Memoirs of a millionaire

by Lucia True Ames Mead

Taking the eight lots which you have purchased, each one hundred feet deep, let us devote say sixty feet to the back yards. This will admit of flowerbeds, and a little playground, a very important item with a mother of young children. These dimensions are the same as those of hundreds of South End lots and houses.

Then there will be left for the building of the eight homes an area of eight lots, each forty feet deep and twenty-three feet wide.

According to our ordinary wasteful system in the building of houses vertically there would be eight sets of stone steps, eight doors and lobbies, and allowing four stories to each house, there would be four halls and three staircases, one over the other, in each of the eight houses. Each hall would involve more or less expense in carpeting, much time in sweeping and keeping clean; and beside, much physical energy would be wasted in simply getting from dining-room to parlor and from parlor to bedroom.

Now it seems to me that instead of building these eight houses side by side vertically, like so many bricks set up on end, we can do much better. We can abolish seven of our doorsteps and entrance ways and use one entrance for all, making it thereby much handsomer, and, if we choose, seven times more expensive. Then instead of eight times three flights of stairs we shall have simply three, one over the other, in a broad central hall which will run from the street to the back yard, having four tenements on either side of it, one tenement for each story. The floors separating the tenements will be made as impervious to sound as the partitions in houses built in the usual vertical fashion. The central hall can be divided into two parts: a front hall containing a passenger elevator and a handsome flight of stairs, and a back hall with another flight of stairs and another elevator, the latter for servants and freight. With the same amount of money that would have been required for building and carpeting the extra stairs, these halls and staircases can be made handsomer and absolutely fireproof. On the top story, instead of the inconvenient ladder and trap-door leading to the roof, which is usual in our vertically built tenements, there can be a comfortable staircase, covered at the point where it reaches the roof and giving exit through a door upon the roof, which can be thoroughly guarded by a parapet or iron fence, thus affording a safe playground for children.

This will cost something, of course, but no more I think than would be expended in the ordinary, wasteful method of building to which we resort at present.

Now perhaps you will say that with the exception of the back yards this is not different from the ordinary apartment hotel; but wait a bit. What I propose to do is to give to each person a suite of rooms equal in cubical contents to what he would have had in his vertical four-story house, and I shall arrange these rooms so that he shall have a frontage on the street, not of twenty-three feet, but of ninety-two feet minus ten feet which he will allow for the central hall. As his neighbor across the hall will have the same frontage and also allow ten feet for the hall, the latter, you see, will be a spacious apartment twenty feet in width.

Think of a flat having eighty-two feet of front, and with a set of four back yards at the rear of each home, which is an area of sixty by eighty-two feet! To be sure each one cannot use all that area. He will have only one fourth of it for his special use, but it will be worth something to have all that space ostensibly his own, and the outlook a little different from each room.

Of course your first question will be as to how these yards are to be reached.

My first purpose is to have these eight families who dwell under the same roof use nothing but their halls and staircases in common. So in the basement each family shall have a space at the rear of the house, twenty-three feet in width, each having its own exit into its own yard from the laundry and store-rooms which will be situated there. In the front part of the basement, where in the average Boston house the coal and furnace are usually found, will be the heating appliances for the whole building, and heat will be provided in the different stories as it is in the ordinary hotel.

There will be speaking-tubes, of course, connecting each laundry with its kitchen above, so that the mistress on the fourth floor can communicate with her Bridget in the laundry, and the only disadvantage will be that once a week the Bridget living on the top story will have to descend four flights in the elevator to reach her laundry instead of running down one flight of stairs, as she would do in the house of the ordinary type.