Justin Davidson recounts New York's embrace of apartment life:
Over and over, the desire for better, cheaper housing has become an instrument of urban destiny. When we were running out of land, developers built up. When we couldn’t climb any more stairs, inventors refined the elevator. When we needed much more room, planners raised herds of towers. And when tall buildings obscured our views, engineers took us higher still.
This architectural evolution has roughly tracked the city’s financial fortunes and economic priorities. The turn-of-the-century Park Avenue duplex represented the apotheosis of the plutocrat; massive postwar projects like Stuyvesant Town embodied the national mid-century drive to consolidate the middle class; and the thin-air penthouses of Trump World Tower capture the millennial resurgence of buccaneering capitalism. You can almost chart income inequality over the years by measuring the height of New York’s ceilings.
The Dish 