Cellar apartments like these should not be glamorized.
While many basement apartments are legal and meet housing standards, your Feb. 25 front-page article "Be It Ever So Low, the Basement Is Often Home" glorifies cellar apartments with potential hazards like inadequate fire exits, ventilation and light; potential exposure to carbon monoxide fumes, asbestos or fire; and over-occupancy.
In the first volume, My Brilliant Friend, Ferrante describes how the two girls, Lila and Elena, throw each other's dolls into the cellar of an apartment owned by "the ogre of fairy tales", Don Achille.
In the third week of August 1942, Mr. Karski entered the cellar of an apartment house on the so-called Aryan side of the Ghetto wall and met with a youth from the Jewish Combat Organization, then secretly being formed in the Ghetto.
On the site of the former Pathfinder Press, the building will include amenities like a swimming pool, private wine cellars for each apartment and a screening room.
Mr. Andersen carved a rec room out of half of the cellar for the garden apartment at 415 Clermont Avenue in Fort Greene, listed at $469,000 through Corcoran.
Mr. Schlegel and his fiancée grabbed the children and ran downstairs, trying to get to the cellar entrance outside their apartment building.
THE place was mobbed, though in two tiny cellar rooms -- the apartment had grown since the McKenneys' days -- just a handful of people makes a mob.
He described having spent weeks in the cellar of his Flatbush apartment building as a young teen-ager, with some mail-order chemicals, five pounds of kosher salt, and a lantern battery, trying to re-create "the original recipe for life on earth," as detailed in the pages of Astounding.
