This may not only be a Cleveland occurrence, the construct of attached housing units eschewing the name 'apartment' for 'loft' or 'condo' in order to appeal to those of more financial mobility but tossed in the face of the new development around the city I start to question the legitimacy of our labeling.
Granted many of the most fearsome atrocities are committed by those in marketing and real estate, where a ranch can be a Victorian ranch if you squint hard enough in just the right light, where Tudor and Two-door are interchangeable without a second thought. It seems a shame however, when a noble idea such as the apartment is tossed aside for seeming, well, normative.
Some brief research (not from Wikipedia!) led to the suggested facts that apartment buildings are actually a rather new invention (as far as building typology goes) first being seen in the United States in Boston's Hotel Pelham (by Arthur Stone) in 1857 (and demolished in 1916). Previously those that could not afford their own townhome or detached structure would typically rent out a room (tenement) or section of a divided house (a flat) or live above their retail shops (merchant quarters) but would still share meals and restroom facilities with those in adjacent 'units' similar to a boarding house. Also in fashion was the renting of hotel suites as a permanent address. These suites typically were lavish and even had quarters for servants. It wasn't until urban centralization (based upon the industrialization of manufacturing) was it questioned to create better living arrangements for the middle class to fulfill the current shortage in housing.
In the early 1880's, after decades of cautious experimentation the apartment building finally reached its goal as a functional yet familiar domicile typology and started to grow taller thanks to the advent of steel building skeletons and the elevator. In the 1920's the apartment building reached the point where speculative development based upon client niches were created. Here specialty suites were begun to be introduced to the humble apartment building. Penthouses, servant's quarters and extended, multifamily subunits within a larger unit were combined with an increase in ornamentation to not only appeal to the upper class whom were looking for a convenient way to move back into the city but also to mark the structure as a higher class establishment to passersby.
It was during the social engineering period of urban gentrification from the late 1800's to the 1960's that began to give the apartment the negative connotation with the development of 'projects' or centralized urban structures for low class citizens that had been displaced from their ethnic communities by cities attempting to revitalize their cores with new business districts or to appease manufacturing tycoons. These apartment buildings were cheaply constructed and poorly thought out as the main purpose of the design was to re-engineer the social structure of the community. These hyper concentrated areas of poverty typically were not offered the infrastructure that would connect these new communities to places of work, worship or schooling and instead alienated entire city blocks of people.
However the failure of the 'projects' cannot be entirely placed upon the apartment building living style and many rather successful apartment structures are still being constructed. I suppose the whole purpose of this conversation is to question why rentable spaces are being marketed as 'lofts' or 'condos' when they are in actuality, apartments? Why is the term apartment such a dirty word? Is apartment living truly antithetical to the American dream?
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