New York is a town of more quartiers and arondissements than Paris, more souks and bazaars than Ciro, a place of havens from overwhelming energy and of studios where that energy is generated. Above all else it is where everyone wants to make a mark. And for a lot of New Yorkers the biggest mark of all is the place they live in – no matter where that is in the infinite diversity of the astonishing tumbling ziggurat that is New York, spilling across its parks and rivers and neighbourhoods. The grand, spacious apartments that line Fifth Avenue across from Central Park on the East Side have an entirely different feel from those opposite, on Central Park West, pinned in its middle by the legendary Dakota building. From the great mansions of Frick and Harkness in Manhattan to the buildings on the flanks of Morningside, from the hipster apartments of Williamsburg and Dumbo to the delightful Victorian houses on Park Slope, every concept of living from gracious to frenetic is to be found in the fabulous five boroughs. This book looks at a cross-section of these great spaces for living created by New Yorkers. It’s about the art of architecture and the art of living in this seething city; it’s about the ambition and zest of New Yorkers for their surroundings and it’s about the stories connected to them – from the Morris-Jumel House, the oldest house in the borough of Manhattan and once George Washington's headquarters to the chutzpah of Julian Schnael perching a copy of a Venetian palazzo atop a Lower East Side building and the ingenious and beautiful ways of living an eco-existence in Brooklyn, this is visual and literary feast of great houses and apartments of New York past and present.