Government
The Quiet Rise of the Much-Maligned Condo
You may be living in one yourself in the near future.
Junius Henri Browne bought one of the original flats in the Rembrandt, an eight-unit apartment building on West 57th Street in Manhattan that opened, in 1881, marking what we’d think of today as the country’s very first condo. The apartments cost about $16,250 (or some $2.4 million now). Browne, a well-known Civil War correspondent at the time, was pragmatic in his motivation.
"He said an apartment would never be a true substitute for a house with an attic, a basement, or a yard," says Matthew Lasner, an assistant professor in the Hunter College Department of Urban Affairs and Planning. "But he couldn’t bare the idea of going out to the suburbs."