This text provides a framework for understanding the urban and the domestic in the 19th century. Turning to an element of the cityscape that is thoroughly familiar, Sharon Marcus argues that the apartment house embodied the intersections of city and home, public and private, and masculine and femine spheres. Moving from novels to architectural treatises, legal debates and popular urban observation, Marcus compares the representation of the apartment house in Paris and London. Along the way, she excavates the urban ghost tales that encoded Londoners' ambivalence about city dwellings; contends that Haussmannization enclosed Paris in a new regime of privacy; and locates a female counterpart to the flaneur and the omniscient realist narrator - the portiere who supervised the apartment building....