Co-op of the Day: 86 Prospect Park West 3 BR

TownhouseLaddy,
You mention you find it a clever way to add a second bathroom. I don't think the bath was added. I would assume the bathroom is just a redo of one that was already in there...though I'm just assuming it's redone since I do not remember a photo of that room.

Not sure if this building would have been the type, but often there is a second small bathroom reached through a maid's room. Maybe there was a configuration of the walls either long ago or possibly by the current owners who apparently renovated. Would not surprise me there once was a smaller kitchen with a small servant's bedroom with a bathroom all his/her own. Often the bathroom can be tiny with just a WC and a small, deep square tub (about the footprint of a shower pan). That would have made the bedroom just large enough to be doable and the sink, if there was one, would have been in the bedroom.

I would be shocked if anyone would have *added* a bathroom since 1930 since it would involve massive work and having a nearby stack for the toilet. I'm sure there're bathrooms in the building in the apartments above and below this bathroom unless someone has ripped them out to create a bigger kitchen.

Posted by: BrooklynGreene at September 25, 2008 7:15 PM

WestElm08,
There is no likely way they got a toilet added unless there was already a waste stack for toilets right about in that spot. Granted, there may have been just a toilet and sink or maybe just a toilet, not a full bathroom.

As I wrote above, that stack *may* have been added a good number of years after the building was built, but unlikely added in the last bunch of years.

Knowing something about these things, indeed, I confirm that it is quite possible this apartment had a maid's bedroom and a *small* kitchen. This was quite common in houses and apartments with some pretension in cities all over the country. Indeed, even in the late 1930's into the early 1940's, progressive architects like Walter Gropius of the Bauhaus built his Lincoln, MA house, one of the first “modernist” houses in the US, with a small galley kitchen with the small maid's room off it.

Yes, today it may seem that most of the apartments that still have maid's rooms are relatively large Manhattan apartments...interestingly during the Big D Depression of these large apartments were actually reconfigured from much larger apartments. So, the Park Avenue apartment one commenter on this thread lived in had two maid's rooms with a bathroom between them (which seems lavish-ish I guess) BUT that apartment which was maybe a little over half of the floor of a building was actually the result of a 1930’s redo during that huge housing bust. Just 20 yrs before, when that building went up, it had full floor apts and some apts sprawling over two floors with their own interior staircases.

I'm pointing this out to illustrate that even when things were being downsized, maid's rooms with their own (often small) bathrooms were still common in new construction and reconfigurations of existing dwellings.

Have a look at many plans for small, even tiny houses in the 1920's into the 30's and you'll see lots of small kitchens with a service porch (deliveries, iceman, etc.) with small maid's rooms and a little bathroom as in the Gropius House and the other modernist houses nearby (and all the many, houses –not so modernist--built all over the country). Much of this may be obliterated today if a later owner (during the post-WWII period, esp in renos of the last bunch of years) expanded a kitchen by removing the partitions.

You can see lots of houses that may still have a maid's room used as a home office or turned into a breakfast nook in many houses in residential sections of lots of cities in the US with a powder room off the kitchen or back door.

Posted by: BrooklynGreene at September 26, 2008 12:51 PM