Ancient Rome was full of 5-7 story apartment buildings and had a population of around a million. Higher density than a whole lot of modern cities, the vast majority of which are not seas of skyscrapers.
Suprised me to learn that the top floors were the cheapest because the buildings were made of wood with no organized fire service and burned down all the time, so being upstairs was a death sentence.
Another fun fact: commoners in Rome mostly ate out at cafes all around the city - like soup kitchens. Having a kitchen and cooking was reserved for wealthier people.
Reading letters from the late 1800's and early 1900's this was true in European cities at least among some classes of people. There might be one(?) kitchen in the building.
I think every single apartment having its own kitchen and every person having their own set of cutlery/dishware/pots/pans/etc is very, very new.
> Suprised me to learn that the top floors were the cheapest because the buildings were made of wood with no organized fire service and burned down all the time, so being upstairs was a death sentence.
The top floors in most prewar walkups in NYC are the cheapest today, even though all have sturdy fire escapes. People don't want to walk up 5 flights of stairs every day, and they also get swelteringly hot on the top floors during the summer, whereas lower floors stay cooler.
>People don't want to walk up 5 flights of stairs every day, and they also get swelteringly hot on the top floors during the summer, whereas lower floors stay cooler.
Being on the top floor of a building without A/C can definitely be an issue with respect to heat.
However, while having to lug a bunch of groceries (or whatever) up multiple flights of stairs can be an pain, is "walking up 5 flights of stairs a day" really a big issue? [Obviously for some people with infirmities it will be.] I work--well, when I commute--in a 4 story office building and most people, including myself, take the stairs when we move between floors for meeting, cafeteria, etc. We at least used to have signs encouraging taking the steps.
Its much more of a hassle concern than it is a realistic inability to climb multiple flights of stairs. Manhattan would be a really, really terrible/uncomfortable place to live if you couldn't physically navigate at least a few flights of stairs at once between subway stations, split-level stores and restaurants, residential buildings, etc, etc.
Just thinking anecdotally, myself and many of my neighbors in NYC are probably dealing with a dozen or more flights or stairs up and down on a daily basis (two flights down out of the apartment building, half a flight up to the street level from the sunken entrance, another 2 flights back down into the subway station, 2 flights up on the other end of the train ride, a flight in the grocery store, two flights at the gym, etc, etc, etc). Escalators are often present, but many people walk up those anyways. I'd feel comfortable saying people living here are generally in far, far better stair-climbing-shape than most of the country.
There is a huge difference between walking several flights of stairs over the day and having to walk 5 flights of stairs in a stretch every time you want to go up to your appartment. I live on the 3rd floor, and I am very happy that I have an elevator. I try to use the stairs as often as possible. But some time back the elevator was down for 5 weeks and I for sure started planning each trip out of my appartment.
This all depends of course on the overall state of your fitness, and how heavy you are. Ideally, one never would use an elevator and hence be very fit and less overweight. And this doesn't count in any kind of medical condition which limit or even prohibit you from taking many (or any) stairs.
For all the practical benefits both elevators and cars have brought to the modern human, they certainly have a big drawback on the average fitness. I try to use stairs as much as possible, and on an average day I certainly klimb 12 flights, but would no longer consider an appartment in the 3rd floor without an elevator for when it is needed.
> most people, including myself, take the stairs when we move between floors for meeting, cafeteria, etc.
How common is this? I never see people take the stairs when there's an elevator. I always take the elevator even if it's just one floor and I have to wait a while.
The problem with escalators is, that the steps are usually higher than those of stairs, as they are not optimized for walking. If you are very tall, this makes little difference, but for not so tall people, using the steps of an escalator is a bit uncomfortable. As a consequence, I usually step them only on very short escalators or when I am in quite of a hurry.
In the early 1980s, I would routinely walk up the escalators, including stopped ones, on the deepest Washington Metro stations. In the 2010s, I take the elevator two floors. I walk several miles per day, I run varying distances each weekend, but something in one knee doesn't like stairs these days.
Maybe it's a default cultural thing at your company. Possibly
taking the steps is a "nudge" to suggest. Taking an elevator for one floor would seem almost weird where I work unless there were some physical issue.
Lots of people do it for the steps. I take the stairs pretty much anytime I know where they are. I guess I'd think about it for more than a few stories.
The stairs in your office likely are a lot less steep than the ones in those apartment buildings.
Also, if you had heating, somebody had to lug up coal, and parents (about everybody was one, at the time, and the mothers were pregnant quite often) would have to lug up small children.
And it isn’t “5 flights of stairs a day”. Chances are the toilet was at least one stair away, too.
I'd say that the difference between lots of stairs and and no stairs is enough to cause a difference in price for rent. I'd say that this is the market working as intended. Or, if you believe that it is not a big deal, you can abuse the market inefficiency ;)
That isn't my experience with the top floors of NYC prewar walkups today (and trust me, I've had a lot of that!), but I could see that being an issue in other places or in previous times.
I don't think that'd have been a driving factor in ancient Rome, though, given how different their uses of their plumbing technology were from ours. They had public toilets and baths (at ground level), so water pressure for washing and bathing wouldn't be a concern for top-floor apartments the way it would be for us today.
Water will never make it up to the 13th story of a building just with the pressure from the water mains, so those building will need to do something to increase pressure on higher floors.
In a five story building, the water can get that high just with pressure from the mains, though the pressure will be much weaker than on lower floors, so the building doesn't need to have any mechanism for increasing the pressure. It probably wouldn't be done for newer buildings, but when the older walk-ups were constructed it would have been considered acceptable as a way of keeping costs lower.
NYC municipal water pressure is guaranteed to (I believe) the 6th floor. They may do better than that depending on the elevation of the neighborhood. Any higher than that, and the building needs to have a water tank on the roof or a high floor.
My understanding is that this was fairly standard in tall buildings everywhere.
Upper floor apartments were cheaper because they were meant for working-class people. The ground level and first floor were for shops and shopkeepers. The 2nd floor (that would be the 3rd flood in American terms) was the "noble" floor for rich people, with high ceilings and big balconies. The last floor under the roof was for housekeepers and cooks of the rich people below.
Well, I think the causality is the other way. The builders had good reason not to build giant penthouse apartments with views at the top: they knew their customers' preferences!
> Ancient Rome was full of 5-7 story apartment buildings and had a population of around a million. Higher density than a whole lot of modern cities, the vast majority of which are not seas of skyscrapers.
This isn't really true - the Aurelian walls were about 14 square kilometers, but a significant portion of the city's 1 million people lived outside the Aurelian walls. We don't have a good sense of how many people lived within the Aurelian walls, but number that's often cited (1 million people/14 square km = 70,000 people/square km, 2.5 times the most dense city in the world today) is not actually representative of what ancient Rome looked like at any period in history.
7 seems like a stretch, "modern" liftless buildings (think 18/19th century European buildings) are usually around 3/4 floors, some go to 5 but it's not the majority
