It was eighty more years before the town-home era ended, years in which new money poured into New York faster than derogatory names for the arrivistes could be coined. In the eighteenth century, the city’s genteel residential district was a tiny enclave at the southern tip of Manhattan island south of Chambers Street, clustered around Trinity Church and St Paul’s church, lower Broadway, Bowling Green, and the Battery.ĭriven north by fire and yellow fever epidemics, social life first alighted in what is now Tribeca, in the 1830s, skittered east to a new district surrounding the intersection of Lafayette Place and Bond Street in today’s NoHo. The location of those homes had moved inexorably uptown over the years. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Manhattan’s social elite, the Knickerbockers, who were descendants of the original Dutch settlers of New York, the English colonists who followed them and finally, the American revolutionaries who tossed the English out, went to bed at night exclusively in private houses. Throughout the 1920s, developers began putting up buildings like 740 Park (and 1040 5th) full of grand apartments with the proportions of fine, freestanding homes-mansions stacked one atop the other, designed as suitable replacements for the private homes that had led society’s march uptown and become obsolete within a single generation. A brief lesson in New York living arrangements is in order.
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