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As the island filled up with apartment buildings, house building declined, and has now all but ceased. There have been only eight new houses built in all Manhattan since the end of World War II. Today Manhattan is in the midst of the biggest apartment-building boom in its history. But high prices since the war have tempted most builders into cutting corners, cramping spaces, and scanting on wall thicknesses. Says Architect Bernard Guenther: "Nowadays, when the fellow upstairs rolls a pair of dice, you can tell when they come up seven." Ceilings are now a standard and skimpy eight feet, and it is a rare apartment that has a working fireplace. Complains Decorator Elizabeth Draper: "The rooms are so neutral: they have no moldings or cornices, no 'eyebrows,' no character." Echoes Designer T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings: "Apart from their shabbiness, the interior spaces are so ignoble. The ceilings are too low—the areas are just not worthy!" The grand old apartments are still perhaps the city's best, still command towering prices (the remaining rentals along Park and Fifth Avenues run as high as $1,500 per room per year, and co-ops sell for as much as $250,000). A few of the postwar generation of apartments are at least cleanly designed. The energetic occupants, with ingenuity, enterprise and money, can make these filing-cabinet spaces spectacular, impressive, or merely comfortable, according to the owner's particular taste, income or inclination.
Venice on the East River. "Today's rooms," says Mrs. H.J. Heinz II, wife of the 57-varieties man, "are either so slickly modern that one becomes Mrs. Plastic or so ornate that one is Madame Ormolulu. I prefer to have something that will last." To restyle part of their eleven-room triplex co-op on the East River at 5 2nd Street, the Heinzes brought in Jansen Inc., international decorators. Drue Heinz used mostly classic French furniture but aimed at a Venetian effect. The high ceiling had been strung with beams. They were ripped out. and the walls were "papered" in green velvet to show off the Heinzes' big collection of modern French paintings. "By doing the room in velvet," says Mrs. Heinz, "we've assured ourselves that it will age well; as the velvet gets shabby, it will look better." Intimacy & Nice Things. Another East Side co-op (i Sutton Place South) in which Jansen has had a hand belongs to Winston Frederick Churchill Guest, an heir to the Phipps steel money, and his wife Lucy ("C.Z."). Boston-born "C.Z." was a Ziegfeld girl and artist's model for Diego Rivera before she settled down as one of New York's more active society matrons. The Guests have homes in Palm Beach and Roslyn, L.I., and rent a "hunting box" in Virginia, have turned their Manhattan apartment into a showcase for their English and French antiques and porcelains. To bring intimacy to the big, high-ceilinged living room, they divided it into three distinctive furniture groupings. "I wanted it comfortable," says C.Z., "so guests don't feel that the room is a museum. It should be cozy and attractive; that's the charm of having nice things. But people should be able to relax and feel at ease."