ninnieamee:

djemso:

ninnieamee:

stoatsandwich:

lickerswish:

maxiekat:

Captain America concept art – Stark Expo and Steve’s apartment

What has this ship done to me that looking at concept art of an undershirt drying on a hanger is making me want to cry?

So what does his apartment tell us about class &c.?

Pretty much poor as expected? The kitchen table is a board thrown on top of the bathtub, which is p. accurate for your average poor tenement apartment — it matches almost exactly the apartments my family lived in in NYC in the 30s, and we were….basically dirt poor. Except that Steve’s seems to be even smaller than the average. I always heard these apartments described as kitchen, living room, bedroom. Steve appears to be down one room.

I can’t tell if he has a bathroom or if that door next to the tub (?) is just a small closet. If it’s not the bathroom, then the bathroom will be down in the building hallway. 

I do want to know who the starlet on the wall is. Lana Turner? Tell me it’s Lana Turner.

The checkered thing looks like a bed, so I’m wondering if maybe it was a one bedroom place and the living room is used as a second bedroom?Certainly know a few people now who do this.  Or that is literally just the corner of one bed maybe a second on the other side of that bed with a toilet through the other door and there’s no couch. Depends on whether you think he lived alone.

That’s definitely the bed. I am not sure that’s another bedroom, though, because it looks like an old law tenement?

It has the interior windows, which were supposed to let in light and air into the inner rooms: in this case, the kitchen. That kitchen has no windows. I’m assuming that’s because it was probably built before turn of the century reforms swept in requiring that all new buildings (“new law” tenements) provide ventilation in each and every room. 

Anyway, old law tenement apartments were usually constructed like railroad flats. There would be the door, there would be the first room, there would be another room, there would be a bedroom. By law, only one of these rooms needed to have an exterior window. The rest would get light in only through a setup like you see in the picture.

Ephemeral New York has a few good, quick posts on it, and most books and websites on tenements will go over the same distinctions between new law and old law (plus the weird stuff about where the toilets are, and when interior toilets might have been added to buildings later on, etc.).