I was thinking about the intersection between building codes and Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote's book (and the movie-which, by the way, is very different from the book).
I may be mixing things up a bit but one of Truman Capote's characters in one of his New york stories lived in a cold water flat and i once read that he himself once briefly lived in a cold water flat.
{A cold-water flat is an apartment which has no running hot water. In most western countries, current building codes make cold water flats illegal}
Similarly, Dashell Hammet lived in an SRO hotel for a year (an SRO is basically a weekly rental dorm room)--the Kenmore Hotel on 23rd Street--and wrote The Maltese Falcon there. Early in my career i had a tour of the Kenmore Hotel after the police and federal marshals had seized it--it had become a pretty squalid place.
My point: these types of apartments have largely vanished, partly due to building codes stipulating higher and higher minimum quality apartments---and, to a certain extent, good riddance. It's a lousy way to live- without hot water in a city that gets cold in the winter. But lower end apartments and rooms filled a useful role.
Today there is compression in the housing market -- the quality spread is narrower, at least in Manhattan.
Then, there were more options for those living on a shoestring for whatever reason. Today there are fewer. There's less flexibility in the system.
People starting out
I may be mixing things up a bit but one of Truman Capote's characters in one of his New york stories lived in a cold water flat and i once read that he himself once briefly lived in a cold water flat.
{A cold-water flat is an apartment which has no running hot water. In most western countries, current building codes make cold water flats illegal}
Similarly, Dashell Hammet lived in an SRO hotel for a year (an SRO is basically a weekly rental dorm room)--the Kenmore Hotel on 23rd Street--and wrote The Maltese Falcon there. Early in my career i had a tour of the Kenmore Hotel after the police and federal marshals had seized it--it had become a pretty squalid place.
My point: these types of apartments have largely vanished, partly due to building codes stipulating higher and higher minimum quality apartments---and, to a certain extent, good riddance. It's a lousy way to live- without hot water in a city that gets cold in the winter. But lower end apartments and rooms filled a useful role.
Today there is compression in the housing market -- the quality spread is narrower, at least in Manhattan.
Then, there were more options for those living on a shoestring for whatever reason. Today there are fewer. There's less flexibility in the system.
People starting out
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