Building types

The houses, apartments and townhouses that Richard Joseph Spinelli works with sit on and around Belmont Avenue, Lorillard Place and Bathgate Avenue, among some of the oldest housing types in New York. These six entries describe those types and the laws that shaped them, from the tenement acts of the nineteenth century to the Multiple Dwelling Law of 1929. Front stoops disappeared from many rowhouses in the 1920s and 1930s as owners divided them into flats, The New York Times has noted; walk ups kept their appeal to buyers and renters, the paper found in 2013; and two in five households citywide live in buildings with under five units, per Urban Omnibus.

Entries in Building types

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  Prewar Buildings in New York

  An undefined label, a cutoff taken from rent control, and survey counts of the homes that predate it.

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  Walk Up Apartment Buildings

  The six story elevator threshold of 1929 and the stair bound homes it left, counted by size, age and borough.

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  Old Law and New Law Tenements

  Two reform statutes, a dumbbell floor plan, and the courtyard buildings that replaced it after 1901.

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  The New York Rowhouse

  Areaway, stoop, facade, cornice, roof and yard: the parts of the city's oldest repeated house form.

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  The Multiple Dwelling Law of 1929

  One date in April 1929 splits the city's apartment houses into two sets of rules that still apply.

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  Two Family Houses in New York City

  An owner downstairs, a tenant upstairs: the small house as a code category and a survey count.