By general consent, Manhattan is the U.S.'s cultural capital, the greatest concentration of taste and wealth in the nation. But only 3,000 people have homes there. The rest live in apartments.
Manhattanites are cliffdwellers by choice as well as necessity. Somehow, apartment living best expresses the basic personality—and impersonality—of the city. Its inhabitants are the young on the way up, the successful who were born somewhere else, the uncertain, the transitory, and the ambitious who are aware that further success (or new failure) may dictate a sudden change in their whole way of life. For the rich (who generally have several other places elsewhere), an apartment is a kind of permanently rented hotel suite. For seekers of anonymity or those who merely hope to be rich, the city apartment is a springboard, a stopping-off place that can be left without regret or nostalgia on the way to a better spot. It is ideal for those who value convenience and mobility above roots (their roots are generally back in Indiana, or in the suburbs), for people who are eternally on the edge of their chairs, ready to leave for Europe or the Caribbean or to take over the West Coast office at an executive's whim.
The Treasure Trove. Being New Yorkers, they are also self-consciously tastemakers. Where money is no object, the lady of the house can call on the nation's most expensively enterprising decorators, who in turn have at hand a huge treasure trove of materials, antiques, furniture ancient and modern in Manhattan's syth
Street stores and Third Avenue backwaters. Probably only in Manhattan can a decorator find a Gobelin tapestry, an Early American sideboard or a Mies van der Rohe steel chair within a few blocks.
Furthermore, since an apartment is an adjustable part of a huge, self-supporting structure, the enterprising designer or owner can often tear out partitions and rearrange walls with a freedom that anywhere else would bring the house down on his head.
Apartments came early to Manhattan.
In 1869, Rutherford Stuyvesant built the first—a thick-walled, five-story brick building on East 18th Street. He called it Stuyvesant Apartments, but most other people dubbed it Stuyvesant's Folly. Still, these "French flats," patterned after Parisian apartments of the day, right down to the watchful concierge, caught on fast. Until the day it was torn down a few years ago, the building never had a vacancy. Moreover, it set the pattern. As the residential section of the city crept uptown, fashionable New Yorkers moved in evergrowing numbers into the massive and ornate variants of Stuyvesant's Folly that rose along Park and Fifth Avenues. They were solidly built, with highceilinged, spacious rooms.