Boy do you have a wrong number. $2000 a month won’t get you a broom closet in Manhattan at least. My daughter was living in a small but comfortable 2 BR apartment in Stuyvesant Town when it was sold. She paid about $2600, but was told they were planning on tripling the rents in five years. She is now in Brooklyn where she has a (technically) 3 BR apartment for about $3000. There are three steps down from the street to the apartment but no steps inside (except to the second floor).
Bolding mine…
Yeah, Stuyvesant Town isn’t exactly typical, even in Manhattan. In fact, $2600 for a 2 bedroom in a private community located in a fab area sounds like a pretty good price to me.
Eyebrows of Doom is right. There are decent rents to be had in Manhattan. I won’t say there aren’t rip-offs and crazy prices in the most desirable neighborhoods (the usual suspects, e.g. Upper West Side, Upper East Side, etc.) but if you stretch beyond elevator/doorman buildings and streets right off Broadway / Fifth Avenue, you can find relatively decent rents. Not that they’re anywhere compatible to what you’d pay for the equivalent square footage in Queens or New Jersey or Albany, but hey, if one feels one simply must live in the tiny island of Manhattan, one had better expect to pay extra for the privilege.
Thanks, LurkerinNJ. I have no trouble attributing the design to fashion of the times, but I find myself curious about the construction method used to build up the rest of the apartment by 10 inches in order to leave the living room sunken. Are these buildings built with floor slabs, or tile arches on bearing walls? The posted listing at 380 W. 76th looks to be from the 1910s but the broker claims 1948.
There were 2BR apartments in Stuyvesant Town for $2600 about seven years ago, but no longer. Now the starting rent for two bedrooms is $3584. For one bedrooms, it’s $3006.67. (See here.)
–I remember Marlo Thomas having some steps down into her apartment in “That Girl” (altough I’m embarassed to admit that).
I looked at Stuyvesant Town apartments last weekend. The 2 bedroom I looked at was $4,100/month. People who are paying $2,600 probably have been there for many years and are rent stabilized.
As a kid I delivered newspapers in the building Bob Newhart allegedly lived in on the TV show: 5901 N. Sheridan Road (You can see it at the end of the opening credits). I can’t remember if I ever saw the inside of one of those apartments in particular, but I did see the inside of a number of apartments in North Sheridan Road high rises and the sunken living room was a common feature. (Not that this would have any impact on the Hollywood set makers for the show).
Oh, I have no idea.
Unless you are from someplace where the broom closets are enormous, you’re wrong. And Stuyvesant Town is not typical of the city in terms of prices, amenities, or even how you get to live there. Some people spend years on a waiting list in the hopes that a StuyTown apartment will open up.
As far as the OP goes, I can’t remember seeing an apartment designed like this.
You might be thinking of Vertigo. I haven’t seen Rear Window, but Wikipedia says the movie is set in Ne wYork and Jimmy Stewart’s character lives in Greenwich Village.
Cat burglar, are ya?
mmm
Rear Window was filmed entirely on a movie set. I have the DVD and the bonus material explains this. So Jimmy Stewart’s apartment was part of the set. (Great movie by the way.)
I saw one in Inwood. I think it was built in the '20s. I think basically it preserves the foyer concept without using walls and gives badly needed ceiling height to the living area. Makes the place feel bigger.
Vertigo was set in San Francisco.
My grandma’s apartment had that, two steps down into a large living room from the entrance and dining room with a nice black iron railing. The apt. building was built in the late 1920s and is in the northern Bronx.
My building was built in 1959 and has no sunken living rooms but does have steps down into the lobby from the sidewalk and two steps leading up from the lobby to symmetrical hallways, the bane of baby carriages, people on crutches, moving men, and people with laundry carts for over fifty years.