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By the 1850s, large brownstone-fronts adopted a new floor
plan whose grandeur reflected the increasing wealth and social
activity
of New York families. A full-sized third room, fifteen to twenty
feet deep and a regular part of the house structure, replaced
the eight-foot-deep tearoom extension. This third room was the
dining room for all meals except breakfast, a function made practical
only after the invention of the dumb waiter around 1850.
Under
this new floor plan, the old back parlor, which had looked into
the tearoom or an open back porch, was a center room without
its own windows. Because sliding doors separated this center room
from the back dining room, it became essentially a part of the
front parlor whose windows faced onto the street. To enhance this
impressive union of the front and back parlors and increase the
light and ventilation in the center room, only a shallow arch at
the ceiling or a screen of Corinthian columns rather than solid
parlor doors separated the two rooms. The front and middle rooms
had become a single thirty-five- to forty-foot-deep parlor, but
separate fireplaces, two sets of ceiling centerpieces and moldings,
and separate doorways on the side hallway in each room maintained
the old idea of distinct front and back parlors.
The fine brownstone-fronts
of the 14th Street and Madison Square areas in the 1850s and
1860s attained truly monumental dimensions—twenty-two,
twenty-five, or thirty feet wide, a basement and four stories tall,
and sixty or sixty-five feet deep. Fourteen-foot-tall ceilings
. . . in the parlors complemented these patrician dimensions. .
. . The bedrooms on the upper floors were correspondingly deeper
. . .
The basement and upper floors remained the same—except
to incorporate the era’s advances in heating and indoor
plumbing. However, on the second floor of large houses, the front
room often
took the full width of the house and was a family sitting room
or library. The back room, separated from the front room by closets
and dressing alcoves with wash basins, was the parents’ bedroom
and had a bathroom with toilet, tub, and shower.
In an era of
large families and several live-in servants, the sixteen-room,
five-story-tall brownstone-front combined grand
parlors for entertaining
and spacious living quarters for the family and, with its many
floors, offered privacy for parents, children, and servants.
Nevertheless, the five floors with high ceilings were problems
in themselves,
and in 1874 one architect complained that a town house was “little
else but a string of stairs, with more or less extended landings.
. . . Up and down, up and down, the women folk are perpetually
toiling as in a treadmill . . . in the fruitless and health-destroying
labor of carrying themselves from floor to floor.”
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