THE CHANGE OF URBAN HOUSING IN THE LATE-19TH-CENTURY NEW YORK CITY IN THE LIGHT OF REAL ESTATE BACKGROUNDS: On the Stuyvesant Apartment and other early examples of apartment houses by the mid-1880s

In the late 19th-century New York, introduction of apartment houses which was seen as a social degradation for the middle and the upper classes was led mainly by speculative builders. They, whose financial standing was quite vulnerable, never explored the possibility of the new housing style to secure profit during the depression in the 1870s, while some of them stepped into building vast and luxurious ones in the first half of 1880s, driven by the anticipation for the larger profit and creation of urban spectacular. It proved, however, that it was the technological invention accompanied by the economic pressure that wiped out people's attachment to owning their own houses in Manhattan.