Looking to the northeast across the rear garden of the Goelet apartments, about 1938. The entrances to the second-floor apartments were on this side. The fronts, facing Third Avenue from East 77th to 78th, were stores. The Third Avenue El is just out of view. CreditAvery Architectural Library

In the taxonomy of the lesser building types of New York — the de-stooped rowhouse, the two-story taxpayer, the midblock sliver building — one is so obscure that even Linnaeus could be forgiven for overlooking it.

It’s the inside-out tenement of the 1930s and 1940s, which had that elegant ingenuity born of necessity. Developers took rows of tenements facing commercial avenues, switched the residential entrances around to the back, and made the fronts into stores.

Reorienting a structure to revamp its entrance became popular by the end of World War I. Among the turned-around buildings were the houses fronting Sutton Place, rebuilt around 1919 so that their facades faced a greensward running down to the East River. A little later, Vincent Pepe took some old rowhouses on Minetta Lane in the West Village and rebuilt them as apartments entered through a rear courtyard off Minetta Street.....Continue Reading

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