Assr
Páginas: 2 (449 palabras)
Publicado: 23 de noviembre de 2012
Where the Secrets Were Kept
IN New York City, houses and apartment buildings typically conceal their private sides when you are introduced to them. But tap the walls or peer into the back of acloset, and who knows what you might find? A hidden staircase, a secret passageway, or walls that pivot could lead to unknown territory.
Some of these oddities are legacies of singular historicmoments, like Prohibition. At a town house for sale in Greenwich Village, which operated as a speakeasy in the 1930s, a second-floor window was a false door that led to the fire escape and from there tothe adjoining yard — very handy when enforcement agents raided the place. Other secrets were the work of architects with a flair for tricky detail, or reminders of an era in which building codes wereless rigorous and apartments were reconfigured with impunity. Still others had specific purposes, like hiding the family silver or keeping servants out of sight, that are less relevant today.
Suchsecrets are often unearthed unexpectedly. A sixth-floor co-op in the Osborne, which was built on West 57th Street in the 1880s, has a staircase that was hidden when the original apartment was dividedinto four parts. The staircase was discovered in the 1990s, when parts of the original apartment were reassembled into a single unit, now listed for sale at $1.7 million. In an apartment on East 67thStreet, a closet hidden for decades in the master bedroom was revealed when the place was being prepared for sale. In an 1840s row house in Chelsea, soon to go on the market for about $8 million,original knotty pine wide-plank flooring was discovered beneath the parquet during renovation.
Some secret spaces are winsome, among them a hard-to-reach room in a house in Prospect Park South, Brooklyn,that looks like something out of “Alice in Wonderland.” Others, like the gloomy tunnel leading away from the basement of a mansion on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, probably served less innocent...
IN New York City, houses and apartment buildings typically conceal their private sides when you are introduced to them. But tap the walls or peer into the back of acloset, and who knows what you might find? A hidden staircase, a secret passageway, or walls that pivot could lead to unknown territory.
Some of these oddities are legacies of singular historicmoments, like Prohibition. At a town house for sale in Greenwich Village, which operated as a speakeasy in the 1930s, a second-floor window was a false door that led to the fire escape and from there tothe adjoining yard — very handy when enforcement agents raided the place. Other secrets were the work of architects with a flair for tricky detail, or reminders of an era in which building codes wereless rigorous and apartments were reconfigured with impunity. Still others had specific purposes, like hiding the family silver or keeping servants out of sight, that are less relevant today.
Suchsecrets are often unearthed unexpectedly. A sixth-floor co-op in the Osborne, which was built on West 57th Street in the 1880s, has a staircase that was hidden when the original apartment was dividedinto four parts. The staircase was discovered in the 1990s, when parts of the original apartment were reassembled into a single unit, now listed for sale at $1.7 million. In an apartment on East 67thStreet, a closet hidden for decades in the master bedroom was revealed when the place was being prepared for sale. In an 1840s row house in Chelsea, soon to go on the market for about $8 million,original knotty pine wide-plank flooring was discovered beneath the parquet during renovation.
Some secret spaces are winsome, among them a hard-to-reach room in a house in Prospect Park South, Brooklyn,that looks like something out of “Alice in Wonderland.” Others, like the gloomy tunnel leading away from the basement of a mansion on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, probably served less innocent...
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