
DATE: Sunday, July 13, 1997                 TAG: 9707110123

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY ALEX MARSHALL, CORRESPONDENT 

                                            LENGTH:  186 lines

THE AGE OF THE APARTMENT LIVING IN LUXURY IN NORFOLK'S ``FRENCH FLATS''

FEW DEVELOPERS today would risk erecting four-story apartment buildings and fancy brick houses next to each other, even if the local government would allow such unconventional zoning.

But there was a time when apartments and houses were considered good neighbors.

Look at Norfolk's Ghent, a neighborhood of fine old houses that's studded with lovely old apartment buildings. People in both types of dwellings live side by side, with no evident class warfare or sagging property values.

Like the houses, the apartment buildings are built with all the fancy trimmings of the time, like high ceilings, ornate moldings, detailed brick work and bay windows.

They are the product of a time, relatively brief in American real-estate development, when apartment living was in vogue.

The trend began in New York, and filtered down to second-tier cities like Norfolk. It was prompted by new forms of mass transit like the streetcar.

You can see the buildings along almost any street in central and West Ghent. Many have formal entrances facing the street, with the name of the apartment building carved over the doorway - The Brentwood, Wayne, Brandon and Marelian.

These buildings might not seem special at first glance. Age and grime has dimmed their curb-appeal, and people aren't in the habit of gazing at apartment buildings the way they do old homes.

Their inhabitants are generally no longer the wealthy, but a mixed lot of all incomes.

But look carefully, and you can see columns, marble trim and detailed facades that made these places fit homes for some of the city's most prominent people.

Until roughly the turn of the century, living in an apartment building was just not done by people who could afford to avoid it. The rich, the professional class, the middle class - all lived in houses.

Then came the luxury apartment. An article from The Virginian-Pilot, dated Oct. 15, 1911, explained the new and exciting trend. Even the word itself was new, French in origin, denoting a sexy and different way to live.

``The age of the apartment house life has come here to stay,'' said the article, which was illustrated with photos of the new Colonial, Merrimac, Rochambeau and Malborough apartment buildings.

``It is a recent institution even in the larger centers, this apartment house living. It is new for the reason that there is a distinction between an apartment and a flat, just as there is between a flat and a tenement.''

The article explains that only the poor lived in tenements. These crumbling stacks of boxes, which often lacked plumbing, were designed to put masses of working class men and their families within walking distance of the labor that constituted work in the port city.

A half-step up the ladder of respectability, the flat had emerged recently as a dwelling for the middle class. The article described a flat as ``a tenement with trimmings.''

But then came the apartment. The apartment, the article explained, provided all the amenities of the house - space, fine decor, room for servants.

According to The Pilot article, ``any stigma that might be attached to a tenement dweller, any social descendency that be held against the flatite, has no reflection upon the apartment house family.''

Many of these early apartment buildings were luxurious indeed.

Joe Collector, a developer who bought many of the older apartment buildings in the 1960s, described what the Wayne and the Stanfield on Greenway Court were like when he renovated them in the 1970s. Each three-story building had only six apartments, Collector said, and each apartment had 2,800 square feet of floor space - the size of a large house.

``Each had a front porch and back porch, a humongous living room and dining room, four bedrooms, two full baths, a big kitchen, a butler's pantry - and a button to push to summon the butler and other servants,'' Collector remembers. ``Those apartments were huge.''

Collector divided each apartment into two, and added three more apartments in the basement, which originally was used to give each apartment-dweller a private storage area. So a building with six apartments became one with 15.

Collector remembers how, in renovating, they saved every glass doorknob and piece of trim to reinstall after they finished rewiring and making other improvements.

Walking around Ghent, it's easy to miss these buildings today. The Wayne and Stanfield are weathered brick structures that, at first glance, don't appear to be anything special. But the second look shows the detailing of the brick, the large balconies and the formal entrances.

One of the first and finest Ghent apartment houses was the Holland, built in 1906, which sits on Drummond Place near the Hague. John Parker, a Norfolk librarian and amateur historian, provided a tenant list from the apartments' first years. It included Richard B. Frentress, of C.W. Fentress & Co.; Charles G. Hunter, attorney; Dr. Levi Old, a physician; and William H. Hardin, vice-president of T.S. Southgate.

It was designed by Clarence Neff, designer of Maury High School in Norfolk and the Cavalier Hotel in Virginia Beach, as well as many of the other nicer apartment buildings in Ghent. One of his apartments' distinguishing features: The hallways are always built with gently rising staircases, which make them easy to climb.

``He hated steep stairs,'' said his son, Parker Neff Sr., of Cooke and Neff realty.

Picking a favorite among the many apartment buildings in Ghent is like choosing ice cream flavors. It depends on individual taste.

One of this writer's favorites is The Brentwood, which sits on Colley Avenue just down the street from the Naro Expanded Cinema. It doesn't call attention to itself with grand columns or heavy, ornate marble trim. But it has honey-colored brick, beautiful French doors that open onto the street, and clean lines.

The builders of these apartment buildings were mostly local Norfolk families and businesses. They often included space for themselves and families, or built their own homes a few doors away.

Marc Poutasse of Cavalier Land, which owns and manages many Ghent apartments, notes how builder Frederick B. Killam built a white-columned brick mansion for himself in the 800 block of Graydon, and virtually surrounded the home with apartment buildings he also constructed.

One of those apartment houses, Graydon Court at Graydon and Colley, is particularly pretty. It looks at first glance like an overgrown house because of its peaked roof and stucco siding. It has a courtyard, and big bay windows for each apartment.

Other builders, said Poutasse and Collector, were the Ropers, P.H. Rose and the East family. Collector noted that the Roper family included elaborate apartments for themselves on top of the Westover apartment buildings on Colonial Avenue.

Norfolk appears to have copied apartment building from New York, which grew and changed tremendously during this period. Elizabeth Hawes tells of this era in her book ``New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City (1869-1930).''

As Hawes explains, in 1869, all respectable New Yorkers lived in private houses; in 1929, 98 percent of that same population had been stacked into apartments.

It was unclear at first whether this new form of living would catch on among the well-to-do, Hawes said. Until then, the only wealthy people who had tried living houseless were Parisians, in their rows of luxury apartments. Urban America had always followed London, with its Anglo-Saxon habit of living in townhouses.

Perhaps to compensate, many of the first apartments in New York were built unimaginably huge, with luxury after luxury. They were called ``French flats.''

The larger apartments in the nine-story Dakota (the building where John Lennon had been living at the time of his death) included as many as nine bedrooms, libraries, billiard rooms, parlors, vestibules, drawing rooms, dining rooms, butler's pantries - and servants' rooms.

But what prompted this change of fashion from English townhouse to Parisian apartment? In Norfolk, as in New York, it was new forms of transportation that created new forms of living.

In Norfolk, it was the new streetcar line into Ghent. The line ran from downtown across what is now the foot bridge over the Hague, into Mowbray Arch and down Colonial Avenue. The new line made it possible for a prosperous family to live on the fringe of the city and still get quickly to work.

At the same time, the streetcar jacked up property values enormously, which put pressure on developers to find a way to put more people per square foot of land within walking distance of the streetcar.

If you look around Hampton Roads, you'll notice that it's only in those neighborhoods built between 1890 and about 1930 - in Norfolk that means mostly Ghent and nearby neighborhoods - that you find apartment houses mixed in with single-family homes. Park Place, just north of Ghent, has some fine old apartment buildings, although some are unfortunately boarded up and abandoned.

Single-family-home neighborhoods built before or after this period shun the apartment. In Olde Towne in Portsmouth, for example, which dates back to the 1750s, few if any apartment houses mix with the 18th century homes of its streets. Some of the larger houses have been converted into apartments, but most originally were single-family houses. The same is true of Freemason in Norfolk.

So what is the legacy of these apartment buildings, now that the era of luxury living in ``French flats'' has generally passed? They help both Ghent and the city in several ways.

First, they provide a great diversity of housing, which means that Ghent is home to students, young couples, senior citizens, and others who might not be able to afford or want an entire house. This makes Ghent a more interesting, and equitable, place to live.

Secondly, they jack up the population density of the neighborhood, which helps keep Ghent's business district viable. Without a lot of people within easy walking distance, the shops on Colley Avenue would wither. The decrease in density elsewhere in the city is a big reason that most other neighborhood shopping districts have fallen on hard times.

Finally, they simply make the neighborhood visually interesting. Having squat apartment buildings next to elaborate homes next to townhouses makes Ghent nice to walk around and gaze at. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos by ALEX MARSHALL

A trend from the past - Charlton 902...

Timeless architecture...Marelian on Graydon Avenue

Luxury apartments...Graydon Court

Photo

ALEX MARSHALL

Apartment buildings like The Wayne contain fine architectural

touches that made these places fit homes for some of Norfolk's most

prominent people.