Apartment Houses. Apartment houses were a brand new building type imported from France. When they began appearing on the Upper West Side in the 1880s, families had to adjust to the idea of living in the same building as other families. Advantages of apartment living included not needing so many servants and having elevators, which were new technology then.

One case study is The Manhasset is an 11-story apartment house located on Broadway between West 108th and 109th Streets on the Upper West Side. Built in 1899, the Manhasset is colorful and grand. The top floor roofs have a special form called mansard. The building covers the entire block-front, and, because it is located where Broadway makes a curve, it can be seen from many blocks away. Originally, the Manhasset was an eight-story apartment house. A few years later it was redesigned by two famous architects, Janes and Leo. In addition to making it taller, they added many shops on the first floor after the opening of the subway in 1904.

The original 77 apartments, planned for upper middle class families, contained six, seven, or nine rooms with one to three baths. In 1905, the New York Census records the presence of many professional and business people. Most of the renters were born in the United States, but there were also a number of adults who were immigrants from Germany as well as others from Ireland, France, and Canada. As would be expected on the diverse Upper West Side, the residents appear to have been from various ethnic groups and religions and included Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Each apartment included a single servant’s room, and most residents had one or two live-in servants.

VISUAL CLUES: • Highly ornamented façades in different historical styles • Lobbies, doormen and building staff • Ten to fourteen stories tall with elevators • Built mostly on the wider and fancier boulevards, like Broadway, Central Park West, and Riverside Drive

Tenements. Tenements were the first building type in New York City made for more than one family. The word “tenement” comes from the word tenant, someone who rents his apartment from the owner of the building. Tenements were first built in the 1830s for poor people who had come from other countries to live here and did not yet have the means to live in single-family homes. The tenements were often extremely crowded. The first tenements were four stories high without elevators. They were 25 feet wide and had four tiny apartments on each floor with three rooms and one window per apartment.

The Tenement House Act of 1867 mandated fire escapes, at least one bathroom for every 20 people, and no large farm animals in the building! But, this was not enough improvement, and in 1879, there was another law, now called the “Old Law.” The Old Law stated that every room had to have a window. So new tenement buildings were five stories tall and built in a “dumbbell” shape creating two light shafts. Unfortunately, the windows were so small and there were so many people sharing the same small light shaft that this still did not solve the problem of making the tenements healthy places to live.

In 1901, another law was passed. This is called the “New Law.” The New Law demanded that new tenements be much wider and that they have space around the buildings, creating courtyards rather than shafts. They were also usually six or seven stories tall, still with no elevator, but they were more spacious with better air circulation.

VISUAL CLUES: • Style often matched rowhouses on nearby side streets • Highly ornamented façades in different historical styles • Ornamental fire escapes • Four to seven stories tall without an elevator • Stores on the ground floor • Built mostly on Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues because of the transportation there

In addition to larger apartment buildings and tenements, rowhouses are a common building type on the Upper West Side. You can still find whole blocks of rowhouses here, many protected as part of historic districts. Often many of the rowhouses on one block were built in the same style by the same builder at the same time between the 1880s and 1900. There may be a style pattern, like every other roof will be pointed and every other roof will be flat.

Rowhouses were originally built for single families. Sometimes they are called “brownstones” when they have a thin layer, or veneer, of brownstone — a chocolate-colored sandstone — on the façade. Most of the brownstones on the Upper West Side came from a quarry in Connecticut. The builders used brownstone over the brick because it provides a softer surface and is easier to carve into or sculpt, allowing for very decorative façades.

Allowing for very decorative façades. VISUAL CLUES: • Usually built in groups and share a wall • Three to five stories, never tall enough to need a fire escape • Large cornices often decorated with dentils (tooth-like projections) held up by brackets • Highly ornamented façades • Entrances can have columns and arches • Stoops lead up to the front doors • Bay windows