TASTEFUL FRIENDS - Five types of NYC apartments explained by an Architectural Digest Architect

Interesting NYC history.

Thanks OP, that was a really interesting background especially for us non Americans

I watched with some hesitation, but it really was a great survey, especially well presented and dense with interesting details. No filler, no apocryphal stories, and nothing to contest. The discussion of the development of loft apartments and the higher origins of "studio apartments" from the elite artists' studio apartments of the 1890s-1910s were my favorite parts; also his sketching out of the city block plans that paralled the popularity of the brownstone and which lent so much of the appearance of New York.

R3 I know right, AD has gone down the drain, so I can understand the hesitation, but this was well done, not rushed, academic, but made to be accessible to all, just like a good professor would explain in a course.

Very interesting. Thanks, OP.

Fascinating. Thank you for posting.

My 1920 building has four apartments per floor - a four-room/one bath unit, approx. 900SF (mine, alas); two classic six units, one about 1200SF, the other about 1550 SF - both with two bedrooms, one bath plus maid's room/bath; and one classic seven, three bedrooms, two full baths plus maid's room/bath, approx. 1900 SF.

Agree, very interesting…especially about the railroad apartments/slums and how they eventually got windows but the air shaft still created disease due to trash and fetid standing water. And no alleyways means trash bags piled up on the sidewalk.

I also appreciated that the narrator got right into it, no time consuming introduction and “please subscribe to my channel”.

This one’s quite good too, and I like the architect’s gruff Daddy voice.

Darn! He’s married, but they have a great meet cute story. And he must be tall, or his husband’s a pocket Gay.

When are rents coming down?!

I didn't realise that the owners of the townhouses would have their entrance at the top of the stoop because of all the horse manure on the streets in the 19th century.

Too bad the streets were laid out with no back alleys so now there are all those unsightly piles of garbage bags on the sidewalks.

it just boggles the mind that railroad apartments in tenements meant traipsing through other families' rooms to get to your place, instead of having a narrow corridor with a separate entrance for each apartment.

See Whit Stillman's Last Days of Disco for railroad apartment plot points....

R13, that is not how railroad apartments work.

There are separate entrances for each appartment. However, there are no hallways within the apartment.

It really is unique to NYC. It would be interesting to see this done on London or Paris.

R13 -- back when they were built, more than one family may have shared a Rail Road apartment, or a family may have taken in a few borders -- but apartments were separated from the common hall, stairwell and (possibly the shared toilets and sinks) on each floor.

I read some novel set on the Lower East Side in the early 20th cent where the family rented out the beds during the day to single men who worked night shifts.

[quote]It really is unique to NYC. It would be interesting to see this done on London or Paris.

Some types are more unique than others: the studio apartment, for instance developed not so much a unique form of apartment as of size: one room. Larger houses had been put to use as studio apartments before NYC. The more elite form of the artist's studio did have roots in NYC, but also Paris and London where artists from rich families had developed "[artist] studio houses" and "[artist] studio apartments" from 1856 as purpose built buildings in NYC and the same and earlier fates in the other cities. The modern studio with kitchen incorporated into the design is an early 20thC thing, a few centuries after private houses having been carved into tenements with plumbing following in time.

The Brownstone apartment is just a townhouse (with a brown sandstone facade) and stoop; the plan shows up in London in Amsterdam in Paris centuries before and of course examples of all those once single family type houses were carved into apartments as fortunes and neighborhoods declined and housing pressures rose. The Brownstone apartment, the most well known NYC form, isn't a NYC firm at all.

The railroad flat is purely NYC in origin, though taken up elsewhere it remained associated with NYC.

The big contribution of Paris is the internal zoning of larger apartments into 3 areas: reception and entertainment areas that would be seen by outside visitors, a family zone of bedrooms, and a service zone of kitchen, laundry, and servant rooms. It appears in mid-19thC Paris and was formalized and developed there and lifted for the grand apartments of the rich in NYC from early examples such as the Dakota to the UES elite apartments built up to WWIi. Look at the floorplan of a prewar classic large NYC luxury apartment and you see the stamp of that Parisian space zoning at work, 30, 50, almost 100 years later.

Okay, R15 and R17, but at 4:12 - 4:15 of OP's video, the architect says that in tenements, you could have a different family in each room of a railroad apartment, ie. each family has only one room and no privacy. I'm sure now people own or rent whole railroad apartments to themselves or just have a couple of roommates and things are not as dire.

Thanks for making things clearer, R15 and R17.

Just like today R19, people will make weird accommodations to save money. Walk in closets get rented out as rooms. Living rooms get counted as rooms.

I once saw a foyer that would be my room. I could have a futon, but I would have to fold it up to open the front door of the apartment. The lease holder assured me that he would step on the edge of the futon, if he needed to walk over me in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.

R19 - another thing that changed over time is how some of these apartments are configured. I have a friend who has a 4-room railroad apartment in the East Village in an “old law” building. that does not have air-shafts. It also also has a small multistory “back tenement” building that is separate from the main building - it is across a small back yard (where the outhouses were originally) and is built all the way to the back of the lot - the only windows on each floor fave the yard & you need to walk through the fist floor of the main building & exit the rear door to reach it

The current layout in the main building is two 4 room railroad apartments on each floor with a very narrow hall / staircase separating them. Each apartment has a bigger front & back room with windows to the street or yard and a door to the hallway connected by two much narrower windowless rooms (to make space for the stair & hall in the center of the building).

Originally each floor had four 2 room apartments - one windowed & one windowless - but the zoning laws changed that abolished back buildings and windowless rooms. Even though these buildings are grandfathered in, I’ve only been in apartments they now have the two room apartments combined into a longer four room railroad layout. So they originally were closer to what you were suggesting, there are also still some old SRO type “flophouses” that have a series of small single rooms that open onto the long hall - but they tend to have walls that don’t go all the way up to the ceiling and lower chicken-wire “ceilings” in each room to provide some ventilation.

That was a great watch, thank you for posting OP. As somebody else mentioned the guy is just so refreshing, not a minute wasted, no whacky forced personality, not even a ‘thanks for watching, my name is’.

I could watch this guy talking all day.

I briefly lived in a railroad apartment in the Village back in the 80s. Living room was in front, kitchen and bathroom were in the middle, which is also where the entrance was and the bedroom was in back. Three of us lived there. The two who shared the bedroom had a platform bed. I lived in the living room, but we built some partitions, so I actually had some privacy. I was young, so it wasn't so bad. There was a little triangle of a rooftop you could sit on out the back window.

Above us, the landlord lived in the same kind of apartment, but with a wife and three kids. I went back there 15 years later, the building had clearly been sold and totally redone. Too bad, it actually would have made a great apartment for a single person or a couple.

Did the apartment have soundproofing, R23, or did you have to be extremely quiet all the time?

R9's video has a light blue townhouse with black shutters at the 1:26 mark. It's at 104 Willow Street. The house is for sale with an asking price of $11.9 million.

R24, We weren't noisy, but we had a piano and it wasn't a problem and I don't remember the kids being noisy. It was a small building, so we were the only apartment on our floor. Run-diwn of course. The landlord painted the stairs and foyer bright pink, while the carpet was dirty green His theory was that its ugliness would discourage crime

True, R20, especially in NYC where the rents are really high. If you want to live in a half decent neighborhood and you don't earn much money, you have to make sacrifices. And obviously in the early 19th century century, the people in power weren't too concerned about the squalor the poor lived in.

R21, thanks for the interesting info about how railroad apartments were reconfigured to improve living conditions.

For those interested in more of the history of artists' lofts in NYC, the often excellent City Lab just published this article.

AD latest video, luxury loft three designers takes.

I hate lofts. Loved in one and never again. I don’t understand how they are still a thing in many cities. I want a home.

I can understand that, R30, and might have agreed in the past. They are definitely not for everybody or even for many.

I always liked the raw space of a good loft, the scale, the double height ceilings, the huge windows, the volume of the space, spare but for a few defining details. Almost inevitably, however, it gets fucked up along the way. People want to have all the benefits of the big open space, but then try to squeeze into them 3 separate bedrooms, as many bathrooms, a quiet space away from the main space... they try to squeeze too many spaces, too many functions, and too many people into a loft and the result is too often a chopped up space that loses all of its once raw appeal. Lofts are not well suited for most families it's safe to say; they are best for one person or a couple who can make the whole place theirs and work for them. Buy a family house if you have 3 young children, or an apartment with five bedrooms; if you want to operate as a hotel for a revolving door of house guests, maybe look for another kind of space.

A good loft has to have good art on a big scale, and it has to have good furniture and a developed sense of design and it has to have people who tolerate a degree of chaos where everything is more or less in sight all the time and where you have to enforce a certain precise tidiness for, say, a precious Mid-Century Modern aesthetic, or tolerate a certain degree of perpetual disorder (in which case your disorder has to be better than most people's.)

The thing I love about them is that there is usually one main room on a grand scale, light from oversized windows, texture from old walls and floors and ceilings. If you can fit in a guest bedroom or other "apart from" space and a bathroom or two, and position the kitchen so that it doesn't look like a place the sole purpose of which is filming cooking classes, that ideal has grown on me over the years. My ideal house would have one very fucking grand room, in size and scale and architecture, and then some bathrooms, a small but practical kitchen, a modest bedroom, and another room that could be used for whatever purpose -- guests, an office, a music room, etc. A good loft is a simplified version of that ideal. Looking at houses now, I'm always intrigued by the possibility but so few live up to what they should be. I'm eyeing one now that the owners eventually want to sell, it's a great double height space used as a professional office now but was previously an apartment or a live-work space.

Ever since the movies Diva and Flashdance I’ve been in awe of lofts and feel like I missed out on them, but much more on a timeline thing when they were actually an invented form like early Soho, more than the marketed real estate confection.

New AD video exploring different abodes in Greenwich Village with your favorite Gay architect.

Many years ago, a friend lived in a six room railroad flat on 2nd Avenue, it was in the mid 20s, not sure of the exact side streets. The rent was super low, around $250-$300. He didn't have a bathroom, just a tub in the kitchen! The bathroom, was basically a toilet bowl in a super tiny room, with no sink, the toilet was shared with all the other residents on his floor. What a way to live in this century! Unbelievable.

This building and another adjoining building were definitely and purposely burned down. A few years later, I read an interview with a former fireman who, along with others, had purchased the two properties before they were burned down. I immediately knew it was the same building where my friend lived.

The former fireman was talking about his new luxury building which went up on the same location. It wasn't hard to figure out that this former fireman knew how to burn those buildings down without it being detected as arson.

NYC real estate is extremely shady and corrupt.

Did y’all note Daddy’s book?

He didn’t really tell us anything about the brownstones as first built and how they’ve mostly been chopped into multiple apartments.

Does he discuss the underwater brownstones on East 68th St.?

R31 sounds insufferable. The kind of person who critiques you for being too untidy for the kind of space you live in. The kind of person who dismisses you because your art is not good enough or on the right scale.

The kind of person who thinks any of that really matters.

[quote] NYC real estate is extremely shady and corrupt.

'Ya think?

We’re back with our main guy on a topic that should hold zero interest for me, but he makes it completely fascinating and tells a complete story of its rise and transformation over the year. Note on his desk is a book of photographs by Ansel Elgort’s father. Anyone know if there are Ansel nudes in it?

A new AD video, I love the seriousness that he gives everything.

Very interesting to find out the real buildings that stood in for Wayne Manor, R41.

R41, it's truly a crime what developers did to Sutton Scarsdale Hall at the 14:23 mark. Disgusting.

The host of the video probably knew that 380 South San Rafael Avenue in Pasadena CA stood in for the exterior of Wayne Manor in the 1960s Batman TV show but didn't want to mention because it's probably a private house. You can't even see the house on google street view, just a brick wall, the gate and closely planted trees.

Anyone who read through the VERY long thread about the gay couple, Rufus and Blake, who rented an apartment that they had furnished with all the cast offs from the stewardess mother of one of the couple was watching the inside of a railroad apartment in the video , which is why the couple have to walk through the guest bedroom to get to their own bedroom.

Most of my NYC apartments were shitty. My best one (from a layout perspective) was in a tenement in Williamsburg Brooklyn. It should be noted that the history of Jewish immigration in NYC was first stop, lower east side tenements (the airless deathtraps). Basically 1890-1920. In 1903, the Williamsburg bridge was built. On one side was the lower east side and the bowery in Manhattan - on the other, Brooklyn. Better tenements with air shafts (and some elevators) were built on the Brooklyn side, and as soon as Jews had enough money they trudged across the bridge and found apartments in those tenements. (1910-1950) After WWII, and with increasing prosperity, the Jews moved out to Flatbush in Brooklyn or further out on Long Island, for example to Levittown and to the five towns, or to Staten Island or New Jersey.. Every time the Jews departed an area, another downtrodden new immigrant group would make the same trek - Italians, and ultimately (afterwards) Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. But the Hasidic Jews, post WWII, found a home in Williamsburg south of the bridge, and have stayed there ever since.

Anyway, my apartment was on the top floor of a 6 floor elevator building. I was the central apartment of the back of the building, so the door to the apartment entered to the tiny kitchen, and what could be a bedroom lay on either side, with one bathroom adjacent to the kitchen. The bedrooms were pretty small, (probably 10 X 10 or even more likely 9 X9) but because I lived by myself, I could use one as a sort of a living room/music room, and the other as my sleeping bedroom. Unfortunately, the area at that time was terribly unsafe for an Anglo like me (totally Latino, mostly Dominican) and I only lived there 10 months before I got some threats on the street that forced me to move. I'd kill for that apartment now that WIlliamsburg is safe and trendy, but the rent has probably gone from $300/month to $3000/month or more. I had an oblique view of the World Trade Center at that time, which is gone now of course.

R45 There was also a cadre of Jews who were becoming middle class to wealthy who moved to the Upper West Side after WWII and lived in those wonderful classic 6 apartment buildings. The The Marvelous Mrs. Mazel depicts this and I just read a book on the history of the Zabars and they and the extensive Jewish community they were part of took up residence there.

I enjoyed reading your post, menluvinguy, but you do know that stewardesses are called flight attendants these days. Just sayin'.

New York loft apartment as conceived by three designers with no restrictions.

Curious to see, R48. From initial reactions to the project, I thought Joy Moyler (#3) would be the strongest, but for an anything goes challenge, the younger designers (#1 and #2) had bolder choices. Though the younger designers had similar broad concepts, Noz Nozawa (#1) had the stronger, design I thought. I hate the kind of sharp curry color and it's all too vintage 1970s look for me, but the Moroccan tile floor and the other colors and even the geometric loops on the plastic ceiling swags were good ideas brought together.

And refreshing that the three designers were quick to complement each other's work and engage in an interesting and constructive critique -- no flare ups of mock (or real) competitiveness.

I hate the Moroccan design. I don't love 1 or 3 either.

Another great AD video with the sexy gay architect.

Architectural Digest Architect = Interior decorator who paid to be featured in Architectural Digest.

My favorite AD architect explores holiday related houses.

HUDSON is the only place where a TRUE loft exists!

Interesting!! I live in NYC but never really knew was a classic 6 referred to exactly.

what websites do I check out for patio inspirations? I need new furniture and design. or links to beautiful patios in NYC