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The title of Elizabeth Hawes's fascinating book recalls Leonard Bernstein's On the Town, whose sailors on shore-leave sing "New York, New York, it's a helluva town...the people ride in a hole in the ground." They were probably equally amazed to see that New Yorkers lived in boxes stacked on top of one another, instead of in houses like other Americans. Long before World War II, huge apartment houses, many of them encrusted with fabulous confections and furnished with fountains, swimming pools and marble lobbies, had risen from the sidewalks. Visitors from middle America were bound to wonder about life in those vast conglomerates. How could the residents endure such an exotic and bizarre existence?
Hawes tells us that at the end of the Civil War, New Yorkers would have asked the same question. "All respectable New Yorkers" lived in private houses in 1869, she reports. By 1929, 98 percent of Manhattan was housed in apartments. Sixty years had brought a revolution in residential life.
There were obvious economic reasons for apartment living in Manhattan's confined space, and the book disposes of these in a few sentences. "Vertical living was an inevitability in a city with a growing population and a limited landmass." Hawes's book is more concerned with the sentimental values that had to be overcome. "The campaign to make the apartment house a respectable place of dwelling," she says, "was a struggle against the stubborn grip of traditional values." The first settlers came to America with a long commitment to individual residences, and New Yorkers gave up private houses "after centuries of cherishing them." To lure people out of their houses, apartment-house builders introduced the extravagant architectural features that still grace the facades of the Dakota (1884), the Ansonia (1902) and the Dorilton (1903). Builders added one service after another to make apartment living as convenient and graceful as possible. Gradually the builders wore down the resistance of the private house people, and by World War I the city was converted. From the war to 1930, during a flurry of furious building activity, the last holdouts moved from their houses into apartments.
This story seems straightforward enough, but it leaves out a lot. Hawes's subtitle--"How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City"--leads...