This article originally appeared in The American Magazine, Volume 86, July 1918 through December 1918 published by The Crowell Publishing Company, 381 Fourth Avenue, New York. Images and transcript below.
Where People Prefer to Live
Some things I have learned out of my experience in building apartments which accommodate 28,000 human beings
By Dr. Charles V. Paterno
PEOPLE who live in small towns often seem to think that the problems of city life are quite different from the ones they have to solve. Some of them are different; but when you come right down to rock bottom, a great man of these problems are universal.
When the man in Clinton, Iowa, or Oklahoma City, or Youngstown, Ohio, or anywhere, looks for a home, he has to think of almost the identical points of which a man in New York thinks when he is seeking an apartment. As I have built apartments in New York City which, all together, house about twenty-eight thousand persons, I naturally have had to make a study of the things people look for, or should look for, in choosing a place to live.
In every town, for example, there is the problem of accessibility. If there is a street-car line in your town, you prefer to live within a minute’s walk of it. If there isn’t any transportation line, you look for a house which is pretty close to your store.
In New York, accessibility is even more vital. A man’s first questions about a New York apartment are, “How near is it to the subway, elevated and street-car line? How long will it take me to go to and from my business?” For an apartment only one block from a transportation line he will pay at least ten per cent more than for one four blocks distant. And for one ten minutes nearer his business than the apartment in which he has been living, he will actually “raise the ante” thirty per cent if he can afford to.
Apartments in a good neighborhood, yet near the business districts, are almost twice as expensive as those two or three miles distant.
If you live in a small town, you may think that men in New York are foolish to pay so much extra money just for the sake of convenience. But ask yourself if you wouldn’t be willing to pay more for a house near a car line than for one located so far away that you would have to wade through drifts of snow in winter or walk ten minutes under a boiling sun in summer. It is worth something to you, both in time and in comfort, to avoid that – and your rent shows that it is.
But this is not the only problem of location. Women, especially, like to live in a fashionable neighborhood. Men, too, want to appear prosperous; and they know that the ability to pay the high rents asked in an exclusive section generally passes as a proof of posperity.
But in New York people really go to extremes about outward show. If I built the finest apartments in the city, but located them in a poor section, do you imagine that people would leave the “better class” districts and flock to these apartments, even at a lower rental? Certainly not. They would rather have a few small rooms in an exclusive neighborhood than a good-sized apartment in an unfashionable section. Pride seems to mean more to them than comfort does.
This desire for show is one of the chief causes of high rents. Since people demand handsome entrances and luxurious fittings they must expect to pay the costs of these things in the form of increased rent. Not long ago, when I built in New York the largest apartment house in the world, I spent forty thousand dollars on an ornamental garden two hundred and seventy feet long and seventy feet wide, in the courtyard of the house. The maintenance of this garden alone costs me about five thousand dollars a year. You can easily see that, when I estimated how much rent each apartment must bring, I had to figure in, together with everything else, the original cost and the yearly expenses of the garden.
Though many people are more interested in outside show than inside comfort, there are two rooms in which every man and woman is interested, no matter what rent they are paying. One is the man’s own personal bathroom. The other is the kitchen. Women who have no servants know that they will have to spend much of their time in that room. And even women who have servants know that unless the cooking facilities are close to perfection there is going to be trouble. Therefore, while the man fusses with the bathroom, the woman looks the kitchen over very carefully.
MEN like bathrooms to be large as possible. Unfortunately, in New York they are usually pretty small. The ideal bathroom for a man is one with a good shower, a large mirror with lights on both sides for convenience in shaving, and a bathtub long enough to stretch one’s self luxuriously at fully length. Soap, as everyone knowns by sad experience, is a must elusive things in bathing, so I endear myself to my tenants by having the soap dish built into the wall alongside of the tub. Whenever men see this contrivance the give three cheers.
In the kitchen and pantries, a woman wants modern improvement, but she is especially keen about shelves. She wants a lot – and then a lot more. In the ordinary city apartment there is usually shelf room for only two or three hundred dishes. I know build shelves which can hold more than a thousand. And when the woman see this generous provision they almost echo the mean’s three cheers from the bathroom. The size of ice boxes is usually another cause for complaint. Knowing this, I install many that will hold two hundred pounds of ice each. In houses where people have many servants, the ice boxes are also arranged so that one side opens into the kitchen and the other into the panty. I never had built them this way until several women told me that when there is only one door to a refrigerator quarrels among servants always take place as a result of two or three wanting to get things at the same time.
Because women like to have as much light as possible when cooking on the gas ranges, these should be placed close to a window. There should also be a good electric light overhead. A hood on top of the range is another convenience which every woman appreciates. This hood contains flues which draw up all the odors, so that, even when only five feet away, one cannot smell what is being cooked. Instead of the one sink, which used to be considered all that was necessary, modern kitchens have several. One of these which is deeper than the others, Is useful for pots and pans. There is also a special closet for brooms and brushes, so that they won’t have to be placed in corners or behind the doors, where they are always falling down.
People who pay thirty-five dollars a month in small towns can usually get a pretty nice house. In New York, however, I’m sorry to say that unless one can afford to pay at least sixty-five dollars a month, double what is paid by people outside the city, it is almost impossible to have an apartment in which the rooms will be light. People in New York often have to pay as much as forty and fifty dollars a month for apartments containing rooms dark enough tot require electric or gas light even in the daytime. These rooms have windows, of course; but the building are so high and so crowded that the light fails to reach more than perhaps one room. Such conditions are unfortunate; but what can be done about it when enough people to populate half a state insist on occupying one small island?
Because light rooms are such a rarity, the rates for apartments which have them are at least thirty to forty per cent higher than for those not so light. There is even a vast difference in the prices paid for apartments on the lower floors of a building and those on the upper floors, because, of course, of the better light and air when one is high up. Take two apartments, just alike, except that one is on the second floor of an elevator apartment house and the other is on, say, the eleventh. The one on the second floor will rent for perhaps $700, while the other will being $500 more. In most modern houses an apartment of fourteen rooms and five baths will being $7,500 on the lower floors and $9,500 on the upper ones, a cash difference of $2,000 a year. People want light wherever they live, but in New York one has to pay from $500 to $2,000 a year extra to get it.
DR. CHARLES V. PATERNO was born in Italy but came to this country when he was only five years old. Although he is a graduate of Cornell Medical College he never has practiced his profession, but has become probably the greatest builder of apartment houses in this, or any other country. He is now 39 years old. Since he was 21, he has built more than 75 of these houses; enough to accommodate a total “population” of more than 28,000 persons.
Last spring he completed the largest apartment house in the world. This picture shows Dr. Paterno and a corner of the $40,000 garden, 270 feet long and 70 feet wide, in the courtyard of this great New York structure, whose yearly rentals amount to a million dollars.
Dr. Paterno is married, has one son, and lives in New York City in a house which he built for himself, overlooking the Hudson River.
Despite this increased cost, however, may people ask for apartments above the sixth or seventh floors. Through experience, they know that the higher one is the less one gets the noise and dust from the street. An additional advantage, also, is the fact that flies are conspicuous by their absence up there.
People often ask my opinion as to the best floor on which to live. I have always answered “the one next to the top,” because on that floor you are high enough to get good light and air and yet you escape the risk of any leak from the roof in winter, while it is also cooler than the top floor in summer.
Sometimes, however, people object to going very high, because they are afraid the children may fall out of the windows, or that their chances of escape, in case of fire, would be less. But almost every apartment house has window guards too high for the youngsters to climb over; and as for fire, there are very few serious blazes in modern apartment houses, principally because of the struct fire regulations. A new innovation, however, is a staircase leading from each side of an apartment, thus giving tow modes of exit instead of the customary single one.
Though most people like to live above the fourth floor, there are some whose business or profession makes the ground floor desirable. Doctors or dentists, for example, like this location because their names can be well displayed there. They also want their patients to be able to reach them with a minimum of delay or difficulty. In the cheaper class of apartments, milliners and dressmakers often display their names and wax models in the windows of a first-floor apartment, thus having show window, shop, and home all for the same price.
ONE of the remarkable things about apartment house life is that such an extraordinary proportion of the tenants move every year. In May and October, the two months in which people change their residence in New York, it is almost impossible to get a moving van until the rush is over. Before one tenant is out, the new one is often on hand, demanding to be allowed to move in.
Twenty per cent of New York moves every year, thirty per cent moves every two years, and about ten per cent moves every three years. The average “life” of a tenant is about two years. I know a man whose record is regarded as almost phenomenal because he has remained in one house for eight years! If there are fifty apartments in a house a tenant who remains five years will have a complete set of new neighbors at the end of that time. That is really one of the reasons why people in New York apartment houses do not become acquainted with one another. In a small town, everyone knows everyone else. On New York you can live three years in an apartment house, and you probably won’t get to know more than one or two families out of thirty or forty.