ninnieamee:

So this concept art for Steve’s apartment.

It’s, like, maybe canon. Let’s get that out of the way. It’s in a canon grey area. I’m not telling anyone to consider it canon. If you’d rather not, cool, ignore this post. 

What stands out to me about these images is

1. the bathtub used as a kitchen table,
2. the interior windows, &
3. the way one room leads directly from the other, railroad-flat style, with an inner room that has two doors but no large visible window.

To start: that bathtub.

A bathtub in the kitchen is quintessentially tenement living. Not that people were assuming Steve was living in the Dakota, but, just as a starting point: he wasn’t spending big bucks on rent. He was probably not in a great neighborhood. He seems to have been lower middle class or poor. This can mean anything — you can be poor and still afford to eat and buy clothes, you can be poor and have none of that — there’s a lot of room in “poor,” and not everyone who lived in what we consider a tenement was huddling with others for warmth in the winter, sadly reflecting on their Extreme Poverty, or coughing and starving all the time.

But still. Here he lives in a tenement. Which doesn’t tell us a lot. What kind of tenement?

There were and are different kinds of tenements in NYC. They can be put into three distinct groups: pre-law tenements, old law tenements, and new law tenements. There are some variations, but generally they get summed up like this:

1. Pre-law tenements were built prior to 1879. They were mostly built in Manhattan, and they were usually 3 rooms per apartment, with little light and no ventilation. Only one room would face the street and have a window. The inner rooms would not have windows. In the 1860s, a law was passed mandating windows for each room. So builders inserted windows between the rooms, which, as you can probably guess, accomplished precisely nothing. 

2. Old law tenements were built after the first big tenement house law of 1879. They were a little stricter on the windows. After 1879, you had to have exterior windows. But the law didn’t specify where windows had to be, so somebody designed what was called the “dumbbell” tenement. The “dumbbell” tenement looked like this: 

Note that the kitchen has two doors, one to another bedroom, one to the hall. It also opens onto a room along the exterior of the building (the living room if you’re living in the front, and a bedroom if you’re living in the back). Also note that the window in the kitchen is tiny because even though it technically faces the exterior, that exterior is just a small airshaft. Which people ended up dumping their garbage in. So. So much for ventilation.

Finally, we get:

3. New law tenements. These were built after 1901, and maybe we can thank Jacob Riis for them, I don’t know. I have a lot of relatives who still live in what were once new law tenements, but they call them “pre-war” because that sounds nicer. They are still, strictly speaking, fairly crappy in terms of design, but they were an improvement. Any room in a tenement built after 1901 had to have at least one window opening directly onto the street or a yard or court. So no more garbage shaft windows. And no more design that rested on inner rooms with no possible air or light source.

Finally, the same 1901 act that created new law tenements upgraded the old law tenements. It required that old law tenement owners at least adapt their buildings a little to provide more ventilation. You know what that means: the addition of useless interior windows. 

So why is this all interesting to me in light of this concept art?

Because this art doesn’t just put Steve in a tenement; it puts him in an older tenement. I’d say an old law “dumbbell” tenement is likeliest, probably upgraded to include interior windows after 1901. His kitchen has two doors: one could open onto another bedroom (or two), and the door off to the side could access the hall. He doesn’t appear to have a window in his kitchen, but for all we know he could have a tiny aperture tucked behind the cabinets that accesses some kind of inner shaft — a “window” for purposes of the 1879 law.

Also, there’s a good chance that he doesn’t live alone. 

It’s pretty momentous that I’m saying this. I’m the biggest ever hater of Steve and Bucky’s Lovenest. Like. The biggest. When people tell me that it’s irrefutable “canon” that Steve lived with Bucky, I calmly nod and then resort to my hate corner sipping on my haterade throwing a hate ball, rolling in my hate. I won’t go over why I think the TWS film doesn’t mandate that they have to live together. I’ll just put it out there: I don’t enjoy a reading that insists on it. I like Steve and Bucky, I like them together, but a dynamic that insists they absolutely did move in together and that there was no other purpose for the flashback scene but to toss them into the same bed space is… not how I read that movie. 

But I have to give it to everyone who was writing that fic: they could share an apartment. Hell, Steve is probably sharing his apartment with someone, or maybe even two someones. Let’s look at that floorplan again, this time marked a little differently:

Whether you think he’s in the front of the building or the back, the bedroom for Steve appears to be what’s marked as the ‘parlor’ (which, hey, he gets fire escape access, good for him). So someone else will probably be in the other room, the room that the door in the kitchen/living room opens onto. Is it Bucky? Arnie Roth? Both of them? Bucky and Bucky’s sister? Two randos Steve met on the subway one day? Maybe the Barnes family lives in the front-facing apartment and Steve moved into the back to be close to them?

I figure any of these options will work if you want to write fic that takes this concept art into account; the point is really that Steve has a whole other room in there, and he’s presumably doing something with it. Maybe it’s an art studio and he does live alone. Maybe it is, in fact, Bucky’s room. I don’t think this stuff forecloses any possibilities; that’s what’s fun about it. Steve’s apartment can still say whatever you want it to say about him.

(For me, it’s interesting to think about him in an apartment that reflects decades and decades of the least amount of legally-mandated benefit to people. Welcome to the U S A. Would you like a garbage shaft building? Your options are a garbage shaft building.)