Houses reflect with deadly accus racy the way people live. The story of a deep cultural revolution is told by the contrast between the Stuyvesant, the oldest apartment house in town, and the newest apartment houses.
Seventy years ago, when the forerunner of the modern apartment house was startling those who passed by on East Eighteenth Street with its ultramodernity, people stayed home more, did all of their living except work around their own firesides.
They had to have separate rooms for everything. They never dreamed of getting along without a front parlour for the entertaining of marriageable daughters and a back parlour where the rest of the family retired when callers came.
Children scampered home after school and brought their friends, and a playroom where they could hammer and cut out paper dolis was needed. It was unthinkable rot to have a sewing room. Pantries with gleaming copper wash basins and pale brass water taps, dining rooms, maids' rooms, libraries were musts.
Most of the Stuyvesant apartments have seven rooms, with coal-burning fireplaces in four of the seven. Some of the ceilings are twenty-two feet high. There are lots of dark inno: halls and cubbyholes. Walls between apartments are two feet thick, of solid brick—one reason why the old house still packs them in.
The average number of rooms in apartments built this year in the City is three. Nobody needs a playroom any more because the children, if any, spend the afternoons at nur-serv schools and supervised playgrounds. The girls go out to the movies when they have dates. They can pick up frocks ready made for $1195 and wouldn't consider sewing their own, So a lot of the rooms once thought necessary have become useless,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.