judd and you could see it's a cast iron building with these really nice big windows letting light into all these floors so these artists move into these spaces because these spaces became available at the same time that art and paintings were getting bigger and bigger no longer were people just doing easel paintings now they were doing these big wall paintings and these spaces were perfect for that and so these artists started fixing all these spaces up and putting in plumbing and putting in heating eventually they lobbied albany to change the laws to allow people to live in these areas that were originally zoned for manufacturing and you actually had to register with the state as an artist in residence to be able to live there and then they would actually have a sign out front that said air which meant artist in residence and so the firemen would know that people were actually living there in case there was a fire in the building all these artists made all these great living spaces and then all these galleries moved in to show the art that these artists were creating and it became this great vibrant arts community but then as soon as that happened people with much greater wealth started to move in and buy these lofts because they were such great spaces to live in and eventually that pushed all the artists out and they could no longer afford to live in these spaces and the whole neighborhood changed almost overnight all those galleries just got up and moved in the early 90s and went to chelsea and so what's left in soho now is just a lot of really wealthy people and very fancy shops instead of the galleries and bookstores that used to be on all the streets there so the exteriors are still intact and they still are beautiful filled with all these cast iron and industrial looking buildings but what happens inside them is now completely different currently the city is talking about rezoning yet again soho to allow more inclusive affordable housing and new buildings and the people who live there are against it for a variety of reasons one being they don't want to destroy the beautiful historic character of the neighborhood but the other and uh a more cynical reason is i think people are afraid that their real estate values will go down studio apartments so what do people think of when you say studio apartment today well usually it just means a one-room apartment they used to be called efficiency apartments but it's just one room and the kitchen is sort of attached to that room it's rarely even separate obviously there's a bathroom but it's just your bedroom your living room and your dining room all in one and if you need to live alone it's probably the least expensive way to live so what i love about the term studios is that it originally came from super rich artists who came from really wealthy families in the late 1800s who built these studio apartments for them but in fact they were multi-room double height really posh beautiful spaces but they call them studios because it was like an art studio and you were intended to make art in them let's take a look at one of the most famous studios hotel days artiste this is located just off central park west on manhattan's west side so even before lofts these were the original residences that were built for artists in new york city what's interesting about hotel des artists it was built by a group of artists who had gotten together and built this 20-story building with this sort of gothic feel to it as you can see here in this image with the pointed arches and what they did was they dedicated 10 floors to studios for making art and another 10 for just typical apartments and yet even as beautiful as these are they still have the ubiquitous window air conditioning units and so you could see in this photograph the double height windows that the double height studios are in and these are fantastic spaces and there's a number of examples of these there's one on west 77th there's others on west 67th and these were beautiful apartments intended for people from really wealthy families who had an interest in art and then over time the real estate industry took that term because it had this certain romantic flavor to it and applied it to one room apartments because it had this very bohemian feel that the one room studio that artists inhabited could be similar but the one room studios that the real estate industry were describing were actually in much more modern buildings that had much lower ceilings they were just a single room of just a few hundred square feet they weren't anything compared to the original studio apartments that were built in new york city so today studio apartments aren't nearly as grand as what they started out as but they're still a very efficient way to live so there you go those are some of the most popular apartment types in new york city and how they came to be and how they shape the way we live today [Music]

Channel: Architectural Digest

Views: 2,080,551

Keywords: apartment, apartments, arch digest, architectural digest, city living, citylife, manhattan, manhattan new york, michael wyetzner, new york, new york apartment styles, new york apartments, new york brownstone, new york city, new york city apartments, newyorkstyle, nyc apartment, nyc apartment tour, nyc apartments, nyc homes, nyc living, nyc real estate, railroad apartment, small apartment, tiny apartment, tiny home, what is a railroad apartment

Id: RL7BECNn-RI

Length: 16min 31sec (991 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 14 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/nlsnpgr84]

I watched it yesterday and loved the history of nyc housing.

[u/theleftairpod]

His other video breaking down popular family homes is also great. Dude makes everything super interesting

[u/MBAMBA3]

That was fun to watch but more like stream of consciousness about a few types of apartments than definitive.

Some of those Jacob Riis photos he uses to illustrate railroad apartment I don't think were railroad apartments. He doesn't say anything about boarding/rooming houses which were very common in the mid 1800's to maybe 1930's.

[u/Renhoek2099]

It's the following 1. Too expensive for you to even see 2. Ridiculously over priced but you're not from here, you'll pay 3. Small rat hole that's just 4k / month with 800 credit 4. 2 Bedroom with 7 people living in it 5. The trap