#131 The First Apartment Building

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Society & Culture, History, Documentary, Places & Travel

4.8 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2011

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Well, we're movin' on up....to the first New York apartment building ever constructed. New Yorkers of the emerging middle classes needed a place to live situated between the townhouse and the tenement, and the solution came from overseas -- a daring style of communal and affordable living called the 'apartment' or 'French flat'. The city's first was financed by Rutherford Stuyvesant, an old-money heir with an unusual story to his name. He hired one of the upper class's hottest architects to create an apartment house, called the Stuyvesant Apartments, with many features that would have been shocking to more than a few New Yorkers of the day. The building's first tenants were sometimes well-known, often artists and publishers, and almost all of them with a fascinating story to tell. Listen in to hear about the vanguard first renters of this classic, long-gone building. www.boweryboyspodcast.com Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Bowry Boys Episode 131, the invention of the New York apartment.
0:05.3	Hey, it's the Bowry Boys!
0:07.0	Hey!
0:08.0	The Bowry Boys is brought to you by eurochipo.com.
0:11.8	Eurochipo editors personally visit and review the best budget hotels in Europe.
0:16.7	Now with hotels in New York City, on the web at eurochipo.com.
0:21.7	Good afternoon, or evening or morning, whenever you're listening to this, this is Greg Young
0:26.4	with another podcast on New York City history.
0:29.8	Unfortunately, Tom is not here this week.
0:32.3	He was called away kind of unexpectedly, so it'll just be me for this show.
0:36.9	I know it's been a little hectic for one or the other of us for the past few months,
0:40.8	so I thank you all for your patience and for continuing to listen to us.
0:44.2	Now instead of complicating myself here with some grandiose topic or major landmark,
0:49.2	I thought I'd go back to basics to the fundamental question of how New Yorkers lived back in
0:54.3	the day, or were they laid their head every night.
0:56.8	And though a spotlight upon a strange new form of living that appeared in the United
1:00.2	States in the late 1860s, the apartment building.
1:04.0	Today obviously most people in New York live in apartments, and I suspect most of you listening
1:08.5	to the show right now, wherever you're at, whatever city you're in, you live in an apartment
1:13.2	now, or have at some point in your life.
1:15.7	We define an apartment today differently than they would have done in the mid-19th century.
1:20.6	Now two architects, two guys that you have heard us talk about many times on this podcast
	...

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