for a like purpose groups of old style, narrow houses, immensely increasing their capacity and desirability, besides doubling their rental. Indeed, this method of adapting old houses to new uses by changing their plan has become a marked feature in the architectural development of the city.

Those who have given but little thought to the question of apartment houses and apartment living are very apt to underrate the importance of the domestic reforms which the system involves. They are apt, too, to think of this style of buildings as suited to a small part of the community only, regarding them either as a more respectable sort of tenement house for the poor, or as a cross between a club-house and a family hotel, well enough for aristocratic imitators of French manners, but scarcely the thing for people of modest republican habits.

The truth is, there is no class of the community for whom apartment houses are not suited while it is easy to show that, whatever their style, however cheap or costly, the money expended on them will furnish ampler home space, superior facilities for economical living, greater privacy and security, a nobler style of architecture, and better appointments every way for a larger number of persons, than is possible with the common fashion of building.

The city abounds in people with incomes sufficient to enable them to live as they choose, who would not choose to endure the care and annoyance of an establishment if they could help it. In most cases they are well on in years. Their children have grown up and scattered, and advancing age has taught them to prefer ease and retirement to wearisome grandeur. A suite of rooms fitted up to their taste in a house like the Grosvenor, with the attendance of a few neat and trusty servants, would answer all their needs, giving them the comforts of home, while relieving them of the burden of a great house.

selves in homes, greatly to their material and social well-being, instead of wasting their years in the costly and unsatisfactory life they are now driven to.

A broader and more numerous class succeeds, embracing the well-to-do, from those who may live handsomely with economy, down to those whose income does not exceed twenty-five hundred or three thousand a year. Many of these have culture, refinement, taste, and can appreciate the finer advantages of civilization as fully as the richest. In any other American city they would be able to own or rent a whole house in a more or less fashionable street, and enjoy life with the best.

In New York, where small houses are not to be had in decent neighborhoods, and apartment houses are as yet the privi lege of the fortunate few, the choice of this class lies principally between banishment from the city, the occupation of a part of a house not made for multiple housekeeping, boarding, or keeping boarders; a choice of evils all so bad that whichever be chosen the chooser is pretty sure to repent of his decision before he is done with it. For those whose taste dictates a genuine, individual home-life, and whose means forbid an expensive style of living, New York is certainly not a paradise, whatever its attractions and advantages may be in other respects.

For the very poor the case is still worse. Their dwellings are, in the main, either the decayed and abandoned mansions of departed fashion, planned for an entirely different set of conditions, or else huge barracks, wretched human hives, all but destitute of every provision for quiet and cleanly living, full of dark, unventilated rooms, and overrun with vermin. The life they compel is enough to blunt every sensibility and crush out every aspiration from the souls of the unfortunates who endure it; more than enough to make the onlooker sigh for the cheap and cheerful cottages which shelter the laboring classes of other

Quick transit may do something towards making similar cottage-homes accessible to the better sorts of New York laboring men, but not much; still less for the poorer, who can afford neither the time nor the expense of travel. The doubtful advantages of the suburbs are rather for those whose shorter hours of business allow them time to go and come without trespassing too much on the hours of rest and

recreation, and whose ampler means enable them to pay the fares. The vast army of workingmen employed in the heart of the city must find house-room for their families near their place of business.

The healthful and economical housing of such multitudes, however, is not possible with the current fashion of housebuilding. Instead of the hap-hazard structures, large and small, which crowd our down-town wards, there is needed a class of dwellings specially constructed for the people who are to occupy them; houses broad and high, to diminish the cost of land and material to each tenant; plainly yet substantially built for cheapness, safety and durability; suitably divided into selfcontained and thoroughly private apartments for households of different sizes; properly lighted and ventilated; with bathrooms, closets, dumps for garbage and ashes, and lifts for coal and provisions: in short, provided with whatever may be requisite for wholesome though humble housekeeping. That such houses can be erected, so as to offer all these advantages, at cheaper rates than the poor now pay for their miserable lodgings, and yet leave a liberal margin for profit to the owner, is easy to prove. Property of the kind will pay as a speculation, let alone its social and sanitary advantages to the city at large. But these latter considerations must not be left out of the account. The concentration of numbers made necessary by the peculiar conditions of our metropolitan life, cannot go on regardless of sanitary and social laws without incurring greater risks than any community can afford to assume; with due regard to such laws, population may be packed many times more densely, acre by acre, than has ever yet been done, and that with little danger to health or morals.

Contrary to the common notion, the unwholesome condition of our "overcrowded wards" is due far less to the excessive number of the inhabitants than to their improper distribution and the unfitness of their dwellings for the housing of many people. The most thickly populated wards in the city, in the world, for that matter, -average from two hundred to three hundred and twenty-five persons to the acre, the highest average to a house being a fraction short of twenty-five: a large number, truly, in comparison with the population of ordinary districts, but certainly not large compared with the number comfortably

PROPOSED ELEVATION OF FIRST-CLASS APARTMENT HOUSE.

rooms, and the like, could be furnished in the basement. Substantially built in a fairly good neighborhood and honestly finished throughout, a house on this plan, five stories high, let at the usual tenement house rates, would return from twelve to fifteen per cent. interest on its cost.

The demand for such shelter is so great, however, that apartments of the kind now command very much higher rates, and, of course, the property-holders profit accordingly.

Where two adjoining lots are at command, a much superior arrangement may be effected by erecting a double house, with common stairways and an open court for light and air in the middle, thus securing broader and more cheerful passages, besides letting sunshine into the heart of the house, a sanitary condition too little regarded in tenement houses. Indeed, in the planning of the majority of our cheap flats, and not a small proportion of the more expensive ones as well, any thought of lighting and ventilating seems never to have entered. This, it is true, makes them relatively no worse than the common run of deep houses; still, where some indication of intelligent planning is shown, it is provoking to find such important matters overlooked. Knowing the stupidity of the common mechanical builder, it does not

surprise one to see a corner house made exactly after the pattern of a house in the middle of a block, with its inner rooms all dark, and fifty feet of blank wall facing the side street: it does surprise one to see the same sort of blunder made by one who is bright enough to recognize the advantages. of a flat house. But the thing is done. with a monotony of iteration. Though dark rooms are always an abomination, and always avoidable, houses which do not have them are quite the exception; and not unfrequently considerable ingenuity seems to have been exercised in devising plans for the multiplication of these unwholesome cells.

We have in mind a very showy block near Central Park, which specially illustrates this crowning vice of bad domestic architecture. Each house in the block contains nine rooms to a floor, besides closets. Of these, three rooms are absolutely lightless, and their only means of ventilation is through the doors opening into the private passage, also dark. Two other rooms are lighted by means of glazed doors, one opening into the parlor, the other into the dining-room. For these unwholesome flats the modest price of from eighty to one hundred dollars a month is asked. The builder should be condemned to live in one of them and sleep in the midmost cell.

The

Even in the most expensively finished flats there is far too little attention paid to the respiratory needs of the occupants. Where several families are gathered under one roof the need of care in this particular is so great that any manifest lack of it is simply intolerable. smell of cooking spoils one's enjoyment of the finest apartments, and the most elegant surroundings will not sweeten the odor of stale tobacco-smoke from the janitor's pipe, supplied with the warm air of one's parlor register.

Another objection to very many flats is the tenement house aspect given them by their great height and the unadorned flatness of their fronts: a fault that any architect could correct with a slight addition to the cost of the building.

Unsubstantial construction,-thin walls and floors too pervious to sound,-are other faults not more common, perhaps, but much less tolerable in flats than in the common style of dwellings, and altogether unpardonable when the rent required (and readily obtained, so great is the demand for such dwellings) is high enough to pay a handsome profit on work of the most solid and conscientious description. From twenty to thirty per cent annual return on cost is, indeed, a common thing with flats; and that, too, in neighborhoods where the owner of an ordinary house is fortunate if he gets ten per cent. It is consequently as natural as it is gratifying that propertyowners should be hastening to reconstruct old houses, and erect new ones, to meet the new demand. As an illustration of the advantages of these changes to all concerned, it will suffice to mention a single instance where, under the direction of a competent architect, a group of five oldstyle houses was recently converted into one apartment house, with apartments ranging from twenty-two rooms to three rooms. The change was made at an expense of $15,000. The immediate increase of rental was $10,000 a year. Previously it was with great difficulty that tenants of any kind could be retained; after the alteration first-rate tenants were plentiful and eager; and where originally five families were inconveniently housed on the five lots, the same area now gives superior accommodation to twenty families.

Still greater economy of space and material is possible with a larger order of structures, since the higher the building the more numerous the divisions of the ground

rent, the lower the average cost of rooms, and the lighter each family's share of the cost of common service. Besides, in a large house the upper floor can be made nearly, if not quite, as desirable as the lower by the introduction of elevators, which cannot well be afforded when the tenants are fewer.

In proof of this position the architect of the Pelham House kindly submits the following specifications for the building. whose "elevation" is figured at the head of this article. It is a structure of splendid architectural proportions, and, as will be seen in the plan, the apartments offer nearly double the accommodation given in existing flats and apartment houses. It will be shown directly that, if rented at current rates, these apartments would return from twelve to fifteen per cent. interest on the cost of the building.

The plan assumes for the building a frontage of 200 feet on an avenue (an entire block), and a depth of 125 feet on each side street,-25 feet more being taken for a rear roadway, to be defended at each end by high ornamental gates of cast iron. This will give ten city lots to the building, and two for the roadway, and secure a plentiful supply of light and air on the four exterior faces of the structure. The height to be eight stories, including the first, or rez-dechaussée, appropriated to shops of the first class, and the upper, or mansard story, suit

ably divided into rooms for servants, and baggage or store rooms. There will remain six floors to be appropriated to fortyeight apartments, eight on a floor; each suite entirely independent of all the others. By reserving five interior courts of various sizes, direct light and perfect ventilation may be secured to every room throughout. The door of each suite opening directly from a broad marble landing connected with the main staircase and the adjacent elevators, will be to that suite, in all respects, a front door. Within is a vestibule, or ante-chamber, and beyond a private hall or corridor, upon which all the rooms and smaller passages open. The ceilings will be effectually deadened by one course of deafening between the floor-beams, and another three-fourths inch course of cement laid solid on the top of the under-boarding; this latter will be again covered with the thick English felting now imported for the purpose. There are six stairways of brick and iron, completely fire-proof, two of them being grand staircases for the occupants, and the other four back-stairs for servants, supplies, etc.; all to be readily accessible from each apartment. Two elevators, constantly running, will convey the occupants or their visitors readily to the upper floors. The front entrance is designed to be grand and imposing, as befits a structure of such magnitude. All the halls and public passage-ways will be heated by steam in the manner usual in first-class hotels; and a concierge, with assistants, to be constantly in attendance in the office to direct visitors, will take charge of parcels and messages, and attend to other general service of the sort.

Each suite of rooms, or separate apartment, consists of drawing-room, 16x22 feet; dining-room, 14x16; three chambers, each 14x16; dressing-room or smaller chamber, 8x10; kitchen, opening on one of the inner courts, 10x14, with three large store closets attached; butler's pantry, 6x12, with hot and cold water laid on; hall, or ante-chamber, 8x8; bath-room, and eight closets of various sizes, some of them exceedingly large, and, in addition, three mansard rooms, 14x10, for servants' use, storage, and so on. All the ceilings will be high, and the finish handsome, though not extravagant throughout.

With an exterior as attractive as that of the Gilsey House, or the Grand Hotel, a building of the proposed size and character would cost at a fair calculation about

SECTION ALONG LINE A, B-ABOVE DIAGRAM.

$850,000, and the land on which it should. be placed about $175,000 more. At a moderate rental the shops, twelve in number, might be relied upon to pay about $30,000 annually. The forty-eight suites of rooms would rent from $1,000 to $2,500 a year each, according to their location and aspect, the least desirable being much better than those offered in any first-class building now erected at a rate fifty or sixty per cent higher. The aggregate rental would pay fifteen per cent on the cost of the building, and ten per cent on the investment required for the land; and the eagerness with which a delighted public competes for the comforts of the houses offering similar privileges, at higher rates, is a sufficient guaranty that the building proposed would find little difficulty in securing tenants for its rooms.

If erected on cheaper ground, and in an equally substantial though less costly style, it is clear that houses of this sort could be made to give accommodations much superior to those furnished by our second-rate flats at prices considerably lower; while with smaller rooms, and fewer to a suite, -yet ample in number and capacity for families of moderate size and means,twelve or sixteen families could be provided for in the space allotted to eight in the pro