It’s 6 p.m. and Alexandra Levite and her sister, Danielle, are preparing for their daily commute home.
Leaving behind their piano, puppet theater, bicycles and cardboard playhouse, and already in their Little Mermaid nightgowns, the sisters, ages 6 and 3, board the 6:05 local for their elevator journey from their 14th-floor playroom to the ninth floor for supper and bed.
Six years after moving into a postwar building on the Upper East Side, Dr. Howard Levite, a cardiologist, and Juliana Mocher Levite, a stockbroker, had become frustrated by their lack of space and decided to buy a one-bedroom apartment in the same building for their daughters and for use as a guest suite.
Unfortunately, the space available was not on the same floor as their small two-bedroom apartment.
“We tried to buy in four directions,” said Levite, “but it didn’t work out.” Along with the perk of having a toy-free living room, the arrangement has one discernible inconvenience: the girls have to be chaperoned when they go from one apartment to the other.
“I feel we’re in a dormitory,” Mrs. Levite said, “and yes, I cannot lie, I’ve been caught in the elevator myself in my nightie.”
All over the city, but especially in Manhattan, where space always seems to be at a premium, there are die-hard New Yorkers like the Levites, who are attached to their buildings. Others are trapped in hard-to-sell one-bedrooms they outgrew a couple of children ago. Some of these people are forgoing the move out of the city and foraging for extra space close to home. And the closer the better.
Let their Westchester counterparts blithely add a wing onto the center-hall Colonial. What New Yorker can resist the urbanite’s Manifest Destiny-to annex, rent or purchase a neighboring space above, below or even in the next building?
And in the best of all possible worlds, patience, perseverance and hard work are rewarded: the tenant upstairs finally moves to Florida; the family next door buys a house in Mt. Kisco, the people on the floor below are suddenly willing to negotiate.
People can expect to pay upward of $3,500 just to get the paperwork through the buildings department to obtain the necessary amended certificate of occupancy if they want to expand their apartment, said Irene Berzak, an independent expediter who specializes in filing applications with the New York City Department of Buildings for the permits necessary when changes are made to the number of apartments in a residential building. “It’s been a big chunk of my practice for the last four or five years.”
Adding on in rental buildings can sometimes be sticky, considering the need for the landlord’s blessing. “Basically we don’t allow it,” said Beth Rudin DeWoody, a vice president of Rudin Management, a company that owns and manages 21 rental residential buildings in Manhattan and one in the Bronx.
“In the past, we had allowed some combining of apartments, but now, in a tighter apartment market, we prefer to have people switch to bigger apartments whenever possible,” she said.
Edward Ira Schachner, a New York architect whose clients have often combined apartments, said that adding one apartment to another was definitely a trend. Recently, when Schachner and his wife, Pamela Beckerman, were expecting their third child, Schachner saw his personal life reflecting his professional work: they added 1,200 square feet to their 1,600-square-foot Upper West Side rental apartment by annexing the one-bedroom apartment, also a rental, on the same floor. “The American dream has always been to have a house,” Schachner said.
Their landlord allowed them to put a door leading from their entrance hall to the living room of the adjoining apartment. Schachner, who works out of his home, said that the combined rents of the apartments are comparable to what it would cost to rent a one-bedroom in mid-Manhattan.
The building boasted Old World moldings, parquet floors and rooms with ceilings nine and a half feet high-the kind of architectural detailing that makes people living in boxy postwar apartments envious.
The couple, who had lived in the 1927 building for 13 years, had often asked themselves what they would do if the apartment next door ever became available.
“We didn’t really know what hit us when it actually happened,” Beckerman said. They took the grand, high-ceilinged space to suit their family, which includes Jason, 5, Benjamin, 23 months, and 6-week-old Adam.
The room that overlooks the rear of the Hispanic Society building has now been transformed into the master bedroom. Schachner’s office is in the former dining room, and the kitchen has become what Beckerman said was the most exciting part: a laundry room.
“This is our commitment to living in the city,” Beckerman added.
Still, Schachner said that like many of his friends, he feels guilty about raising children in apartments. “It’s the parents who mind,” he said. “I see kids playing basketball in the basement outside the super’s apartment or riding bikes in the hallways, and they think it’s great. I guess you never get everything you want.”
Rita Falkener, an interior designer in Brooklyn Heights, got close to getting everything. Falkener, who is a partner with Stan Stuetley in the Brooklyn design firm Falkener-Stuetley, did not hesitate when part of the floor above her double-parlor 1834 brownstone apartment became available a few years ago.
“I grabbed it,” said Falkener, who lives with her husband, Waldo, a lawyer, in the elegantly appointed duplex accented with African sculpture.
“I moved the kitchen into what had been our bedroom and installed a stair to reach the new bedroom on the floor above,” Falkener continued. But this was no ordinary stairway. “Spirals eat up too much space,” Falkener said, pointing to her striking “26-foot white cloud,” a swirling staircase of metal and plaster that rises dramatically in front of the 12-foot-tall windows of the parlor.
Falkener, who has worked on a number of projects combining two apartments, was enthusiastic about the possibilities. “Especially if you’re in a co-op, it pays to stay in a building where you know the political situation,” she said.
At first, Susan Becher, a publicist, and her husband, Bruce Gilbert, a psychiatrist, hesitated to install a door that would connect their two-bedroom apartment to the adjoining one-bedroom apartment in which they both worked, in a turn-of-the-century Upper West Side building.
“We wanted to keep it all separate,” said Becher, adding that she later came to appreciate the door, which opens from their entrance hall into Gilbert’s office and that allows both her and her husband to check in with David, 11, and Marc, 5, when the boys get home from school.
“The arrangement has made it possible for us both to have offices at home,” Gilbert said. “The kids know when they can come through and when they can’t.”
Respecting one another’s boundaries is a concept that is also in full force in the McManus-Murphy household. There, three generations unfold in a series of rooms with high ceilings and family heirlooms that has the feeling of a big house from the Age of Innocence.
