It was easy to imagine what these dwellings might have been like. They were old, and had no hot water. My grandmother's place on East 19th Street could have once been a cold-water flat. It had the railroad flat layout. This meant the rooms were laid out in a straight line, like a railroad track. You had to go through them all to get to the front room.
A cold-water flat obviously was not a desirable place. Apartments without an individual bathroom would be worse, but I don't know how many of those might have been left by the 1960s. I'm sure they too were still around.
Saturday night bath. I always heard of this. I also always assumed it was just a traditional time for people to take a bath before Sabbath Sunday. Well, yes, traditional, because that was the only time the superintendent created any hot water for the tenants. Thus, a cold-water flat had a reprieve on Saturday night. There would be hot water. For a while.
The Burek brother Johnny who I recently reconnected with and whose remembrances helped source the AC/DC posting, added some further descriptions of their early 1950s living conditions.
He writes "...another thing about our apartment back then was having a bath tub in the kitchen with an iron cover over it. Hot water it seemed was only supplied early on Saturday evening. Therefore, everyone in the building would rush to take a bath before the hot water ran out."
My wife remembers a playmate whose apartment in the Bronx was a railroad flat with a bathtub in the kitchen. The toilet and the sink were in a small room next to the kitchen. She does think the Hanleys had hot water all the time, but it is possible they didn't.
TV was of course a nascent medium back then, and since the Burek house was DC current, there was a converter that allowed the TV to work with their current. Of course there was no show called 'Saturday Night Live' yet. But it had a prequel: Saturday Night Wet.
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