ARCHIVES

This time of year, getting away feels essential. Even if it’s just to a new neighborhood.

The high-ceilinged, light-filled studios on top of Carnegie Hall have housed artists, musicians, and writers for more than a century; now, the remaining tenants are fighting to stay.

Brighten up the darkest days of winter with smart and stylish illuminators.

In order to make their freshly built West Village penthouse accommodate a lifetime’s worth of art and books, and the artist’s wheelchair, Chuck and Leslie Close had to start by taking it apart.

Always a dance hall. A former polka palace in Williamsburg turns seventies-influenced loft space�with plenty of room to party.

In a former cardboard factory, I-Beam Design created an ingenious multitasking apartment for a pair of art collectors.

A robber baron’s baroque ballroom lives on as a pied-à-terre.

Who hasn’t put a hand to that freshly painted wall and wondered, Who used to live here? Every dwelling is saturated with past lives, some mundane, some extraordinary. We have ten pages of the latter, a look at the apartments of New Yorkers from James Dean in his humble West Side digs to the Steinbergs in full Reagan-era opulence.

The majestic apartment where the Bernstein family once sprawled is now meticulously planned but no less art-filled.

On Staten Island, Mark Landis’s 1770s fixer-upper is a way of life.