"The first building to overcome these sensitivities was Richard Morris Hunt’s Stuyvesant Apartments." (Image by John Singer Sargent.)

From “Sardine Life,” a smart essay in New York magazine by Justin Davidson about the evolution of apartment living in NYC, which was considered déclassé until one elegant building changed all that:

“The first building to overcome these sensitivities was Richard Morris Hunt’s Stuyvesant Apartments at 142 East 18th Street, a luxurious behemoth by 1870 standards. This structure defeated doubters with a two-pronged argument of aesthetics and pragmatism. The architecture oozed dignity: Five stories high and four lots wide, it had an imposing mass, an overweening mansard roof with yawning dormers, wrought-iron balconies, and ornamental columns. Even more persuasively, compared with the cost of building, furnishing, cleaning, and repairing a private home, all this respectability came as a bargain. Within a few years, the Times announced that a ‘domiciliary revolution’ had taken place: a happy epidemic of flats had beaten back a plague of sinister boardinghouses. Young couples could now afford a bright new place in town; families no longer needed to fan out to the villages that lay miles from Union Square. The change represented the triumph of pragmatism over prejudice. ‘Anglo Saxons,’ the Times reported, ‘are instinctively opposed to living under the same roof with other people, and it is doubtful if [that resistance] would have been overcome had not the earliest flats been of an elegant kind, in the best quarters of the town, and therefore, expensive and fashionable.’ The rich made the apartment safe for the middle class.”