Alone Together

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 193 since 1945. His essay reflects a concern with issues that are national in their scope. Robert B. Fairbanks (“The Good Government Machine: The Citizens Charter Association and Dallas Politics, 1930—1960”) judiciously reexamines the role of business and civic leaders in the transformation of politics in modern Dallas. The editors have brought together a helpful thematic collection. The chapters by Fisher and Mohl were designated cowinners of the accompanying Webb-Smith annual best-essay competition. This vol­ ume will enrich instruction and encourage the formulation of new research agendas. Michael H. Ebner Dr. Ebner teaches urban and social history at Lake Forest College. With Eugene M. Tobin, he is coeditor of The Age of Urban Reform (1977) and the author of Creating Chicago's North Shore (1988). He is currently writing a book entitled “Shock Suburbs: Growth in the Exploding American Metropolis since 1945.” Alone Together: A History of New York’s Early Apartments. By Elizabeth Cromley. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Pp. xv + 252; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95. In the United States, the apartment as a dwelling unit, the apart­ ment building, and apartment living are in origin a Manhattan phenomenon. After the turn of the century they superseded all other forms of permanent residence within the borough and set the standard for the rest of urban America. Their development in New York has long needed a comprehensive historical account, and Elizabeth Cromley, professor of architecture at the State University of New York at Buffalo, has at last offered to satisfy the requirement. Her book is a bold first step in dealing with an important aspect of urban building, but it is limited to the social history of an architectural form at the expense of the technical and urbanistic aspects. Indeed, the work might be most accurately entitled a history of apartment life from the American beginnings to about 1910. There is considerable emphasis on the complex and changing attitudes of the tenant toward this novel and once-threatening mode of life. These attitudes began to shift around the mid-19th century from nearly complete hostility toward living in tenements, hotels, and boardinghouses, or eating in restaurants, as threats to morality, privacy, the sanctity of marriage, and the purity of women, to a total surrender around the turn of the century to what was once scorned and feared. It is the radical change in the physical arrangements and the per­ sonal modes of family life that constitute the central theme of Cromley ’s narrative. Sheer practical necessity finally compelled adaptation to existence in multifamily dwellings: the population of Manhattan grew rapidly throughout the 19th century, while the construction of single­ 194 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE family houses fell increasingly behind the housing need, until finally the scarcity of land and the costs of building made such construction impossible. The goal of every respectable middle-class family was the privacy and protection offered by the single-family home, and the chal­ lenge to architectsand developerswas tocreateapartmentsthatsatisfied these deep-lying needs while providing the functional advantages— especially to housewives—of the single-floor, self-contained dwelling equipped with the new power-operated household appliances. The Parisian flat, best known to the upper-income bourgeoisie in New York, was in many ways a model, but it was at the same time a source of moral uneasiness to the almost pathologically conventional Americans. The author is at her best in describing how the evolution ofapartment plan­ ning, from Richard Morris Hunt’s Stuyvesant Apartments of 1869 to the turn ofthecentury, progressivelymet the physical and psychological requirements oftenants to the point where any ofthe older alternatives were unthinkable. Yet one comes away from Cromley’s work with the realization that there are serious lacunae. The modern apartment building would have been an impossibility without a parallel evolution of utilities on an unprecedented scale, complexity, and reliability. Central heating, constant-pressure water supply, the associated piping, radiators, and sanitary fixtures—these formed the primary necessities for urban existence. Fireproofing, lighting with multiple fixtures served by a public supply of gas and later electricity, and a safe vertical transpor­ tation were quickly seen as essential

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