New york homes: ideas, options and buying details

Where land is scarce and the lot is standardised, almost every decision in a building becomes an argument about daylight. That single sentence explains more New York housing than any list of styles.

The reasoning is short. A grid was laid down before most of the buildings on it existed, and it produced lots that were narrow across the front and deep from front to back. Build to the edges of a lot like that, with neighbours hard against both sides, and you have a building with windows at two ends and a long dark middle. Everything that follows, from the shape of a plan to the profile of a tower, is a response to that problem.

This page is about buildings and the city's form. It names no residence and no occupant, and nothing here identifies a specific house.

What to take away

• The narrow, deep lot is the origin of nearly everything. Light at two ends and darkness in the middle is the condition every plan here is solving.
• The raised entrance is structural logic, not ornament: it lifts the main rooms above the street and puts a usable floor at ground level.
• As buildings grew tall, the daylight problem moved from inside the plan to the street, and the rules that followed shaped the skyline directly.

The lot came before the buildings

A grid imposed on land in advance of development is a decision about everything built afterwards. It fixes the frontage available to each owner, the depth they can build, and therefore the shape of the building that makes economic sense on the parcel.

The resulting unit is a building considerably deeper than it is wide, sharing walls with its neighbours on both sides. Those shared walls are efficient in every respect except one. They are cheaper to build, they carry structure for two buildings at once, they insulate against heat loss and against sound, and they use land that would otherwise be a gap. What they cannot do is admit light.

So the building has two façades, front and back, and a long interior distance between them. In a shallow building that is unremarkable. In a deep one it means a substantial part of the floor is far from any window, and no amount of money spent on the exterior changes it.

Two ends of light, and what a plan does about it

Once you accept the constraint, the plan organises itself in a fairly small number of ways, and you can recognise all of them.

Rooms in sequence, front to back. The simplest answer is to string rooms along the depth of the building, each opening into the next. It uses every square foot and it costs privacy, because passing through the middle of the building means passing through rooms.

A corridor down one side. Give up a strip of width to a passage and rooms gain doors of their own. This is the trade at the heart of a narrow building: circulation is expensive here in a way it is not on a wide lot, and every plan is making a choice about how much to spend on it.

The dark middle used for what does not need light. The stair, the bathroom, storage, and services migrate to the centre, because that is the part of the floor that no window can reach. Reading where the stair sits is one of the quickest ways to understand how a building was organised.

A notch cut out of the mass. Where the depth is too great to solve any other way, the building gives back some of its own floor area as a light well or shaft, bringing daylight and air to the middle from above. This works better in principle than in practice: a narrow shaft between tall walls delivers modest light, carries sound between floors, and collects whatever falls into it. Its history is a large part of the history of housing regulation in dense cities.

That regulatory thread is worth knowing in outline, because it is the reason the constraint is not purely economic. Housing codes in dense cities generally require that a habitable room have a window onto a legal open area, which is what stops the dark middle simply being sold as a bedroom. What counts as a habitable room and what counts as a legal open area are defined locally and revised over time, so the specifics are a question for the current code where the building stands rather than something to take from a general article.

The raised entrance is a section drawing

The stair up to a front door is the most photographed feature of the type and the most misunderstood. It is not decoration, and it is not primarily about status. It is the visible consequence of a decision about how to use the lowest floor.

Sink the bottom floor partly below the level of the street and it becomes usable space with its own entrance underneath the stair, lit by windows just above ground level. Raise the floor above it and that floor gains something valuable: it sits above the noise, the dirt and the sightlines of the street, so its windows can stay open and its rooms can be the good ones.

You therefore get two front doors, one up and one down, serving two different levels and historically two different functions: reception and living above, service and utility below. That arrangement outlived the household structure that produced it, which is why the type converts so readily into separate dwellings. The section was always doing that job.

Read the front of such a building and the hierarchy is legible without entering it. The tallest windows mark the principal floor, and they are usually the floor at the top of the steps. Storeys above it get progressively shorter, because they were progressively less important.

Building up moved the problem outdoors

As construction technology allowed real height, the daylight constraint did not disappear. It relocated. A tall building on a narrow street does not darken its own middle so much as it darkens everything around it, including the street.

Cities responded by regulating form rather than appearance: requiring buildings to step back as they rise, so that a notional line drawn from the far side of the street continues to admit light to the ground. The architectural consequence was immediate and unmistakable, and it produced the stepped, tapering profile that reads as characteristic of a certain period of tall building. That shape was not a style anyone chose. It was the largest volume the rules allowed, and architects then made the best composition they could out of it.

A later alternative traded floor area for open ground: a slimmer tower rising straight from a plaza, permitted to go higher because it left space around itself. Both approaches are answers to the same question about light and air at street level, and both are visible in silhouette from a distance, which makes them one of the easier things in this city to read correctly.

Deep plans, conversions and the corner

Two more consequences are worth naming, because they explain a large share of what living space here is actually like.

Buildings originally built for commerce or manufacture have deep floor plates. They were designed around large windows and open interiors, which worked because the occupants needed uninterrupted floor rather than a series of daylit rooms. Converting such a building to dwellings reintroduces the old problem in a new form: the perimeter is excellent and the core is dark, and any plan has to decide honestly what to put there.

And the corner unit is genuinely different, not just more expensive. Two exposures instead of one changes the light through the day, makes cross ventilation possible, and allows rooms to face two directions. In a building where every other unit has one exposure, that is a structural advantage rather than a matter of preference.

The same logic explains why apartments stacked vertically in a building are usually identical. They share a structural grid, a service core and a window arrangement, and altering any of those on one floor would disturb all the others.

How to read an interior here

• Find the shared walls. Whichever sides have no windows are party walls, and they tell you the building's orientation on its lot immediately.
• Locate the stair and the services. They mark the darkest part of the plan, which is the part the design gave up on.
• Count exposures. One, two, or a shaft. This single number explains more about how a space feels than its floor area does.
• Look at ceiling heights across floors. Where they vary, they are recording an old hierarchy of rooms.
• Check window head heights against the street outside. A floor raised above the pavement is telling you where the principal rooms were meant to be.

Ceiling heights, stair position and window placement are the elements that survive refits, which is why they are better evidence than finishes.

Common questions

Why are the buildings so deep and narrow?

Because the lots are, and the lots were laid out in advance of the buildings. Frontage is the expensive dimension in a grid, so parcels were cut narrow and long, and building to the edges of such a parcel produces exactly this shape.

Is a light shaft worth anything?

Some, and less than its plan drawing suggests. Light reaching the bottom of a narrow shaft between tall walls is limited, and shafts carry sound and collect debris. They were an improvement on nothing, which is the standard they were introduced against.

Why do older buildings have such tall windows on one floor only?

That floor was the principal one. Height was allocated by importance, and the composition of the façade is a fairly honest record of how the building ranked its own rooms.

Does the same reasoning apply in other cities?

The method does; the answers do not. Somewhere with abundant land, a mild climate and a seismic condition produces almost the opposite building, as Los Angeles homes sets out. Comparing the two is the clearest way to see that both are solving local problems rather than expressing local taste.

What should I look at first in a photograph of an interior?

The windows: how many walls have them, how tall they are, and what they face. Everything else in the image is a decision that could be reversed next year. The daylight is a property of the building.