New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City (1869-1930)

In the years immediately following the Civil War, virtually no one in New York City lived in “morally questionable” apartment houses; by 1930 ninety-eight percent of the population did.

In NEW YORK, NEW YORK, Elizabeth Hawes gives us a lively, original account of this golden age of luxury apartment houses and how it transformed the city–socially, architecturally, psychologically–from a provincial place into a great metropolis. We see how such stately buildings as the Dakota, the Stuyvesant, and the Apthorp arose out of the old farmlands, and how the changes wrought in New York society reverberated in the lives and works of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and William Dean Howells. A book that will delight lovers of social history and architecture, and anyone wanting a greater understanding of the city.