apartment building: Definition from Answers.com

Although the term "apartment" is an American invention from the late nineteenth century, Americans were slow to accept this style of multi-unit, horizontal living.

In Europe, the Industrial Revolution in the early nineteenth century boosted the popularity of multi-family buildings, by offering convenient, affordable, and fashionable housing for the burgeoning urban middle and upper classes. This was particularly true in Paris and Vienna.

Parisians had embraced apartment living since the seventeenth century. In a multi-use pattern that would gain popularity in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s, a typical French apartment house included a street level with commercial tenants and residential apartments on the upper floors. In this pre-elevator era, wealthier tenants lived on the first floor level, or bel tage, above a mezzanine, or entresol, and the higher the level, the more modest the apartment. Attic space bedrooms were reserved for servants.

With the exception of Scotland, where private "flats" (from the Scottish word, "flaet" meaning "story" or "floor") for Edinburgh's wealthy classes dated back to the sixteenth century, Britain's middle and upper classes shunned multi-unit living until the early twentieth century.

"french Flats" in America

Nineteenth-century middle-class Americans preferred a private, multi-story, detached house to a one-level flat in a building shared with strangers. Until the late nineteenth century, multi-unit housing was also tinged by the image of "tenements," multi-unit residences for working class and immigrant families.

Rising costs for urban property after the Civil War prompted builders to market apartments as a respectable alternative to boarding houses. These early apartments were modeled after Parisian apartments and were referred to as "French flats" to distinguish them from tenements. One of the earliest was the 1869 Stuyvesant Apartments on East Eighteenth Street in Manhattan, designed by the Paris-trained American architect Richard Morris Hunt.

Architects adapted French flats to American middle-class requirements with modern plumbing, bedroom closets, storage space, and large, fully equipped kitchens. By the 1870s, the urban housing crunch created such a boom in apartment house construction that, in Manhattan, alone, 112 apartment houses were built in 1875.

By the 1880s, apartment living not only had shed its negative connotations, but also had become a fashionable choice for wealthy families in search of luxury living at prestigious urban addresses. The introduction of the first electric elevators in the late 1880s, along with fireproof steel frame construction, pushed apartment houses skyward from their previous six-and seven-story limits.

Manhattan's Central Park, opened to the public in 1859, created a boom in luxury apartment buildings along the park's western edge. The most famous was the Dakota at Seventy-second Street and Central Park West, completed in 1884. With its sixty-five suites, some with as many as twenty rooms, the Dakota came with a wine cellar, a gymnasium, and croquet and tennis courts, and included central heating, elevator service, and its own electric generator.

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apartment building: Definition from Answers.com