The Stuyvesant
142 East 18th Street

Architect: Richard Morris Hunt
Builder: Rutherford Stuyvesant
Built: 1869 (possibly a
reconstruction of
several older houses)
Razed: 1957

The Stuyvesant was the first building to house under one roof more than one family of the sort that aspires to high social status. Though lower class households had been accommodated together as early as 1833 in a tenement on Water Street, the quantity of the space and the quality of its occupants gives this building the distinction of being the first apartment house in New York. By present-day standards the layout was primitive: the kitchen, dining room, service entrance and dumbwaiter are all remote from each other; the inner hall is long and narrow and contains no less than five right-angle turns; two of the bedrooms are at the opposite end of the apartment from the lone bathroom; the closet space is inadequate; and no elevator was provided. Nonetheless The Stuyvesant represented a beginning and as such it is significant.

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