After re-watching the second episode of season five, I noticed that the new guy has a claw foot tub in his kitchen. It’s up on a wood box, and it has a board laid over top so it’s pulling double duty as a counter top. Is that at all typical? I guess, if the tub doesn’t have a tap, keeping next to the stove would be convenient to fill it up with stock pots of hot water. Still, it seems more Little House on the Prairie than 1966 in some unknown boroughs of New York.
I had a friend with a railroad flat on Ninth Avenue in the 1980s with exactly that arrangement.
Common in the old-school tenements, still definitely in existence in 1966 . Saved running a water line to two spots in the apartment. You can still see this configuration from time to time even today, but most of the old tenement buildings are being pulled down, or, at the very least, gutted on the inside.
I’d break my goddamn neck climbing in and out of that thing perched so high yet having to duck under the cabinetry.
The book* Alone In The Kitchen With An Eggplant* includes an essay about living in a New York apartment in the 1960s that had no sink, only a bathtub. The apartment was small enough that it must have been pretty close to the stove.
Where were the toilets in these apartments located? 
Was it a literal water closet off the bedroom or was there a public on that the entire floor shared?
I knew someone with this arrangement in the late 80s, it was a pretty low rent place (in the East Village, in Manhattan). Thinking back to the time, we knew this was an “old New York” thing, but even in the 80s, it wasn’t UNHEARD of. When my friend got this apartment, most people we knew mentioned having at least one other friend or coworker or acquaintance who had a similar set-up in fairly recent memory.
A few years later, so mid 90s, I knew a person who bought an apartment in the East Village, now a much more expensive area, and that apartment had been modernized and renovated, including a lovely bathroom – but the architects had kept the tub in the kitchen for its kitsch/novelty value. In addition to the tub in the bathroom, I mean.
In the 60s, it could have easily been shared on the floor. Later, by the time I saw a tub in a kitchen with my own eyes, such apartments had the small water closet added on – it was always very obvious, like a corner had been carved out and if you were even a vaguely tall person, you had to sit a bit sideways in order to close the door.
You could just pee in the tub.
IT’S ALL PIPES! /George Costanza
I remember these from my childhood. I believe the last one I saw was in the early 1990’s. I hadn’t seen one for years before that one though.
I once had a renovated apartment with a former water closet, toilet removed. It was a door in the kitchen that opened to a closet with a tiny window, just big enough for a toilet. You could see where the tile was patched over in the spot where the toilet had been.
It’s featured in the 1988 comedy Married to the Mob: After mob boss Dean Stockwell kills her husband Alec Baldwin, Michelle Pfeiffer moves to such an apartment with her son, and there’s a tub in the middle of the kitchen. He asks her why it’s there and she tells him she’ll tell him later. It’s implied that either she doesn’t know either, or the answer is too shocking for words.
There’s a thread about it on the IMDB page, with answers ranging from “a leftover from Prohibition, to make bathtub gin” to “meth lab” to “former brothel” to everything speculated above.
The title character in the recent show Ugly Betty lived in an apartment (I assume in Manhattan) with a tub in the kitchen.
I knew somebody who had one in DC. She wouldn’t have given it up for anything, although they bought the place next door and converted part of that into a large luxurious bathroom.
Cast iron cermaic lined claw-foot bathtub with drain + bushels of seafood + water and pot boiler = easy ginormous clam bake.
My mother-in-law’s Manhattan apartment had the tub in the kitchen with an enamel cover. The toilet was outside the apartment and down the hall - and this was in 1994. Apparently, the rent- controlled (not stabilized) tenants were left with the previously-shared hallway toilets, while the other apartments had a tiny room with a shower and toilet inside the apartment.
My parents & grandparents had them in the old Chicago house, on Drake Avenue, in the 60s.