Walkabout with Montrose: Lux Living: Apartment Hotels

This is the 4th in a series about the history of multi-unit housing in Brooklyn.

As more and more people poured into New York in the last quarter of the 19th century, it soon became apparent that the city was running out of room for everyone, rich and poor alike.

Of course, the rich had more options. Advances in transportation- the Brooklyn Bridge, ferries, railroads, horse trolley service, and the improvements of local streets and roads made Brooklyn an ideal suburb for many of the era’s successful industrialists, financiers, and movers and shakers.

Brooklyn Heights had long been the first suburb, with larger and finer brownstone homes replacing most of the clapboards of the late 1700’s.

Clinton Hill, Bedford, St. Mark’s, and Park Slope soon became home to millionaires who built large and lavish mansions and occupied wide and opulent row houses.

Luxury apartment buildings and hotels were the next step in providing homes to the well off in Brooklyn.

Over in Manhattan, the first luxury apartment buildings started springing up in the 1870’s, with luxury co-ops, including the Gramercy Park Apartments, in 1883, the next step in living around one’s social peers.

The apartment hotel was developed at this time to provide the privacy of a house with the amenities of a hotel for the discerning tenant. One entered into a lavish and ornate lobby, and was conveyed to suites by that new invention, the passenger elevator.

The suites were large, many consisting of a reception room, parlors, a dining room, bedrooms, private baths, and servant’s rooms. There were no kitchens, but some suites had butler’s pantries to aid in the serving of meals.

Residents had a choice of dining in the opulent private dining rooms downstairs, or having meals brought up with the aid of dumbwaiters, connected to the kitchens in the basement of the building. Dishes would be removed in the same way.

Maid and laundry service could also be provided, with wash tubs and drying rooms also in the basement.

New technologies made apartment hotels and luxury apartment buildings the laboratories for inventions we now take for granted: telephones and hotel switchboards were in use by the end of the 1870’s, as were central heating, hot running water and gas lighting.

Electricity was in place by the 1890’s, while the central vacuum cleaner, with nozzles in the walls of each room, was invented as far back as 1859, with suction powered by electricity commonplace by the turn of the century.

The Hotel St. George, on Henry and Clark Streets in Brooklyn Heights, begun in 1885, was one of the earliest upper class apartment hotels in Brooklyn.

An 1888 advertisement reads, The independence of the home maintained in every respect without the annoyance of housekeeping: experts in charge of every department, making the St. George the leading family hotel.

The hotel expanded into the largest hotel in New York City, eventually taking up the entire block of Clark to Pineapple, Hicks to Henry. Montrose Morris designed one of the additions in 1890.

Other apartment hotels followed, among them the Italian Renaissance Revival styled Bossert Hotel (1909), on Montague St, with its ornate lobby, and later famous rooftop dining room, and the Standish Arms Hotel on Hicks (1903).

Montrose Morris designed the San Carlos Hotel, now the Roanoke Apartments, in Fort Greene (1890), and the Chatelaine Hotel in Grant Square, Crown Heights North. Clinton Hill’s Mohawk Hotel, built on Washington Ave, in 1903-4 by the firm Neville and Bagge, was among the finest in Brooklyn.

The Mohawk offered suites of 1 to 5 rooms, with a grand dining room on the ground floor. The Beaux-Arts hotel was described as having the quiet atmosphere of a well-ordered home with all of the advantages of a modern hotel.

The lines sometimes get blurry between guest hotels and apartment hotels, some buildings were both, and many of the finest in Manhattan and Bklyn have always been both.

All of the examples in Brooklyn have now been converted into apartments for a wide range of incomes, with the exception of the Bossert, which belongs to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and is on the market. See photos on Flickr.

There were many other smaller hotels in our well to do brownstone neighborhoods, some catering to bachelors, working women, middle-class families, and those coming to the city needing a base of operations.

All of this non-traditional living, that is, non-single family home living, was bound to raise the eyebrows and the ire of the watchers of morality, and as can be expected, they were not pleased.

A writer in the Architectural Journal of 1903 opined that the promiscuous exclusivity of the apartment hotel made it the most dangerous enemy domesticity has had to encounter. Large numbers of working single women were a new force in the working environment beginning in the last quarter of the 19th century.

Bachelor hotels for men often consisted of a suite of 2 or more rooms, but women’s residential hotels had only private rooms, like a dormitory, forcing all entertainment and dining to public spaces, where they could be watched over.

It was only in the beginning of the 20th century that public opinion would allow young single women to rent apartments.

Still, many social critics saw these new independent living arrangements, combined with the disappearing servant class and modern domestic inventions and conveniences, as a witch’s brew designed to corrupt women and break up families.

They blamed the apartment for the rising divorce rate, declining birth rate, premarital sex, and social disparities between rich and poor. (from Building the Dream: A social history of housing in America, by Gwendolyn Wright).

Yet, for many of the well to do, at the close of the 19th century, the apartment was an important force in housing in wealthier neighborhoods. Brooklyn is home to some fine examples, as we’ll explore next time.

Next time: Together, but not too much: the luxury apartment building.

[Photos via eBay]