Las Urbanistas

Visitors wandering through the Richard Pousette-Dart exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum seem oblivious to the scaffolding and hard hats in their midst. But for the people behind the scenes, the work unfolding within the museum’s curved white walls is as engrossing as the art displayed on them.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
The museum has cracks in its facade, a decaying sidewalk and outdated mechanical systems

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Strips of carbon fiber are being used to reinforce the outer walls.

For the last three years a team of engineers, conservators and architects has been studying the guts of the Guggenheim, mapping out a thorough but respectful renovation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling building on Fifth Avenue, completed in 1959. Although it was clearly in serious need of renewal, with cracks in its facade, a decaying sidewalk and outdated mechanical systems, experts wanted to make a comprehensive diagnosis before determining the best course of treatment.

Now they have a plan — already in action — and the end is in sight. The work is expected to be completed by summer 2008. “It’s taken us three years to get to the point where we’re actually intervening,” said Pamela Jerome of Wasa Studio, the preservation architect on the project.

And on a recent walk through the museum, which will remain open throughout the renovation, the specialists involved talked about what they had discovered and strategies they have devised. Ms. Jerome has faced major renovation challenges before, including the sagging cantilevers and damaged stucco of Fallingwater, the residence designed by Wright in rural Mill Run, Pa.

But the Guggenheim’s structural complexities, she said, made this project more daunting. In addition to repairing the facade, the $29 million renovation involves upgrading the cooling systems and updating the elevators and bathrooms.

Perhaps the team’s most crucial realization was that workers in the 1950s had failed to provide continuous horizontal steel reinforcement in the walls on the sixth ramp, as they had on the lower ramp walls. The sixth is twice the height of the lower ones and leans outward at a different angle, the museum says.

The original building lacked insulation. In a 1992 project devised by the architect Charles Gwathmey, insulation was finally installed, improving the situation. But some gaps were left on the apron slab, where the floor meets the wall, creating condensation problems that are now being addressed. Strips of carbon fiber are being installed in the concrete walls to create a seamless, protective exterior envelope.

As the work proceeds, the walls’ interiors are exposed, as they must have been when the building was under construction. “It’s the first time we’re seeing what Frank Lloyd Wright saw,” said Glenn Boornazian, president of Integrated Conservation Resources, who is the principal conservator on the project.

Wright is never far from anyone’s mind. Paramount goals are to make the work almost imperceptible and to adhere to the building’s original form to the greatest extent possible.

“From a preservation point of view, you don’t want to change the external appearance,” said Robert Silman, president of Robert Silman Associates, the project’s structural engineers.

When it came to the windows and skylights, then, the specialists wanted to improve them without replacing them. The windows, though, are not double-glazed and don’t provide adequate insulation. So the architects decided to replicate their form but substitute new glass with advanced thermal qualities that has been tested for water and air infiltration. (They have not yet undergone tests for pigeon-proofing, Ms. Jerome said).

Similarly the conservators tried to find repair materials — concrete patching compounds, acrylic crack fillers, expandable surface coatings — that “would be physically and aesthetically compatible,” Mr. Boornazian said. After identifying about 20 manufacturers that deal with concrete restoration, they narrowed the list to six and then subjected their materials to rigorous weather testing.

“Just as Frank Lloyd Wright was on the cutting edge of using materials, he forced us to think of solutions in unusual ways,” Mr. Boornazian said.

Wright was among the first to use gunite — sprayed concrete — on a large architectural scale, which allowed him to create his smooth unbroken curves, Mr. Boornazian said. To give the Guggenheim’s surface a monolithic appearance, he added, Wright left out expansion joints, which would have created visual vertical breaks.

Wright’s professional reputation has emerged intact, experts involved in the project say. The building’s flaws lay in its execution, not its conception. Exposed to high winds and extreme variations in temperature, the walls have continually expanded and contracted. They will still be flexible but will become more resilient, with concealed control joints that allow the gunite to expand and contract without cracking.

As part of its preparatory research the team studied the Guggenheim’s archives, including photographs taken during construction; written documentation of the building process; correspondence between Wright and the contractor; and original architectural and shop drawings.

The building was then stripped of as many as 11 layers of paint, and experts conducted a 17-month survey of thousands of cracks of varying magnitude in the facade. Using impact-echo technology, in which sound waves are sent into the concrete and the rebound is measured, the engineers located voids within the walls.

To map the geometry of the museum and determine its load-bearing capacity, the engineers relied on laser measuring, a fairly tricky matter given the building’s spiral and its sloping walls. “We think it’s the largest laser model ever constructed,” Mr. Silman said. “It took up the whole memory on the computer.”

They also submitted their findings to two peer review panels of experts in architectural restoration, materials conservation, structural engineering as well as an environmental envelope specialist.

“We all believe, when we finish, this building will be better than new,” said Marc H. Steglitz, the museum’s chief operating officer. “And we’ll get another 50 years out of it.”

On Sept. 10, 1932, one minute after midnight, a 7-year-old boy named Billy Reilly dropped a nickel into a turnstile and boarded an A train at 42nd Street. It was a southbound express, and it was Billy’s first ride on an A.

BETTMANN/CORBIS

Riders boarded an A train on March 20, 1933, during the opening of the Bergen Street station in Brooklyn. The A train started running in 1932.

Along its 31-mile route, the A train travels past a graveyard in Ozone Park, Queens.

It was the city’s first ride, too — 171,267 passengers rode it that September day in 1932, its first day of operation. The line, then called the Eighth Avenue subway, spanned only 12 miles and 28 stations, from the top of Manhattan to the bottom.

Some 75 years later, the A line stretches farther than it did back then, literally and culturally.

Over the years, the A line has become less of a train and more of an icon, a symbol of the nearly 500,000 varied and eclectic New Yorkers and others it carries through the city daily. The A line is certainly not the oldest run in New York’s subway system, nor has it ever been the smoothest-running, the most punctual or even the cleanest. But an argument could be made, thanks in part to Duke Ellington’s up-tempo stamp of approval, that it is perhaps the coolest.

“There’s no 6 train song or D train song,” said Dr. John Morrow, 33, a cardiologist who rode a packed A train recently on his way to lunch. “The A train has a little more cultural significance.”

Today, on the A line’s 75th birthday, transit officials will celebrate with a ceremony at the start of the line at the Inwood/207th Street station. A special train made up of six prewar cars is scheduled to provide service along the line’s original route to the Chambers Street stop in Lower Manhattan.

Back in 1932, the new subway was part of the Independent Subway System, or the IND, the first city-owned subway network. The IND competed with two private subway systems, the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation and the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, which opened first, in 1904. The city took control of the BMT and IRT in 1940.

The Eighth Avenue subway, which took seven years to build, was the IND’s first line, and it dazzled riders with longer stations to accommodate 10- and 11-car trains, wider platforms and sleek R1 cars manufactured by Pullman Standard.

“The R1 cars that ran on the A train at that time were phenomenal,” said Stan Fischler, a subway historian who has written several books about the city’s subway system. “If you had put air-conditioning into them, they’d be good enough to run today.”

The A train is the longest line in the system — 31 miles, from northern Manhattan through Brooklyn to Far Rockaway in Queens. New York City Transit, the arm of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that operates the subways, says it is the longest subway line in the world.

The A often feels like the city’s very own transcontinental railroad, traveling deep under the ground and soaring high above it, below the bustle of Washington Heights, past old tombstones in graveyards in Ozone Park, over the waters of Jamaica Bay. Perhaps the most famous section is the run under Harlem heard between the notes of Ellington’s recording of “Take the A Train,” which was written by Billy Stayhorn.

“Think about what a bargain it is,” Mr. Fischler said. “For two bucks you go all the way to Rockaway. Do you realize what that would cost you in a taxi? You couldn’t afford the tip.”

There is a strange symmetry to the line. You step on at the 207th Street station in Inwood in northern Manhattan, and you step off at the Far Rockaway/Mott Avenue terminal in Queens, near a western Long Island hamlet named Inwood. (Some trips end in Ozone Park and some in Rockaway Park.)

Those riding the A train the weekend before its anniversary, however, could hardly enjoy such uninterrupted, long-distance travel: Because of weekend track work, people had to board shuttle buses to get from Howard Beach to the Rockaways.

“I did not know I was going to be on a bus, but you kind of expect it on weekends,” said Shamiyah Brown, 27, who rode the shuttle bus with her seven children and her niece on Saturday. “I’m not surprised.”

The A train’s first registered complaint was apparently made just minutes after it began running, when a man at the Chambers Street station became upset because he had put two nickels into a malfunctioning turnstile.

Since then, the line has gotten mixed reviews from passengers and the Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy group. In the group’s latest report card, which ranks the city’s 22 main subway lines from best to worst, the A train was tied for 12th place. The group found, among other things, that the line arrives with below-average regularity.

The A line has been crippled by fires (the January 2005 blaze at the Chambers Street station, for instance) and has seen its share of tragic and bizarre occurrences.

The limbs and torso of a 19-year-old Brooklyn man were found in a blue plastic bag in a tunnel in 2005. Pigeons have been known to step aboard trains at the outdoor Far Rockaway stop and casually step off at the next station. In May 1993, a man posing as a subway motorman took an A train with hundreds of passengers for a three-and-a-half-hour ride. He made 85 stops, and arrived on time at the Ozone Park/Lefferts Boulevard station.

On Saturday afternoon, the line that carried Billy Reilly on its inaugural run — he moved to the front of the crowd at the 42nd Street station when a transportation commissioner learned he was born the day of the new subway’s groundbreaking, March 14, 1925 — carried Dr. Morrow, who sat reading and listening to a Tom Waits song on his iPod.

It carried Ernest Rivera, 28, an unemployed father of three from Brooklyn. It carried Gunther, a Manhattan couple’s white puppy. It carried a middle-aged woman with a tattoo on her chest, a man holding a surfboard and another man who had remembered to wear his A train T-shirt.

Rudy Worrell, 54, knelt on the floor and played his flute and duct-taped keyboard. Mr. Worrell remembered taking the A train as a boy, to play hooky from school. Years later, he would return to the A, unemployed and homeless, playing his music aboard it for small donations.

“This is my bread and butter,” he said as the train rumbled along. “Ain’t nothing like the A train.”

It Didn’t Age Well The splotchy look of the Woolworth Building, at Broadway and Park Place, comes from the dirt absorbed by precast concrete blocks that replaced the original terra cotta in the 1970s.

IT’S like a fungus that runs up and down the tower of the Woolworth Building, at Broadway and Park Place. From every angle the cream-colored surface has dirty, discolored patches, the unanticipated consequences of a major restoration project three decades ago.

The Architectural Record, 1913/Office for Metropolitan History

Frank Woolworth began accumulating his 5-and-10-cent store fortune in 1879, and by 1886 he opened a headquarters in New York City. He was a multimillionaire by 1900, when he built a lacy Gothic-style limestone house at Fifth Avenue and 80th Street, a building demolished in the 1920s.

It was designed by Charles P. H. Gilbert, a mansion specialist who worked up and down the avenue. He also designed the main building of the Jewish Museum, at 92nd Street.

In 1911, Woolworth announced plans for the tallest building in the world, to be constructed on Broadway between Park Place and Barclay Street. Like his house, Woolworth’s new building was to be neo-Gothic and designed by a Gilbert — in this case, Cass Gilbert, who was not related to Charles but was instead an aggressive out-of-towner who had elbowed his way into New York City architecture.

In 1905, Gilbert had designed the boxy Gothic-style West Street Building, at West and Cedar Streets, one of many structures to use the new technology of glazed terra cotta to clad a tall building, and the architect used it as a model for the Woolworth Building.

For Woolworth, Gilbert doubled the size of the 23-story West Street building and then some, to 55 floors, with a pyramidal roof 792 feet high. That topped the 700-foot Metropolitan Life tower, built at Madison Avenue and 24th Street in 1909.

Paul Starrett was one of the contractors bidding on the Woolworth project, and in his 1938 book, “Changing the Skyline,” he recalled trying to persuade Woolworth to use more traditional materials.

“In stone it would be magnificent,” he said, but in terra cotta, “it would look like a 5-and-10-cent store proposition.”

He did not get the job.

The utility of terra cotta was irrefutable: each block of fired clay, usually hollowed out, was a fraction of the weight of brick or stone. The blocks were easily modeled in intricate forms and were protected by a glaze that shed dirt.

A 1912 ad by the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company in The Real Estate Record and Guide boasted, “Cream color in another material would be dark and dirty after a few years’ exposure.”

Unlike many prior skyscrapers, the Woolworth Building was well received by the architectural intelligentsia. It had no raw blank side walls, and the Gothic-style detailing seemed an honest reflection of the new steel-frame technology.

Writing in The Architectural Record in 1913, Montgomery Schuyler particularly admired the way Gilbert adjusted the scale of the ornament. The finials, shields, crockets and other details were not simply giant-sized to look good from a distance but also held up to close view from neighboring buildings.

Compared with European models, “this brand-new American Gothic loses nothing,” Mr. Schuyler said.

But Mr. Starrett’s misgivings were well founded. In his 1938 book he recalled, apparently from years earlier, “the spectacle of the upper part of the Woolworth Building, wired up with metal mesh to catch the falling terra cotta.”

By 1962, The New York Times reported that riggers were repairing broken pieces all year round.

These problems only grew worse, and in the 1970s the Woolworth company retained Ezra D. Ehrenkrantz & Associates (now Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn) to examine every one of the 400,000 terra-cotta blocks. The architecture firm found that 25,000 of them needed complete replacement and selected precast concrete instead.

The concrete had a surface coating, meant to be renewed every five years, to shed soil and moisture, like the glaze on the terra-cotta blocks.

Timothy Allanbrook, now a senior consultant at Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, an architecture and engineering firm in Northbrook, Ill., worked for Ehrenkrantz at the time and was on and off the scaffolds at the Woolworth Building for three years.

He says the prescription for periodic resealing has not been followed, so the porous concrete has been absorbing water and dirt for years. He suspects that the concrete has absorbed so much dirt that it cannot be cleaned sufficiently so that it matches the original terra cotta, which may leave another replacement as the only option.

Mr. Allanbrook said that 30 years ago, the terra-cotta industry was in decline, making concrete “the optimal choice in a narrow field of imperfect choices.”

Now, terra cotta has seen a resurgence, so the original material could be a reasonable replacement, Mr. Allanbrook said; so could newer materials like concrete reinforced with glass fiber.

Roy Suskin, a vice president of the Witkoff Group, the building’s owner, declined to discuss the problem and any plans for remedying it.

PLAINVIEW, N.Y.

JUDGING from a number of developments going up on Long Island, former industrial sites are sometimes just the kinds of properties that communities are happy to see transformed.

In fact, Jan Burman, who is responsible for four new projects, has found that converting dead factories into clustered housing developments can earn the blessing of local government. For one thing, industrial sites do not arouse the protective instincts of civic groups that might otherwise oppose new housing. The trick — for Mr. Burman and other developers — is finding the right factory in the right location.

“The smart builders ahead of the trend have realized that developing industrial sites is the way to go,” said Robert A. Wieboldt, the executive vice president of the Long Island Builders Institute, a building industry organization. “In most cases, people feel that if the reuse is more attractive than the existing industrial use, they want it.”

Take Seasons at Plainview, the Burman development now being built on a 10-acre former fiberglass shower manufacturing plant within a large industrial park. All the 134 pale yellow town houses at the site, which cost roughly $35 million to build, have been sold.

The town of Oyster Bay, which encompasses Plainview, normally would not approve homes within an industrial area, according to Leslie Maccarone, a deputy commissioner for the town’s department of planning and development.

But Mr. Burman discovered a way to separate the residential traffic from the industrial park’s roads by carving an entrance from the Long Island Expressway service road. That, and the environmental studies showing that the site was clean of contaminants, helped gain approval for the housing.

With its 2,000-square-foot clubhouse and indoor pool, Seasons at Plainview borders the expressway and has only the one entrance, on the North Service Road, flanked by stone walls that act as sound barriers.

All of its units are attached in groups of four — two second-floor units and two on the ground floor — and each home has windows on three walls.

Twenty-eight of its units, for first-time buyers, were sold below market rates: two-bedroom units priced at $250,000 for those with incomes of up to $100,000 a year. In exchange for including them, Mr. Burman was allowed by the town to build more houses per acre than are usually permitted. They look just like the remaining 106 homes priced at market rates, around $500,000 for buyers 55 and older.

Ninety of the units have certificates of occupancy, and people are moving in, Mr. Burman said. There is a waiting list for the remaining units, he said; they are completed but awaiting inspection.

The other three residential communities that Mr. Burman’s Garden City-based firm, Engel Burman Group, is building on former industrial sites are: 63 attached homes, priced from $350,000 to $375,000, that will replace an old lamp manufacturing factory in Amityville; 53 single-family homes in West Hempstead being developed with James Neisloss of Meadowood Properties on the site of a now-demolished scientific toy factory, priced from $450,000 to $600,000; and 61 homes in Oceanside, priced around $400,000, replacing an old warehouse formerly owned by South Nassau Communities Hospital.

Suffolk County, too, offers examples of using development to transform industrial eyesores, and sometimes commercial ones as well. The town of Brookhaven plans to rezone the 19-acre site of a defunct sand mine in the hamlet of Middle Island, as well as a 13-acre former multiscreen movie theater and parking lots in the hamlet of Coram. The goal: to create town centers and closely clustered new housing — in fact, to create separate identities. What exists now are sprawling subdivisions separated by lengths of strip malls.

Connie Kepert, a Brookhaven councilwoman, says she envisions “pedestrian-oriented” centers for an area where three neighboring hamlets are barely distinguishable from one another. “Right now,” Ms. Kepert said, “you don’t know if you’re in Coram, Selden or in Middle Island.”

Kenneth Faltischek is the developer for the sand-mine property, Ms. Kepert said, and the developer Parviz Farahzad owns the movie theater property.

When it comes to older homes on Long Island, there are increasing numbers for sale and fewer buyers to go around. But at the same time there is stronger demand for new homes, closer together in gated communities, where monthly fees cover maintenance, said Maryann Caputo, general manager of the real estate firm Shawn Elliott Luxury Homes and Estates, based in Woodbury in Nassau County.

“We find that it doesn’t matter what age group you’re in,” Ms. Caputo said. “It’s a type of lifestyle that many people want.”

Couples and parents who work long hours, she added, “want to spend their free time with their children or socializing rather than fixing up the house or mowing the lawn.”

They stand on corners from Brighton Beach to the Bronx, all but mocking New Yorkers: Pay phones that may or may not work, which you can’t even check for a dial tone without worrying about germs.

But they remain rooted in the pavement of New York, blocking pedestrian traffic, looking a bit like museum pieces in an age of cellphones, BlackBerrys and Bluetooth headsets.

There is a reason for their survival: Public telephones are one of the stranger cash cows in city finance. Not because of the coins that are fed into them, but rather because of the millions upon millions that companies are willing to pay to put ads on them.

The phone kiosks generate $62 million in advertising revenue annually — and last year the city got $13.7 million of the take, triple what it pulled in from calls.

Over all, the number of pay phones in New York is falling, as it is throughout the country. But in a phenomenon unique to New York, the phones are more valuable than ever, thanks to the intense competition among advertisers for attention in a city of eight million.

Phone companies say the pay phones are still necessary, noting that during 9/11 and the 2003 blackout, people lined up to use them. But it is the phone kiosks’ desirability to advertisers, who love them because they are inexpensive and plentiful, that appears to be driving pressure on the city for permission to install new phones in choice locations.

Since 2003, every new phone the city has authorized has been put at the curb, the only spot where city regulations permit advertising. It has approved moving 465 pay phones from alongside buildings to the curb.

The phones are a source of frustration to some neighborhood and community groups, who say the city is giving precious sidewalk space over to what New York needs least: more messages from Madison Avenue. They are urging the city to put limits on pay phones and their advertising.

“The phone booths are unkempt. They are dirty. The advertising is overwhelming,” said Vanessa Gruen, director of special projects for the Municipal Art Society, which has objected to the phones. “The sidewalks of New York are our biggest public space, and somebody should be watching over them, and they should not be for sale for the city to make money out of them.”

The Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, which regulates the phones, declined to discuss their pay phone policies. Press aides to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg did not respond to an e-mail message.

New York transformed the pay phone business in 1999 when it signed franchise agreements with all pay phone companies operating in the city and required them to use media representatives specializing in outdoor marketing to sell their ad space. Previously, only New York Telephone was licensed to provide pay phones in the city, though other companies did so anyway. Now, 39 pay phone companies have agreements.

Within two years, the city’s pay phone ad revenue had outstripped its earnings from calls. The city collects 26 percent of the ad money, while it gets 10 percent of the revenue from local calls and 50 percent from long-distance calls.

The gap between the income sources has continued to widen.

“One of the top buys in New York right now, and it has been for the last couple of years, is phone kiosks,” said Keith Stewart, vice president of Generation Outdoor, which places outdoor advertising. “We’re able to spend a fraction of what we would for other outdoor formats. With kiosks, I can blanket the city.”

Although the number of phones in the city is shrinking — there are now about 22,700 — , 80 percent of the decline has been from phones alongside buildings, rather than at the curb, according to the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications. Those are the phones that do not permit advertising.

“It’s so clearly for advertising,” said David G. Liston, chairman of Manhattan Community Board Eight.

Mr. Liston would rather have trees than pay phones sprouting from city curbs. “Sometimes, you’ll see two and three pay phones together as if it’s an airport,” he said. “It’s almost as if they are putting out more phones for bigger ad spaces.”

Some restrictions have been put in place. Advertising on curbside kiosks on purely residential streets is not allowed. And no ads are permitted on any new pay phones approved since December 2004 in Manhattan neighborhoods south of Harlem.

Pay phone companies say they sympathize with neighborhood residents. But they warn that New York would be worse off with fewer public phones, and ads help the companies survive.

“It’s keeping the public pay phones alive,” said Les Shafran, executive director of the Independent Payphone Association of New York.

While the agreements vary, generally, the phone companies receive up to a third of the revenue, while media representatives who market the space take in roughly 50 percent.

“Pay phone providers in other parts of the county are seeing ad revenue, but not like New York,” said Tracey Timpanaro, editor and publisher of Perspectives on Public Communication magazine, a publication of the American Public Communications Council. “It’s the foot traffic. No other place is going to have that level of foot traffic.”

Mr. Stewart agrees: “It’s definitely a New York niche phenomenon. Once you get to New York, you’re batting with everything. You have taxi tops, transit shelters and urban panels. You have bus sides, bus interiors, subway interiors and subway platform posters. And then you have traditional bulletins — the billboards — and, in some cases, walls.”

Even in such a saturated market, Richard Schaps, the chairman and chief executive of Van Wagner, the media representative that controls advertising on 3,000 of the city’s phone kiosks, says there is room for growth.

Van Wagner has spent at least $129,000 since 2000 to lobby the city for pay phone advertising and the installation of phones on city streets. And it has asked the Traffic Audit Bureau, which monitors the reach of billboards and other outdoor media, to devise a method to measure pay phone kiosks as well — a first for the bureau.

On West 46th Street in Clinton, between 9th and 10th Avenues: the now-prim residential street was known for its strolling prostitutes and bordellos.

Kitra Cahana/The New York Times

May Matthews Playground in Hell’s Kitchen, scene of the infamous 1959 “Capeman” murders, when two teenagers were the innocent victims of gang warfare.

Kitra Cahan/The New York Times

The view from the third floor of the Landmark Tavern, a former speakeasy favored by George Raft.

Kitra Cahana/The New York Times

The Landmark Tavern is said to be haunted by a Confederate veteran who, knifed in a fight, staggered to the second floor to die in a bathtub.

NEW YORK is a walking city. People walk everywhere: to work, to school, to shop, to worship. And usually we’re in such a hurry, with the whole city rushing headlong around us, that we can miss what we’re walking past.

It’s the past itself — fragments and layers of New York’s history unceremoniously preserved in its streetscapes, in stories told on park benches and bar stools, in ghosts glimpsed in shadowed doorways. Hell’s Kitchen is one such neighborhood. Walking it with a longtime denizen offers a chance to bring alive some of that history.

Several legends compete to explain how Hell’s Kitchen got its name, but there’s no dispute about why. From the mid-1800s into the 1980s, this Midtown area, from 34th Street to 59th Street between Eighth Avenue and the Hudson River, was one tough neighborhood. Though it’s now known by many for its Off Broadway theaters, chic restaurants and luxury condominium towers (and as the name of a reality TV show), Hell’s Kitchen has a history that’s rich with gangsters and ghosts, streetwalkers and speakeasies, mysterious disappearances and gruesome murders.

“It isn’t Hell’s Kitchen anymore, it’s Hell’s Canyon,” Todd Robbins recently remarked, standing on the corner of West 39th Street and squinting up Eighth Avenue at the skyscrapers. As he led me around the neighborhood, he said that he rarely used the more genteel name, Clinton, first proposed in the 1960s. To him the older name better suits an area he fondly described as a place of “diamonds on top of a dung heap.”

Mr. Robbins has lived in the same one-bedroom apartment in a Ninth Avenue tenement since he moved there from Southern California 26 years ago. He could fairly claim to be holding up the neighborhood’s reputation for colorful characters: he eats lightbulbs and swallows swords for a living, is dean of the Coney Island Sideshow School, and ambles through Hell’s Kitchen wearing a straw boater and high-button shoes.

As we strolled west along busy, noisy 39th Street, from Eighth Avenue toward the waterfront, it was hard to imagine that the area was once green meadows that the Dutch settlers called Bloemendael (later anglicized as Bloomingdale), the Vale of Flowers.

African-American workers completing the Croton Aqueduct lived here in the 1840s. They were followed in the 1850s by a surge of Irish and German immigrants, who worked on the Hudson River docks and in the area’s slaughterhouses, factories and lumberyards, and for the Hudson River Railroad, later the New York Central, whose tracks ran down 10th and 11th Avenues.

Some worked as West Side cowboys, riding horses ahead of the trains, waving lanterns or red flags to shoo off pedestrians, horse carriages and later automobiles. Still, there were enough accidents that 11th Avenue came to be known as Death Avenue before the tracks were moved in the 1930s.

Tenements to house the workers and their families were hastily thrown up from the 1850s on, and out of them roamed gangs of youths who ruled the streets after the Civil War. The Hell’s Kitchen Gang, whom Herbert Asbury called “a collection of the most desperate ruffians in the city” in his 1927 book “The Gangs of New York” (inspiration for the Martin Scorsese film), fought constantly with the police and with rivals like the Gorillas, the Parlor Mob, and the Gophers. Members had names like Stumpy Malarkey, Goo Goo Knox, Happy Jack Mulraney, and One Lung Curran, who, when his girlfriend complained of the cold, walked out to the street, “blackjacked the first policeman he encountered,” according to Asbury, and stole his coat.

The block of West 39th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues saw so much fighting it was nicknamed Battle Row. In 1881 an article in The New York Times referred to a particularly scurrilous tenement on the block as Hell’s Kitchen, its first known use in print. Today those tenements are gone; the street lies between auto body shops and a Lincoln Tunnel ramp.

Many blocks of tenements were razed during the tunnel’s construction in the 1930s and expansion in the ’40s and ’50s. Yet examples still dot the neighborhood. Mr. Robbins’s block, on the east side of Ninth Avenue between 45th and 46th Streets, is an almost intact row.

During Prohibition it was said there were more speakeasies than children in the Irish Catholic area. On Restaurant Row (West 46th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues) the long-popular Barbetta is one of the establishments in former speakeasy locations. (Danny’s Grand Sea Palace, now, sadly, closed, was another.) The speakeasies were run by gangsters like the dapper Owney (the Killer) Madden, who held the controlling interest in the Cotton Club in Harlem and consorted with the notorious Mafia boss Lucky Luciano.

The Landmark Tavern, which opened in 1868 at the corner of 11th Avenue and West 46th Street, was a speakeasy favored by George Raft, the Hollywood tough guy who grew up in Hell’s Kitchen. His ghost is said to haunt the bar, along with that of a Confederate Civil War veteran who, knifed in a fight, staggered up to the second floor to die in a bathtub that’s still there. The ghost of an Irish immigrant girl who died in her bed wanders the third floor.

Mr. Robbins noted another Prohibition-era site, on the east side of the neighborhood. The plain brick building at 330 West 45th Street (between Eighth and Ninth Avenues) is at the former site of Billy Haas’s Chophouse. In 1930 Judge Joseph Crater stepped out of the restaurant, into a cab, and vanished. The unsolved mystery made him one of the most famous missing persons of the century.

“For decades, ‘pulling a Crater’ was common slang for disappearing without a trace,” Mr. Robbins said.

After World War II, low rents drew new waves of immigrants to Hell’s Kitchen, including many new arrivals from Puerto Rico. Their turf wars with their Irish neighbors were romanticized in the 1957 musical “West Side Story.”

In 1959, while “West Side Story” played two blocks away on the stage of the Majestic Theater, May Matthews Park (now Playground) on West 46th Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues) became the site of real gang murders. A member of the Puerto Rican Vampires, spoiling for a fight with the Norsemen, an Irish gang, knifed two innocent teenagers to death there. The killer, Salvador Agron, a k a the Capeman, got his own musical in 1998 thanks to Paul Simon.

Two generations of Irish gangsters, nicknamed the Westies by the police and the press, operated in the neighborhood into the late 1980s. Murder, theft, arson, extortion, gambling, loan-sharking, liquor, drugs, nightclubs — the Westies did it all.

The “gentleman gangster” Mickey Spillane (no relation to the novelist) ran the neighborhood like an Irish Godfather in the 1960s and married into the local political dynasty, the McManus family (known as “the McMani”). The wedding was held at Sacred Heart of Jesus, the beautiful brick and terra-cotta Roman Catholic church on West 51st Street between 9th and 10th Avenues. The Romanesque church, which still holds masses every day for a congregation of Irish, Italian and Hispanic worshipers, was built in 1885 and designed by Napoleon Lebrun, architect of the Metropolitan Life building at Madison Square.

A war between Mr. Spillane and Jimmy Coonan, a younger rival, littered Hell’s Kitchen with corpses from the late 1960s until Mr. Spillane was shot dead in Queens in 1977. His murder was an apparent mob hit; he’d been feuding with the Mafia boss Fat Tony Salerno over the lucrative racketeering opportunities presented by the planned Jacob K. Javits Convention Center between 11th and 12th Avenues.

Mr. Coonan’s reign was savage. The appropriately grim-looking Hudsonview Terrace apartment tower (747 10th Avenue, between West 50th and West 51st Streets), built in 1976 under the Mitchell-Lama affordable housing program, was the scene of one of his infamously grisly killings. On Jan. 18, 1978, in a Hudsonview apartment, he and two associates murdered Rickey Tassiello, a small-time gambler who owed Mr. Coonan $1,250. Then they dismembered the body in the bathtub and hauled out the pieces in garbage bags — all except the hands, which Mr. Coonan put in baggies and placed in the refrigerator’s freezer. He planned to retrieve them later to put Mr. Tassiello’s fingerprints on a pistol he would use in another murder, to throw off investigators.

The Westies hatched many capers in the booths of the Market Diner, a classic early-60s greasy spoon on the corner of 11th Avenue and West 43rd Street. It closed in 2006 and now sits behind a chain-link fence, waiting to be demolished — or, fans hope, relocated — to make way for a planned high-rise.

One block east, the Mr. Biggs Bar & Grill at 10th Avenue and West 43rd Street is on the site of a dive bar, the 596 Club, which Mr. Coonan owned in the 1970s. In 1977 he and his crew murdered and dismembered the loan shark Ruby Stein there. The torso was later retrieved from the East River.

Mr. Robbins said macabre stories about the 596 Club still float around Hell’s Kitchen. Old-timers remember jars behind the bar that held the severed fingers of guys who had crossed the Westies. There’s the one about gangsters rolling a severed head down the bar.

“I’ve heard a lot of that kind of stuff,” T. J. English, author of “The Westies,” said in a recent interview. “Normally you’d dismiss it as absurd, but since it was the Westies, who knows? That place was certainly the proverbial bucket of blood.”

Scott Rudnick, owner of Mr. Biggs, said the place had its share of ghosts when he first opened 13 years ago, but the introduction of karaoke nights “spooked the spooks out.”

There were plenty of sinners in the neighborhood, but Hell’s Kitchen also had a plenitude of churches. Several former churches are now devoted to theater. They include the Theater at St. Clement’s (423 West 46th Street), where Mr. Robbins serves as host of a weekly revue, “Monday Night Magic,” as well as the Actors Studio (432 West 44th Street, between 9th and 10th Avenues) and the nearby New Dramatists (424 West 44th Street).

Adaptive reuse of another sort can be seen at 421 West 54th Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues), home of the legendary Hit Factory recording studio from 1991 to 2006. It is now condominiums, with the advertising slogan “Live in the House That Rock Built.” Although many of the Hit Factory stars (including Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and Stevie Wonder) actually made their records at an earlier location, this is the site where 50 Cent was stabbed — a suitably Hell’s Kitchen historical grace note.

In many ways the Westies’ reign was the last hurrah of the old Hell’s Kitchen. By the late 1980s Rudolph W. Giuliani, at the time a federal prosecutor, had put Mr. Coonan and his crew in prison. With the cleanup of neighboring Times Square in the 1990s the upscaling of Hell’s Kitchen commenced in earnest.

More blocks of old tenements were demolished to make way for a growing forest of condominium towers. Dark bars became friendly bistros. The declining waterfront, where the International Longshoremen’s Association once had so many neighborhood felons on its rolls that it was known as the Pistol Local, is now part of Hudson River Park.

Walking along the Capeman block of West 46th Street Mr. Robbins recalled that well into the 1980s the now-prim residential street was infamous for its strolling prostitutes and bordellos. At Mr. Biggs, Mr. Rudnick said that his clientele now consisted of young professionals “who wouldn’t set foot in this neighborhood” when he first opened.

It’s still tawdry where it borders Times Square along Eighth Avenue, and the long, lonely blocks by the waterfront can still feel haunted at night. But much of the old Hell’s Kitchen has vanished in the shadows of Hell’s Canyon.

“New York City is so gloriously unsentimental and forward leaning that it doesn’t appreciate its past, ” Mr. Robbins said. “People need to know what happened here, while they can still see some of it.”

One Carnegie Hill; 37 Wall Street; Chelsea Landmark; Ritz Plaza.

A GOLF simulator that lets residents imagine they’re playing the 18th hole at St. Andrews in Scotland.

A penthouse party room with sweeping city views where residents can entertain, say, 50 of their closest friends.

Swimming pools, yoga studios and massage rooms that would satisfy even the most driven New Yorkers.

And finally, the one thing that should make any apartment dweller’s heart skip a beat: a washer and dryer, even in a 450-square-foot studio.

These are the kinds of amenities that developers are using to redefine the term “luxury rental” in Manhattan, and, perhaps more to the point, to justify a whole new level of prices for people who want the feel of a high-end condominium but don’t want to buy.

With rental vacancies hovering at less than 1 percent, developers are confident that the rental market is strong enough to absorb thousands of new apartments, even if they come with rents that are two to three times current averages. That means studios that rent for as much as $3,500 a month, one-bedrooms for $6,000, and two-bedrooms for $11,000. These are, incidentally, the kind of prices that owners of high-end condos might get if they rented out their apartments, brokers say.

In recent years, developers have been focused more on condo development than on rental construction, but at least nine rental buildings have opened within the last year, and at least a dozen more are scheduled to open in the next two years. Most of these buildings are high-rises, which means that thousands of new apartments will become available in the next 18 months.

“Builders are realizing that they can build rentals with high amenities and real wow factor because people are willing to pay for it,” said Gary Malin, the chief operating officer of Citi Habitats. In many ways, the market for new rental buildings is merely following the lead set by the condominium market in the last five years, when developers raced to find the most talked-about new amenity.

The developers of these new rental buildings are also giving them a Club Med vibe. Some even have created the land-based equivalent of a cruise director — someone to organize Halloween parties, a softball team and the occasional ski trip or scuba diving lesson. All with particular renters in mind, of course.

“These are people who know how they want to feel when they walk into their lobby and their home,” said Cliff Finn, the managing director of new development marketing at Citi Habitats. “It’s about feeling successful.”

The Chelsea Landmark, a 38-story tower with 407 apartments at 25 West 25th Street, opened five months ago. The developer, Rose Associates, built 22,000 square feet of amenities that include a gym, the golf simulator, a Zen garden, a spa with an oversize whirlpool and sauna, two lounges with billiards tables, wireless Internet connections and free juice and coffee, and a demonstration kitchen where local chefs will be featured at monthly events.

“Not every builder is willing to spend the money to get the high rents,” said Adam R. Rose, the president of Rose Associates. “But we knew that with this building we would be able to skim off the top 5 percent of renters in every building around here,” including people from older Rose rental buildings, he said. About half of the 20,000 apartments that Rose owns and manages across the city are rentals.

Mr. Rose said his company would not have built a building as well appointed as the Chelsea Landmark a few years earlier. “What’s acceptable to the marketplace has changed drastically,” he said. “What we delivered 20 years ago in condos wouldn’t make it today in even the lowest-level rental building.”

New rental apartments now include name-brand stainless-steel kitchen appliances, granite countertops, marble baths and hardwood floors. “The days of parquet are gone,” Mr. Rose said.

He added, however, that while the materials used in apartments at the Chelsea Landmark were expensive, they were chosen to stand up to a potential revolving door of renters. The kitchen counters are made of manufactured quartz composite and the bathroom tiles are porcelain. “They don’t just look good; they’re indestructible,” he said.

The quality of apartment fixtures and the kinds of amenities in a building naturally vary, depending on a building’s location and the kind of tenant that the developer hopes to attract. Brokers and developers agree that the target audience for many of the new high-rises is young professionals in their 20s and early 30s who may earn as much as $300,000 a year but who just aren’t ready to own yet.

The people moving into 37 Wall Street, for example, are “downtown-oriented people who are still early in their careers, and they choose to rent, but they have a condo sensibility,” said Mr. Finn of Citi Habitats. They are people who can afford a $4,800 two-bedroom but who might not have the $300,000 they would need for a down payment on a comparable condo that might cost $1.5 million, he said.

Thirty-seven Wall is a former bank building that has been converted to 373 rental apartments. Amenities include a gym, a yoga studio, a screening room, a lounge and billiards room with a lush clubby feel, and 150 channels of DirecTV in each apartment.

Chris Mazzarella, who works at a market research company in SoHo and who moved into 37 Wall in May, said the building’s amenities were “a major decision maker on my part.” He lives in a studio and plans to spend plenty of time in the lounge either shooting pool or on his laptop, and in the gym working out. He also hopes to give a Super Bowl party in the screening room.

Mr. Mazzarella, who is 27, said most of his neighbors seem to be young professionals. “I definitely feel like I’m in my element,” he said.

A building like One Carnegie Hill, at 215 East 96th Street, has a slightly broader mix of renters: singles in their 20s and couples in their early 30s, some with young children. The building, which opened a year ago, has an enormous fitness center and a rooftop party room, but it also has a charming children’s playroom that comes with free child care on weekend mornings when parents might be working out in the gym.

It has a roof terrace for sunbathing and a third-floor terrace with a playground and three separate barbecue areas, where residents can give outdoor dinner parties.

Mindy Jaffe said she and her fiancé, Per Chilstrom, have made good use of the barbecue areas. “We’ve had people over, and you just can’t believe you’re in the city,” she said. “It’s like being in your own private outdoor space.”

Ms. Jaffe said she and Mr. Chilstrom, who are both 32 and who rent a one-bedroom, have each lived in all kinds of buildings, including walk-ups and buildings without doormen. “We’ve thought about buying but haven’t been ready to do it,” she said.

The top 19 floors at One Carnegie Hill are actually condop units, while the bottom 23 floors are rentals, with separate elevator banks for each portion. The fitness center and lounges are free to apartment owners and available to renters for an annual fee of $600 for one person and $1,000 for two.

David Wine, the president of Related Residential Development, the company that developed the building, said the fees were set well below market rates for health clubs. “We’re not viewing it as a profit center,” he said. “We want people to join and use the amenity because it improves their lifestyle, and it’s what living in the building is all about.”

With so many new buildings coming online, the owners and managers of some older rental buildings are renovating their common spaces and looking for other ways to compete.

Stonehenge Management, which owns and manages the Ritz Plaza, a 479-unit building at 235 West 48th Street that was built in 1990, recently renovated the building’s fitness center and pool and also created a lounge area that residents can use for private parties. As apartments become available, they are also being upgraded.

“We have no problem spending the money to keep up with the newer construction and to maintain the rents we maintain,” said Marc Kaplan, the director of leasing at Stonehenge.

Shigeki Morii, a media consultant, has lived at the Ritz Plaza with his wife, Yuko Hamada, for nearly 10 years and said he was pleased with the upgrades. He uses the gym regularly and takes his laptop to the lounge whenever his wife needs quiet in the apartment to concentrate on her work as a Broadway reviewer for a Japanese television company.

“I also like the social aspect of the building,” he said. “Especially at the gym, when you see the same people and take the same classes, it’s a good way to get to know each other.”

Mr. Wine said his company was always looking for ways to keep its buildings current. At 1 Union Square South, which is nine years old, Related recently doubled the size of the roof terrace, adding outdoor barbecues and private party space. And at the Westport at 500 West 56th Street, a building that is about four years old, Related is creating a second party room at the top of the building because the existing one is almost always booked.

“We’re continuously redoing lobbies and common spaces because we have to constantly compete with new construction,” Mr. Wine said.

Looking ahead, with many more rental buildings on the horizon, developers seem quite likely to continue their efforts to outdo one another and even themselves.

Mr. Finn of Citi Habitats said he was working with different developers on half a dozen new buildings that will open in the next two to three years, including two 60-story towers with 1,254 units planned by Silverstein Properties on West 42nd Street.

Although the new buildings are still in planning stages, developers seem to be pushing the design envelope in search of a resort aesthetic, he said. That could mean outdoor rooftop pools and apartments with higher ceilings and ever finer finishes.

“You’re going to see a whole new breed of rental product coming on,” he said. “Things that will give condos a real run for their money.”

UNOBSTRUCTED The Majestic rises 32 stories on Central Park West at 72nd Street. The building is now undergoing a $2.5 million facade renovation. The Majestic’s cantilevered construction means there are no corner columns to block the views.

WHEN the Majestic opened at Central Park West and 72nd Street in 1931, there was nothing more modern in New York than this 32-story apartment building that mixed skyscraper design with Art Deco. But Irwin S. Chanin’s soaring twin-tower project was brought low in less than a year by the Depression.

Office for Metropolitan History
A photograph from 1937.

Although apartment houses on Central Park West now seem as natural as bread and butter, those that followed the 1884 Dakota disappointed real estate investors. Apartment construction came in a flood in the 1890s, with buildings like the 11-story Majestic apartment hotel built on the blockfront from 71st to 72nd Streets in 1894.

The rising tide of the 1920s boom lifted the skyline. In 1929, Chanin announced a 45-story apartment house on the Majestic hotel site.

Born in Brooklyn in 1891, Chanin had started as a house builder, but in the 1920s put together a real estate and development firm that built several theaters.

Chanin’s original plan for the Majestic site called for apartments of 11 to 24 rooms in a colossal, stocky tower, something like the New Yorker Hotel at Eighth Avenue and 34th Street.

He began demolition on Oct. 1, 1929, and when the stock market crashed later that month, he was at first sanguine, as were other owners who thought that inflated stocks had been siphoning investment cash out of real estate.

But in August of 1930 he revised his plans and put up a 32-story building, with two towers and apartments of 4 to 14 rooms. It featured cantilevered construction, an innovation in which there were no corner columns to block the view.

The building opened in the fall of 1931, and the brochure for prospective renters promised solutions to “the complexities — physical, psychological and social — of modern New York life.” The amenities mentioned included the building’s full morning sunlight, its distance from the smoke and soot of Midtown, the commute via the Central Park drives and the peaceful refuge of the park itself.

The Art Deco design is almost all brick, with little ornamentation other than the shape and shadow of the masonry itself. The authorship of Chanin designs is always troublesome. Chanin was an engineer but listed himself as the architect on the drawings. But he also employed Jacques Delamarre, who studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, and on this project they consulted with René Chambellan, a sculptor.

Using a warm orange brick, the design is a fencing match of sorts, pitting the multiple panels of horizontal brickwork (carefully confined between the windows) against the powerful vertical lines of the piers running up the front.

The most startling element is visible from the rear: the colossal quarter-round shapes of the back of the towers, slightly menacing, like a giant dynamo out of Fritz Lang’s 1927 movie, “Metropolis.”

In The New York Times in 1931 Chanin confidently predicted that the post-crash slump would create a shortfall of apartments by 1933. But testimony in a 1935 lawsuit about the financing of the Majestic’s mortgage indicated that only 45 of the 205 apartments were finished by October 1931. In 1932, when the Continental Bank and Trust Company began collecting the rents in lieu of foreclosing, a 10-room tower apartment was advertised with a rent of $6,500 per year.

In 1934, The Times reported that Chanin had no income other than $500 a week from his management company.

The Majestic can claim a number of well-known residents — Milton Berle, Walter Winchell and Zero Mostel among them. And as Grace Lichtenstein noted in a 1981 issue of the Majestic’s newsletter, there have been some notorious ones as well: Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello. In fact, in 1957 Costello was slightly wounded in a shooting in the lobby, although The Times reported that he told the police he did not have “an enemy in the world.”

Another historical footnote: Bruno Hauptmann, convicted of kidnapping the young son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh, worked as a carpenter at the Majestic in March 1932, around the time the child was taken from the Lindberghs’ house in New Jersey. The little boy’s body was found in May of that year.

The Majestic is now a co-op, with 238 apartments, and sales in the last year and a half have ranged from $2.5 million for a five-room apartment on a low floor to $25 million for a 15-room apartment in one of the towers.

Walter B. Melvin Architects is currently supervising a $2.5 million facade renovation — even Modernism can get old.

Chanin predicted this in 1931, when he told The Times that “if the new Majestic is in existence after 1981, it will be somewhat of an architectural curiosity.”

By that time, he said, zoning laws will have been repealed because light and air would be supplied by electrical and mechanical means, “more dependably and more efficiently than nature.” He even suggested that “probably two-thirds of Manhattan Island will consist of parkland surrounding the relatively small number of super buildings,” far bigger, presumably, than the Majestic.

Leticia and Rick Presutti, shown with their children, Cosima and Rocco, looked at more than 40 apartments last year before deciding to buy a Classic 7 on Madison Avenue.

BUYERS looking for apartments with three or more bedrooms in New York City should brace themselves.

Asking Price: $2,500,000
This was the floor plan of Leticia and Rick Presutti’s Classic 7 before the gut renovation began.

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

Last month, Trent and Sabrina Ulicny and their two sons, Skylar, 7, and Taelan, 4, moved into their three-bedroom. Their search took less than two months.

Asking Price: $700,000

The floor plan of Trent and Sabrina Ulicny’s three-bedroom at the Langston, a condo at 145th Street and Bradhurst Avenue.

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

Waiting To Move In Thomas and Katrina Scilaris, shown with their son, Thomas II, decided to buy a four-bedroom apartment with a den and a terrace at 255 East 74th Street after searching for more than a year.

Asking Price: $4,500,000

The floor plan for Thomas and Katrina Scilaris’s four-bedroom apartment.

It could be a long, hard search, and even vast sums of money won’t necessarily make it easier.

The elusiveness of these large apartments is hitting people with budgets of, say, $8 million just as hard as buyers with only $2 million to spend. And the fights for the apartments that are available are being won or lost in bidding wars.

As more and more young families choose to stay in the city, demand for three- and four-bedroom apartments far exceeds a very limited supply, making large apartments the tightest part of the current real estate market.

Leticia and Rick Presutti got lucky. They looked at more than 40 apartments over six months last year before deciding to buy a Classic 7 on Madison Avenue for just under the $2.5 million asking price.

Even though the Presuttis were looking before the market began heating up in February of this year, the search was anything but easy.

Ms. Presutti said that after a few months, it “got very frustrating, because at the beginning, our broker showed us everything that was out there, but then for weeks and weeks, there was nothing more.”

The 2,000-square-foot apartment they ended up buying was actually the first apartment they saw, but it needed a gut renovation, which apparently was scaring off other buyers.

“You would think that with so many apartments in New York, there would be much more out there,” Mr. Presutti said. “But the more we looked, the more we kept coming back to this one.”

Their broker, Fern Hammond, a senior vice president at Halstead Property, said that the Presuttis’ six-month search for a Classic 7 — a three-bedroom apartment with a maid’s room and a living room, dining room and kitchen — would be impossible in the current market.

She explained that last February, when the Presuttis closed their deal, was just about the time that the city’s sluggish real estate market began to recover and the market for large apartments turned white-hot. “That’s when the market tightened like a vise, and the prices just shot up,” she said, adding that the same apartment would now sell for close to $3 million.

The market for prewar apartments is particularly limited because many large apartments have been subdivided into smaller units over the years and those that still exist tend to belong to people who have no interest in moving.

Bruce Rabbino, a Halstead broker, has been searching for prewar three-bedroom apartments for two different clients for nearly a year. “But people don’t leave those buildings — they get carried out in a crate — so the turnover is not very rapid,” he said.

He worries that his buyers are losing faith in him. “They end up thinking I’m not doing my job,” he said, “but I’m scouring the listings and calling people every day. There’s just nothing to show.”

Three-bedrooms in prewar co-ops, if and when found, start at about $2.5 million, but they often need a significant renovation.

Developers throughout the city are now building more three- and four-bedroom units to meet the demand. The average sale price for a new three-bedroom condo is about $4 million, with apartments selling for as little as $1 million in Harlem and Brooklyn and for as much as $8 million on Park Avenue.

The scarcity, though, seems to be universal. “It’s not just the $2 million to $3 million apartments that are hard to come by,” said Bill Milvaney, a broker with Bellmarc Realty. “Even with $4 million, $5 million or $7 million to spend, we’re just not finding them out there.”

Recent studies of the market indicate just how strong it is for larger apartments. While the average sale price for studios and one- and two-bedroom apartments hasn’t changed much in the last year, the average price for three-bedrooms went up by nearly 18 percent, to $4.187 million, according to the latest market report released by Prudential Douglas Elliman. For four-bedrooms, the increase was even steeper: more than 36 percent, to $9.175 million.

Even though larger apartments represent the most robust part of the market, they still make up a relatively small share of it. Three-bedroom apartments accounted for only 5 percent of the sales in the last quarter; four-bedrooms represented only 1 percent.

“There’s constant pressure on the upper end of the market because it’s always been a very small market segment,” said Jonathan Miller, the president of the Miller Samuel appraisal company. “The pressure is exaggerated now because you have a surge in income from two consecutive years of big Wall Street bonuses creating even more demand, and the demand drives up the prices.”

Brokers agree that most of the demand comes from young families who in the past would have opted for the suburbs, where they can get much more living and outdoor space for their money. Census figures bear this out: the number of children under age 5 living in Manhattan grew by more than 32 percent from 2000 to 2005.

“Quality-of-life issues have gotten tremendously better in the city, so more and more families want to stay in Manhattan or even move into it from the suburbs,” said Stephen Kliegerman, the executive director for development marketing at Halstead. “Everyone’s also working longer days and weekends as well, and they want to be closer to their families. They want to be able to come home for dinner and then go back to work if they have to.”

Ms. Presutti said she and her husband never considered moving out of the city with their two children, Cosima, 3, and Rocco, 1. “My husband would never see the kids,” Ms. Presutti said.

They have watched friends move to the suburbs, she said, and the fathers leave for work before the children get up and get home long after they’ve gone to bed. “On Sunday nights, the kids practically say: ‘Bye Daddy. See you next week,’ ” she said.

Living in the city, though, means that Mr. Presutti, a mergers and acquisitions lawyer, can spend at least an hour every morning with the children, and he can also take Cosima to preschool most days.

As they watch the progress on their renovation, which includes a new kitchen, four new bathrooms and refinished floors and woodwork throughout the apartment, the Presuttis look forward to moving into an apartment they have custom-designed.

The condominium market can provide more choices for young families who want to stay in New York, particularly the new buildings that have higher concentrations of large apartments.

The Upper East and West Sides — neighborhoods known to be stroller- and tricycle-friendly — are popular hunting grounds for families seeking more space. But while many people want to live in prewar doorman buildings, that market is very limited, brokers say, and the financial requirements imposed by co-op boards can put those apartments out of their financial reach.

“You have a lot of young people — the next generation with families — who have very high incomes, but they haven’t had the time to amass fortunes, and that makes the co-op board process very iffy for them,” said Barbara Fox, the president of the Fox Residential Group.

Their incomes can support big mortgages, she said, but they might not have the kinds of assets that prewar co-ops demand. Many co-ops require buyers to have at least twice the price of an apartment in liquid assets, which rules out many potential buyers.

All of which helps explain why the market for large condos is even stronger than that for co-ops. Prudential Douglas Elliman’s market report shows that the average price for three-bedroom condos went up 23.2 percent in the last year, to $4.69 million, while the average price for three-bedroom co-ops went up 17.6 percent, to $4.18 million.

The developers of 255 East 74th Street, a new 83-unit condo tower now under construction, hope to benefit from this trend: 70 percent of the apartments there have three or more bedrooms.

“We studied the market and made a commitment to build large family homes,” said Richard Lebow, the director of marketing and sales for the World-Wide Group, the developer.

When World-Wide surveyed the area east of Third Avenue, it found very few three- and four-bedroom apartments, Mr. Lebow said. “There was virtually nothing, and what there was tended to be all awkward combinations of smaller apartments,” he said.

Thomas Scilaris, an orthopedic surgeon, and his wife, Katrina, decided to buy a four-bedroom apartment at 255 East 74th after searching for more than a year, being outbid in two prewar buildings and having a deal for a town house fall apart.

The first apartment was a three-bedroom that had been combined with a studio, but the only way to get to the fourth bedroom was to walk through the third.

The second apartment had three bedrooms and a better layout, but only two baths. The town house is what prompted them to look for even more space.

“But I’m glad we didn’t get them now, because this new location is better for everything we need,” said Dr. Scilaris.

The building has a large children’s playroom, and it is only seven blocks from his office.

The couple’s $4.5 million apartment has four bedrooms, a den and a terrace. They have an 8-month-old son, Thomas II, and they hope to expand their family eventually. They also wanted to have a guest room for visiting grandparents.

They started their search more than a year ago and will not be able to move into their new apartment until the fall of 2008. “That’s all right, though,” Dr. Scilaris said. “As far as we’re concerned, good things happen to people who wait.”

Veronica Hackett, the managing partner in the Clarett Group, which is developing several buildings with larger apartments, said that as always in real estate, location does matter. So while large apartments are sought after on the Upper East and Upper West Sides, “there are certain markets where you’re not going to sell three-bedrooms,” she said.

Downtown neighborhoods, she said, tend to have more appeal for single people and empty nesters. Three of the Clarett Group’s current projects show the range of the three-bedroom market, both in terms of size and price. At 200 West End Avenue, near 70th Street, three-bedrooms start at $2.65 million for 1,627 square feet. At Sky House, which is being built on Madison Square Park, at 29th Street, they start at $1.85 million for 1,596 square feet. And at Forté a tower being built near the Brooklyn Academy of Music , they will cost $1.1 million for 1,435 square feet.

With a budget of only $750,000, Trent and Sabrina Ulicny, who have two sons, 7 and 4, spread their search wide and looked in Brooklyn, Inwood, Westchester County and Weehawken, N.J. The Ulicnys are proof that three-bedrooms can be had in Manhattan for under $1 million and on short notice, because they found, bought and moved into their three-bedroom apartment in Harlem in less than two months.

After deciding they wanted to stay in the city, the Ulicnys had only two firm requirements: that the apartment be within easy commuting distance of their sons’ school on the Upper West Side and that it be in a doorman building. They wound up with a three-bedroom in the Langston, a condo at 145th Street and Bradhurst Avenue, for less than $700,000.

They moved last month from a two-bedroom near Lincoln Center, where their dining table had become buried under mounds of paper. Mr. Ulicny is marketing a new sake-based liqueur called Ty-ku, and Ms. Ulicny is completing her college degree online from the University of Phoenix.

In their new apartment, they have a home office with two workstations and a full-fledged dining area. “We don’t have cords and wires hanging all over the table anymore, and we don’t have to tell the kids, ‘Don’t spill spaghetti on Mom’s laptop,’ ” Mr. Ulicny said. “As corny as it sounds, it’s nice to be able to sit down and eat dinner together.”