How New York City invented the penthouse

Penthouse: the word conjures up luxury and exclusivity.

Thing is, it’s a clever 1920s rebranding of the top of a building, where no one with any choice used to want to live.

For most of the city’s history, the single-structure mansion was the preferred domicile for the rich.

At the turn of the 20th century, monied New Yorkers were increasingly occupying “French Flat” cooperative apartments.

But even then, the undesirable rooftop apartment was given over to servants. Until the city and its tastes changed in the Jazz Age.

“By the end of the 1920s, the cliff dwellers of Manhattan were beginning to appropriate for their own pleasure the once forlorn roofs of apartment buildings,” writes Donald L. Miller in his excellent new book on New York in the 1920s, Supreme City.

“The ‘Cinderella’ of New York architecture, the ‘penthouse,’ or roof apartment, had for decades been considered the least attractive part of a high building, a boxlike residence for the servant class, set among soot-scarred chimneys and wooden water tanks.”

Now, with a vertical city making air and light the most luxurious commodities of all, developers and their wealthy clients had these “cramped dormitories for the laboring classes” torn down and “replaced by new luxury quarters.”

“[Reporter Virginia] Pope saw ‘a new chapter of New York’s social history . . . being written above the roof line,'” wrote Miller. “In there roof houses ‘New Yorkers achieved ‘a detachment impossible to any dwelling set on earth,'” wrote journalist William Irwin. “There were no neighbors in sight; ‘only the tainted air above Manhattan.'”

A 1924 New York Times article foresaw this new desire for penthouses, which were still very limited in number, and only a few dated farther back that the late teens.

One penthouse in particular, “is a substantial affair of steel construction, cement floors, and wire embedded windows. Windows on four sides give on the towers and steeples, the skyscrapers and the occasional treetops of the city.

“A wide walled terrace looks up to a ceiling no one can touch, the blue sky of heaven.”

[Top photo: 55 Seventh Avenue in the 1930s, by Berenice Abbott; second: a 1940s Gramercy Park penthouse, NYC Municipal Archives; Third: a postcard from the Penthouse restaurant, Museum of the City of New York; bottom photo: a Tudor City penthouse in the 1930s, MCNY]

The influx of bachelors in Gilded Age New York

Today’s New York is a city of singles.

But until about 150 years ago, it was impractical and expensive for unmarried adults to live alone (as well as morally suspect when it came to unhitched women).

Things changed in the 1870s—for guys, at least. “With the growth and industrialization of New York City in the 19th century, the work force consisted of very large numbers of unmarried men,” explains a 2004 Landmarks Preservation Committee report.

“The number of bachelors in the city ranged from 125,000 (about 13 percent of the population) in 1870 to nearly 45 percent of the male population over the age of 15 in 1890.”

All these unattached guys had to live somewhere. One solution for men with  cash was a new type of housing called the bachelor flat.

Bachelor flats were basically apartment residences that consisted of a suite of rooms or just one room, sometimes with a kitchen and bath; sometimes without.

Many of these bachelor flats are long gone. But some still exist.

There’s the Benedick on Washington Square East (mentioned in Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth), the Gorham on Broadway and 18th Street, and a lovely copper-topped, circa-1890 building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 30th Street called the Wilbraham.

“The Wilbraham catered to single professional men of means,” noted the LPC report. “The 1900 census listed eleven single male ‘boarders’ at the Wilbraham, ranging in age from 28 to 80: two lawyers, two treasurers, two company ‘secretaries,’ a music professor, a drygoods clerk, a silk manufacturer, an architect, and an actor.”

The guys at the Wilbraham didn’t have their own kitchens. But there was a communal dining area, and they had plenty places to eat in their neighborhood—then a posh, happening area.

The bachelor flat concept didn’t last long. By 1927, the Wilbraham was open to women, and today, it’s a regular apartment building.

Bachelors are still here, of course, along with their female counterparts.

A look at Manhattan’s first apartment building

For much of the city’s history, any New York household that could afford it lived in their own single-family home. The idea of sharing a residence with other people? Very declasse.

But in 1870, a developer named Rutherford Stuyvesant tried something new with his Stuyvesant Flats at 142 East 18th Street, near Third Avenue.

Inspired by new multi-family buildings that were all the rage in Paris, Stuyvesant spent $100,000 on his five-story structure, hiring architect Richard Morris Hunt to design 16 apartments and four artists’ studios.

First dubbed a folly, these middle-class rentals near chic Union Square caught on quick. They ushered in demand for more apartment-style dwellings.

“Although lacking an elevator, the building had running (cold) water, a novelty at the time,” states Changing New York, which features a photo of Stuyvesant Flats by Berenice Abbott in 1936 (above).

“Full occupancy followed, and “Parisian Flats” came into vogue. In later years, steam heat and electricity were added, and the building remained fully occupied until its 1958 demolition for Gramercy Green (above right), a 14-story building with 240 apartments.”

Fancy flats—or low-rent tenement apartments?

In the late 19th century, could you class up a typical city tenement building by calling it a flat?

Looks like some developers thought so.

“French flats”—distinguished from tenement houses by modern luxuries such as parlors, dining rooms, servants’ rooms, and indoor plumbing—caught on in the city after 1870.

But considering that neither Williamsburg nor the East Village were upper-class neighborhoods, I doubt the residents who ended up in the Havemayer Flats, on Havemayer Street, or the Mascot Flats, at 6th Street near Avenue D, had servants.

Mascot Flats has an interesting recent history. Abandoned and then torn apart by thieves and drug addicts by the early 1980s, it was renovated in 1986 with help from Jimmy Carter and Habitat for Humanity.

Check out photos of the pre-renovated interior here. A 1990 documentary, The Rebuilding of Mascot Flats, chronicles its rebirth.

Mysterious building names on Ninth Avenue

Most city tenements are marked at the top by a name, presumably of the builder, and the year the structure was completed. 

But at 744 Ninth Avenue, off 50th Street, the tenement is named “9th. Ave. Flat.” It seems to be a pretty fanciful moniker for a typical red-brick tenement building; “French flats” at the time were usually higher-end apartments for middle-class New Yorkers. 

Perhaps the builder had amenities inside—private baths?—that put it a notch above the usual late 19th century tenement apartment.

Also on Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen is another strangely named tenement building. I wonder what “Foresters Home” was—just a tenement put up by a man named Forester? Or maybe some kind of charity residence that housed orphans or the indigent. 

Only two 8s remains from the two inscriptions announcing the date it was built: 1880.

Brownstoner’s Montrose Morris has more on the French Flats building boom. 

The Jeanne d’Arc “French Flats”

It’s a strange sight: On the mostly nondescript commercial corner of 14th Street and 7th Avenue is a striking red-brick apartment building—complete with a statue of Jeanne d’Arc above the front entrance.

 Called the Jeanne d’Arc, the building is a remnant of the brief time in the 1880s when West 14th Street was a wealthy residential area.

It’s also one of the city’s first “French Flats,” a fancy name for a middle- to upper-class multiple-family dwelling. In other words, it’s the standard apartment house we know and love that’s all over New York City today.

 Completed in 1889, the Jeanne d’Arc was designed to attract upwardly mobile families who could afford a building with design touches such as a pressed-metal cornice, carved figures and griffins, and a statue of Jeanne herself.

There she is with her sword and shield, ready to fight for 14th Street. The letters at one time must have spelled out her name, but now it just looks like “lear.”

For more Jeanne d’Arc in New York, check out the Jeanne d’Arc Home “for friendless French girls.”