Family Friendly Apartments in New York City
There are many things that make for a family friendly apartment in New York City, from a building's amenities to its neighborhood and nearby services to the attitude and lifestyle of your fellow tenants. First and foremost, however, the one feature that families with young children covet most of all, is the on-site play room, especially now, as the weather starts to turn chilly, and those long, stuck-inside days of January, February, and March loom ahead.
Many of Glenwood's properties were designed and constructed as NYC family friendly apartment buildings, and all of the images in this post are from various Glenwood building playrooms. If you live here, you're set. But the battle for scarce resources–and in New York City, the scarcest resource of all, perhaps, is space–has caused quite the imbroglio in other buildings around town, especially in co-ops where everyone has a say in what should go where. Playroom, gym, or storage area? The New York Times ran an amusing little piece on the topic about a year ago called Ruckus Room.
Other sought-after amenities that we've seen in family friendly apartments in New York City include a communal children's library, ground-floor stroller parking, last-minute babysitting services via the building's concierge, and outdoor recreation space, with or without basketball hoop. Also key for families is easy access to full laundry facilities, ideally in the apartment (if not the machines themselves, at least the hook ups), but even just having a laundry room on premises is a huge help.
As far neighborhoods go, family friendly apartments can be found all over town, but the most popular areas to raise kids in Manhattan remain the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side, for their proximity to the vast and amazing Central Park (as well as the less vast but still pretty great Riverside Park, and Carl Shurz Park), tons of good schools both public and private, and, especially on UWS, all of the shopping and services you need (groceries, clothing, entertainments) right nearby.
Posted in Apartment Living NYC | Tagged family friendly • family friendly apartments • luxury apartments
