Let’s Take a Trip to the Skinniest House in New York

Let’s Take a Trip to the Skinniest House in New York
April 3, 2011

A couple weeks ago, we took a trip to Julianne Moore’s house in Greenwich Village, a section of New York City in Manhattan.

March 20, 2011: Let’s Take a Trip to Julianne Moore’s House
April 18, 2010: How to Live the Good Life in the Traditional City

The purpose was to get you used to the idea of living in a proper Traditional City urban house — the attached townhouse. In fact, this house is quite beautiful and has a luxurious big backyard.

It is on a land plot of about 2200 square feet, or 1/20th of an acre. This would be considered a very small plot indeed in Suburban Hell, but in the context of the Traditional City it is spacious, even extravagant.

This particular house is a good example of a Traditional City style urban design. However, Greenwich Village and New York City are not. They are examples of 19th Century Hypertrophism. So, I want you to think of the house, not the street and the city in general. Think of a house like Julianne Moore’s, but in a proper Traditional City environment like this:

What’s the difference? Primarily it is the width of the street. This street is a proper pedestrian street, about 20 feet wide. That is actually on the wide side for a pedestrian street, which is why actually only half the street is being used for transit, and the other half for an outdoor cafe.

January 31, 2010: Let’s Take a Trip to New York 2: The Bad and the Ugly
January 24, 2010: Let’s Take a Trip to New York City
February 21, 2010: Toledo, Spain or Toledo, Ohio?

These photos describe very well the difference between a Traditional City Really Narrow Street and a typical 19th Century Hypertrophic Street.

Doesn’t that look like a nice place. No Cars!

Actually, it is the same street, with the center automobile roadway digitally removed. We just got rid of four lanes of auto traffic.

http://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2011/03/thinking-small-narrow-streets-movement.html

A Traditional City will have some larger “arterial” streets somewhat like Washington Street, with a central roadway, but that should be only a small fraction of overall streets. I think a ratio of about 80% Really Narrow Streets/17% Arterial Streets/3% Central Boulevards is good.

(A Central Boulevard would be something like Broadway in New York or the Champs Elysees in Paris.)

In that case, why not just use an example from France? Because people can’t relate. They say, “oh that is so quaint, and typical for a bunch of quiche-eating surrender monkeys.” I need to use examples of Americans living in these sorts of houses, and enjoying it. It helps us to cross the line from “oh, that’s a nice postcard shot from a European vacation,” to “hmmm, yes, that could be a viable solution for me.” (Remember I’m dealing with retards here.)

As it turns out, Greenwich Village also has the narrowest house in New York City. The land it stands on is nine and a half feet wide, and thirty-two feet deep. That is 304 square feet.

Now let’s just think about that for a moment. An acre has 43,560 square feet. So we are talking about 1/143th of an acre. It is only one-seventh the size of the land that Julianne Moore’s house is on.

A hundred-and-forty-third of an acre? Is that possible? Is it tolerable?

Of course, you can have a lot higher density than that with an apartment building. You can easily do 300+ apartments per acre, with a Traditional City design of 5-6 stories like you see in the photo above, and no high-rises. But for now we will talk about single-family houses.