Alone Together

by Elizabeth Collins Cromley

Book Overview

Twentieth-century New York is now famous as the city of "cliff dwellers," but in the second half of the nineteenth century, middle-class apartments in Manhattan were a new--and somewhat suspect--architectural form. Alone Together presents a history of the "invention" of New York apartment houses.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801486130
• ISBN13: 9780801486135
• Release Date: December 1998
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 7.0" x 10.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

The development of the early New York apartment house

This superb book explains how well-to-do New Yorkers were reluctant to move into apartment buildings, and how that resistance was overcome through clever design and marketing tactics. Cromley begins by discussing early Parisian apartment buildings and the earliest tenements in New York City. These two historic strands came together in the 1870s, when apartment buildings for the affluent, known as 'French flats,' appeared as a new building type for New York. Cromley highlights the social history of the era - what life was really like for the people (especially the women) who lived there, as distinct from their counterparts in single-family houses. Among the still-extant classic buildings discussed are the Dakota (1884), the Osborne (1885), and the Ansonia (1902). In all, the book covers the mid-1800s to 1911; there is nothing here about the 1920s building boom following WWI. The book is generously illustrated with about 30 floor plans and about 50 engravings.