Cromley, Elizabeth C. Alone Together: A History of New York's Early Apartments. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Cromley examines the development of the apartment building as a middle class architectural form in Manhattan in the mid-19th century. She discusses how the middle class apartment building was an entirely separate architectural and social form from working class tenements, and how the building form evolved to suit specifically middle class ideas about family and social place. Relying heavily on an analysis of artifacts in their daily use, Cromley concludes that evolution of the apartment building as a dominant middle class architectural style represented a way to articulate middle class values and beliefs, and was sufficiently successful in doing so as to revolutionize the way in which New Yorkers approached the idea of housing. [C. Rector]