The city’s first apartment buildings, like the Dakota, the Gramercy and the Chelsea, were constructed in the 1870s. Unlike the city’s existing tenements — those greasy, cholera-ridden death traps described in books like Jacob Riis’s “How the Other Half Lives” — apartments offered amenities like telephones, electric lighting, commercial refrigerators, private dining rooms and ground-floor restaurants that could deliver food to your unit.

The gap in living conditions of the rich and the poor was lessened, to an extent, during the first half of the 20th century. In 1901, New York State banned tenements, and toilets, natural light and ventilation were added to existing buildings to make them more sanitary. During the depression, our city’s luxury apartments were chopped up and sold off, while servant’s quarters were converted into bedrooms. And in 1935, the nation’s first public housing units went up on the Lower East Side.

A trend in modern apartment living — the open floor plan — is borrowed from the way artists lived in converted warehouses in SoHo in the ’60s and ’70s, with “the kitchen facilities, the eating facilities and the living facilities all in one big open space,” Ms. Cromley said.

Today, as apartments have become the domain of even the superrich, with a penthouse in Midtown recently selling for $100 million, the ultimate amenity is the view offered by a building that soars above everything around it.

But that’s not exactly new.

“New York has always built taller, sooner, than other cities, and at the risk of public safety,” Ms. Cromley said, offering the example of 12-story apartment buildings going up at a time when water from fire hoses could only reach the fifth floor.