The Stuyvesant Flats at 142 East 18th Street

This structure, formerly perched at the corner of 18th Street and Irving Place, is largely considered to be New York City's first apartment building. At the time of its construction in 1869 and 1870, the city's housing landscape was divided between tenements and townhouses. The Stuyvesant Flats, developed by Rutherford Stuyvesant and designed by Richard Morris Hunt, bridged the gap and filled the need for upscale but condensed housing with a multi-family building in which units had their own toilets; and thus the apartment building was born, and New York was changed forever (and ever.) The building would go on to house well-known names like landscape painterWorthington Whittredge and the widow of General Custer, Elizabeth Custer, says The Bowery Boys.