ABSTRACT
Historians Elizabeth Collins Cromley, Elizabeth Blackmar and Paul Groth discuss the attractions and repulsions of the new living situations in New York and San Francisco (apartment buildings, hotels, rooming houses): the freedom of individuals to move easily and frequently, both in location and in social status; the anxieties of families to assert their social status in shockingly new circumstances. These three, together with historian Donald Olsen, demonstrate that in these new circumstances, architects and builders often turned to pre-existing models: in America, the so-called French flat; in Vienna, the palaces of the aristocracy; everywhere, the larger institutional structures of the past such as monasteries. In a close analysis of Parisian apartment buildings (which were also modeled on aristocratic prototypes) as seen through the novels of Balzac, literary historian Sharon Marcus shows that these most desirable dwellings of the French middle classes exhibited transparency toward their urban surroundings. These buildings, unlike their British and American counterparts, housed several different social classes and often included commercial enterprises. Economic historian M. J. Daunton, writing about the British working class, argues that a gradual reorientation toward the street, away from more communal types of spatial configuration, was a by-product of early-nineteenth-century middle-class efforts in planning reform, developing household technologies, and the changing aspirations of working-class people themselves. Selections from the greatest of Émile Zola’s urban novels, L’Assommoir (1876), suggest in a vivid and concrete way the housing experiences of the Parisian working classes during the period of Baron von Haussmann’s replanning of Paris. Paris is viewed through the eyes of Gervaise, a laundress.
