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A railroad apartment or railroad flat, sometimes referred to as a floor-through apartment, is an apartment with a series of rooms connecting to each other in a line.Sennett, Richard. ''The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities''. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992. . The name comes from the layout's similarity to that of a typical (mid-20th century or earlier) passenger train car. Without hallways, it results in less semi-public space.
This style is most common in
A railroad apartment or railroad flat, sometimes referred to as a floor-through apartment, is an apartment with a series of rooms connecting to each other in a line.Sennett, Richard. ''The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities''. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992. . The name comes from the layout's similarity to that of a typical (mid-20th century or earlier) passenger train car. Without hallways, it results in less semi-public space.
This style is most common in New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
, San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
, and their surrounding areas. Railroad apartments are common in tenement
A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. They are common on the British Isles, particularly in Scotland. In the medieval Old Town, i ...
buildings or even modern apartment blocks, and are sometimes found in subdivided brownstone
Brownstone is a brown Triassic–Jurassic sandstone that was historically a popular building material. The term is also used in the United States and Canada to refer to a townhouse clad in this or any other aesthetically similar material.
Type ...
s.
Railroad apartments first made an appearance in New York City in the mid-19th century, and were designed to provide a solution to urban overcrowding.Eisner, Simon; Gallion, Arthur; and Eisner, Stanley. ''The Urban Pattern''. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1993. Many early railroad apartments were extremely narrow, and most buildings were five or six stories high. Few early buildings had internal sanitation, and bathrooms emptied raw sewage into the back yard. In some cases, one family would take up residence in each room, with the exterior hallway providing communal space.
Floor-through apartment
A floor-through apartment refers to an apartment that extends from the front of the building to the rear of the building, usually with front and back windows, even if it does not occupy the width of the full floor.See also
*Enfilade (architecture)
In architecture, an enfilade is a series of rooms formally aligned with each other. This was a common feature in grand European architecture from the Baroque period onward, although there are earlier examples, such as the Vatican stanze. The d ...
– similar design in grand European architecture of the Baroque period
* List of house types
This is a list of house types. Houses can be built in a large variety of configurations. A basic division is between free-standing or single-family detached homes and various types of attached or multi-family residential dwellings. Both may v ...
* Shotgun house
A shotgun house is a narrow rectangular domestic residence, usually no more than about wide, with rooms arranged one behind the other and doors at each end of the house. It was the most popular style of house in the Southern United States from t ...
References
Apartment types House types {{struct-type-stub