Out and About: The unkindest cut

Endless hallways give away a wholesome past. This view is from the public area toward two of the bedrooms.

Since so many pre-war apartments on the Upper West Side were designed on a grand scale, with formal dining rooms and numerous bedrooms, it should be no surprise that many of them do not survive intact.

But I confess that I was surprised on a recent open house tour how frequently it is possible to encounter their offspring, as it were. In fact, four of the five units I visited one recent Sunday had been carved out of larger apartments.

Let me tell you that they were not only instantly recognizable as bastard progeny of bigger apartments, but they featured terrible layouts, wasted space and crude attempts to make the best of a bad thing.

Consider the photo above of