• Matt Blaze@federate.socialOP
    2·
    3 months ago

    “Who designed this?” you might ask.

    Small NYC brownstones such as the one shown here were generally either built from the start as multi-family tenements, or were built as single-family homes and later subdivided into apartments. In the former case, the layout into individual units was part of the original design and generally fairly sane. In the latter case, landlords often tried to squeeze every square inch of rentable space out of the existing layout, at the expense of things like hallways.

    • Joe Hill 🇮🇱🇵🇸🇺🇦@union.place
      1·
      3 months ago

      @mattblaze@federate.social
      The first place I lived in NYC was originally designed to be 6 floors x 2 relatively spacious apts. when I lived there, it had been divided into 4 600 sq/ft apts per floor.

    • Chuck@chaos.social
      1·
      3 months ago

      @mattblaze@federate.social I mean you can’t sleep in a hallway now can you ?

      At USC there used to be a design contest at the Architecture school for putting the maximum number of living spaces into the smallest number of square feet. Each ‘unit’ had to support two adults, cooking, bathing, a bathroom, and a place to sleep.

      One of the students called it ‘smooshed camping’ which sort of stuck with me.