Closing Bell: Brooklyn Brochures
Talk about floor plan porn! A few weeks ago Streetscapes writer Christoper Gray wrote about an online collection of real estate brochures through Columbia University, which boasts 2,518 Brooklyn buildings in its collection. Pictured above are plans for the 4th to 8th floors of the building at 9 Prospect Park West. Check out the entire…
Talk about floor plan porn! A few weeks ago Streetscapes writer Christoper Gray wrote about an online collection of real estate brochures through Columbia University, which boasts 2,518 Brooklyn buildings in its collection. Pictured above are plans for the 4th to 8th floors of the building at 9 Prospect Park West. Check out the entire Brooklyn collection at New York Real Estates Brochure Collection.
Well, remember that for every apartment there were probably 5 or 10 tenements under construction! And those means lived differently back then (well, I guess they still do today) – the apartments had maids, the kitchens had servants, and the layouts included servants’ quarters. The people who bought those apartments back then wouldn’t buy the average condo today!
Wow, they just don’t make apartments like that anymore, imagine 8 room apartments….
ugh, now, all you get is 2 rooms with everything combined together, and a window if your lucky….
The architects back then really put thought into their plans, where people can actually live.
By the way, check out this as well:
go to the Digital Gallery of the NYPL
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/index.cfm
and type in “apartment houses” as a search.
The first couple of hundred images will be of lay outs and floorplans of apartment houses, narratives about the architects etc, and then there is a wealth of other images, NYC Views etcetera.
Streeteasy offers links to that site with many of the buildings featured. I have often used it to find out more than just the floorplan for an apt I was interested in. Great site.
I’ve posted links to there a few times. Love that site.
The descriptions in the brochures are the best – the equivalent of today’s granite countertops, Bosch appliances and other broker babble (linoleum was big, I remember).
it’s interesting the amenities highlighted–colored bath tiles, stand-up showers in larger apartments only, roof insulation. I was told by an older cabbie that many of the Broooklyn Dodgers and some famous actors of the era lived in the Flatbush apartments built in the era of these brochures.
Yes, the Brooklyn brochures have been up on the site for a year or two (and are far less than 2,500). Chris’s article was about the posting of the Manhattan and Bronx brochures (the bulk of the collection, I believe). Because the collection deals with apartment buildings and is largely (not exclusively) from the inter-war period, the Brooklyn buildings skew heavily towards non-Brownstone (newer) neighborhoods.
One of the regulars here (maybe NOP) highlighted this collection quite a few months ago in comments to either COTD listing or maybe an HOTD.
It’s an incredible collection, only made frustrating by the buildings that are missing. What’s perhaps most fascinating is that the vast majority are in neighborhoods like Flatbush and Bay Ridge. (Also I think the number listed above are in the entire collection, not just Brooklyn.)