Chelsea Apartments

Like most apartment buildings then, it was six stories high and each floor accommodated four separate five-room rental units. There were two front apartments with windows on the street and two rear apartments with windows facing the backyard; all the apartments had windows facing a common areaway.

The windows were very significant features of the apartment building. In an era of no air conditioning, except in movie houses, it was the only source of ventilation during those hot and muggy New York City summers. Window screens were utilized to allow air in and prevent mosquitoes from entering, but they unfortunately hindered the free flow of air. 

One of the windows in each apartment led to a fire escape, a place where you could lie down outside, as many apartment dwellers sometimes did, to avoid the heat and humidity. The fire escape became a balcony bedroom for many during uncomfortable summer nights.

The areaway windows had some special functions, one of which was the drying of clothes. The customary way to dry clothes in an apartment building was to connect clotheslines on pulleys from one apartment to another via each areaway window. 

During the winter some people would emplace metal window boxes on the areaway windowsills to keep food cold. In the summer neighbors could be heard conversing or quarreling in nearby apartments.

If you were fortunate to live in a front apartment you could use the window as a diversion by hanging out the window. It encompassed the placing of a pillow on a windowsill, and then simply leaning down on one’s elbows and looking out the window. It was the ultimate interesting form of people watching because it could be done from the privacy and comfort of one’s own dwelling. 

The front windows were also convenient to check on children at play and to call them up for lunch or dinner. Money could also be wrapped securely, and dropped down to them to buy something from a nearby store.

Another important portal of the apartment house was the front entrance. It was not only a means of entering or exiting the building; it had some other useful and interesting functions. It consisted of a concrete landing with several steps where the residents would congregate. The stoop, as it was called, was the general social gathering place for the tenants of the building, especially the women.

It was here on hot summer evenings that they would meet to talk and gossip with their neighbors and watch their children playing in the street. The children used it as a home base for games of hide and seek and ring-a-lievio, and for bouncing a ball against for games of stoopball, a uniquely exclusive city game. It was also quite common for people to take pictures of family and friends gracing the stoop of the building.

The roof of the structure was also used for picture taking, and it also had some other interesting uses. People who lived on the top floor used to hang laundry to dry, and for many others it became, tar beach, a place for private sunbathing far away from the bustling streets below. It was also utilized as an observation post when something unusual occurred in the neighborhood.

The superintendent of the building, who usually resided in a rent-free basement apartment, closely monitored all the tenants’ activities. In the winter it was his responsibility to operate the furnace that provided heat for the building. The tenants would often bang on the radiator pipes to inform the superintendent if the heat was insufficient. He also had to collect the garbage from each unit, something he did by using a dumbwaiter, a miniature elevator that was used to move garbage from each floor to the basement. From there he had to place the garbage in metal pails and place them outside the building for collection by the city sanitation department.

Most of those old apartment buildings still stand today; some are high priced rentals, and others have been converted into condominiums. The Chelsea neighborhood is no longer a place where families live and grow up; today’s residents are young, single, upper middle class individuals. Gone is the camaraderie that flourished in the old buildings of the forties and fifties and with it those unique and creative pursuits: tar beach, stoopball, and hanging out the window.

more articles by  Clyde Borg