Alone Together

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.