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How much does a one-bedroom apartment on the East Side cost?

The book is Valley of the Dolls. The year is 1945. Theatrical attorney Henry Bellamy wants his secretary to find an apartment for a younger colleague returning from the war:

"Anne will come up with something," Henry insisted. "Try for the East Side. Living room, bedroom, bath, and kitchen, furnished, around a hundred and fifty a month. Go to one-seventy-five if you have to."

This is a stretch. No one thinks our heroine will be able to find anything at that price—and she doesn't. There are a lot of soldiers returning from the war, after all. In reality, this kind of apartment probably runs $200 or more.

In today's dollars that comes to about $3,300. "East Side" is a little vague, and furnished apartments are no longer common, so let's search Zillow for one-bedroom unfurnished apartments on the Upper East Side that rent for less than $3,000:

I don't live in New York and maybe I'm being badly fooled by Zillow. So help me out, New Yorkers. Can you rent a one-bedroom apartment on the East Side for prices like this? Or is Zillow way off base?

21 thoughts on “How much does a one-bedroom apartment on the East Side cost?

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    1. cmayo

      I don't know about dumpy necessarily, but they're going to vary in specifics. Size, utilities, etc.

      Also, since KD likes to tell us sometimes about how the quality of things has gotten better over time, sometimes we need to take that into account with the price of the thing (not an argument that I buy into when it comes to necessities/things that are tools - buying a newer/fancier/expensive tool to perform a task that a simpler, older tool performed just fine isn't always better), that's probably important to mention here. How does the quality of the $3000 apartment today compare to the quality of the $200 apartment in 1945?

      And finally - to not be considered housing burdened with a 3K housing payment, you'd have to have an annual salary of 120K. Assuming that that housing payment also includes utilities. If it doesn't, you need more.

  1. ey81

    Tenement apartment, i.e., third floor walkup with bathtub in the kitchen and toilet down the hall: sure. Rent-controlled 50-year-old apartment: sure, although you might have to slip the super another $2000 to let you in. The kind of apartment a Jabberwocking reader would accept: no. Note that the number of apartments on the map is a tiny fraction of the number of people moving to the UES every week.

  2. shaldengeki

    I'm a pretty recent NYC transplant, so take this with a grain of salt, but IME folks use StreetEasy, for the most part:
    https://streeteasy.com/1-bedroom-apartments-for-rent/nyc/price:-3000%7Carea:139,123%7Cno_fee:1

    I think you'd be able to find a place, but you'll have to trade off on one of the typical axes: a smaller apartment, or an older building, or a worse location.

    (That being said, it's the upper east side. You've already traded off location, heh.)

  3. DFPaul

    The reality is these days that younger colleague returning from the war wouldn't rent a one bedroom. He or she would have 3 or 4 roommates in a two bedroom.

  4. Brett

    Living room, bedroom, bath, and kitchen, furnished,

    That's the key right there - the guy in question wouldn't be renting an apartment like that, not unless he's got a pretty good salary. More likely she'd be looking for a room-mate spot for him in a multi-bedroom apartment, or a place in one of the many boarding houses and residential hotels in NYC at the time.

  5. KinersKorner

    I would say it is doable. My sons pay less- upper Westside and downtown. Other friends live East and pay slightly more. One thing about NYC- be flexible.

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  7. DButch

    Zillow got pretty badly burned in the last couple of years with their "Zestimates" combined with their attempt to become a house flipper. It was a bit confusing, but it looked an AI algorithm was used to set purchase prices and the selling price for the homes they were adding to their inventory.

    It sounded to me like they didn't anticipate a feedback phenomenon where the Zestimates both drove the amount of money they were willing to pay to buy a property and the markup they hoped to sell for - PROFIT, right? The result was that they overpaid badly to get inventory and then tried to sell for a big markup. That went over like a lead balloon and a lot of houses sat empty for a while.

    I hope they don't do something equivalent for rentals...

  8. shamhatdeleon

    There's a lot of inventory on the Upper East Side. It's very reasonable to expect several choices at that price point.

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  12. kaleberg

    My niece is a realtor on the Upper East Side., so I hear lots of real estate gossip about the area. You can find lots of one bedroom apartments on the UES for $3K a month, but mainly east of Lexington Avenue. The really wealthy part of the UES is along Central Park (5th ave), Park Avenue and Madison Avenue, but as you head east things get less costly. This has been the case for at least a century now.

    I went to my niece's company website and did a search for furnished 1 bed, 1 bath apartments in the area. There isn't anything listed for much less than $4k. That would have been about $240 in 1945, a fair bit more than $175 or $200.

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