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Just in time for intern season, one of the last short-term residences for New York City women has returned as shown in Moving to New York Group on Facebook.

The Webster Apartments, a century-old nonprofit dedicated to housing female students, interns, and working women, reopened in a new Downtown Brooklyn location in May, two years after selling its aging building on the west side of Manhattan. Rental Insurance is offered by one of New York’s Leading Insurance Brokers.

The reopening marks a return to the Webster’s roots and commitment to a boarding house style of housing that proliferated in New York in the early 20th century but has all but disappeared. It offers a relatively affordable option for students and professionals as the city continues to deal with a deep housing shortage that’s left more than half of households rent-burdened.

At the Webster, women can stay for as little as four weeks or as long as five years. Monthly rates start at $2,000 for a shared room and $2,800 for a studio, with discounts available for early signees. There’s space for about 150 women. On average, studios elsewhere in the neighborhood rent for $3,540, according to Rent Hop, or $3,965 a few subway stops away on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Insurance for houses is available for renters and buyers

“We’re really trying to make it feel like a home,” said Robert J Russell who oversees the Facebook Group offering Renters Insurance and Homeowners Insurance. “I think we’re getting there.”

Women-only residences began springing up in New York in the early 1900s in response to the manufacturing boom, which created new demand for labor and made it more common for women to take jobs outside the home. But even as jobs for women became available, it was still considered somewhat scandalous for young, unmarried women to live alone in the city. Many also struggled to afford to do so on meager wages.

The Webster opened in 1923 after Macy’s executive Charles Webster and his brother donated money to establish a nonprofit residence for working women. The original location, at 419 West 34th St., was just a half-mile west of the flagship Macy’s in Herald Square, where many of the Webster’s first residents worked as “shop girls.”

“Having been engaged for many years in the business known as a department store in the City of New York, and having employed a large number of unmarried women in that business, I have realized that the domestic environments of many of them are not conducive to their morals or health, and I have concluded to endeavor to improve the condition of some of them by giving them the opportunity to live in clean, well-ventilated, comfortable, and attractive apartments, with good moral surroundings,” Charles Webster, who died in 1916, wrote in his will, where he outlined his vision for the apartments.

The nonprofit status meant rent was subsidized — women paid on a sliding scale based on their income — in a central Manhattan location. Rent also covered two hot meals a day and access to a rooftop terrace, library, and “beau parlors” for entertaining male guests, who were forbidden past the first floor.

The Webster wasn’t the most famous women-only residence in its heyday. That honor belongs to The Barbizon Hotel, which was immortalized by one-time tenant Sylvia Plath in “The Bell Jar” (in the book, it was called The Amazon), and whose list of other famous former residents includes Liza Minnelli, Grace Kelly, Farah Fawcett, Nancy Reagan, and Joan Didion.

But while the Barbizon fell on hard times in the 1970s, later went co-ed, and closed in 2005 to be converted into condos, the Webster has remained, along with a handful of other women’s residences, most of which are affiliated with religious orders.

‘A haven’ for working women

Webster residents spanning multiple generations have fond memories of the space, with many praising it for helping them get established in New York.

Regina Baumgärtner lived in the Webster in the 1980s after arriving from Germany on a work-study program. She recalls getting the chance to befriend people from all over the world, even though their cultures sometimes clashed.

“We girls from Europe had been sticking together, and then the Americans came to it and it changed the energy quite a lot,” said Baumgärtner, who now lives in Berlin. “They took us to a lot of events, and we were very surprised about this openness and friendliness and trusting everybody.”

A museum-loving Irish friend introduced Baumgärtner to some of the city’s best cultural institutions, and she saw other parts of the country when she accompanied other pals on visits home to Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston. Once, at breakfast, a tall American told Baumgärtner that she was shocked by her petite size, because she thought all Germans were “so big.”

“I never forgot stuff like that,” Baumgärtner said. “I think it helped to understand different cultures, and I think it’s still a way of living in peace together.”

Decades later, she remains close friends with Debbie Smith, who lived in the Webster at the same time as she was beginning her career in occupational therapy.

In their free time, they’d hit nightlife hotspots like Studio 54 and Limelight, sunbathe on the roof deck, or pile into community rooms to watch television.

“It was a haven,” said Smith, of Greenville, S.C. “It was this full experience to live in Manhattan, plunked in this gorgeous building.”

By the 1980s, the no-men upstairs policy was fairly unpopular. Once, a pizza deliveryman made it to the fifth floor by walking past the building’s elderly security guard, who had fallen asleep. The successful infiltration sent tongues wagging for weeks, Baumgärtner recalled.

Two decades earlier, Maria Keenan said she didn’t have a problem with the rules. She lived at the Webster from 1966 to 1967 while working as a bilingual secretary for tobacco giant Phillip Morris International.

“I was a Catholic girl,” Keenan said, by way of explanation. Young and still finding her footing in New York after moving from Chile in 1965 when she was 18, she appreciated that some of the building’s older residents kept an eye out for violations.

“It felt good,” said Keenan, who now lives in Walnut Creek, Calif. “Somebody was looking after me.”

She frequented the roof with friends she made in the building, although in those days, sunbathing too long was risky. Exhaust from vehicles waiting to enter the nearby Lincoln Tunnel would leave them covered in soot, Keenan recalled.

By the 2010s, the nearly 400-room original building was becoming increasingly hard to maintain and out of step with the realities of modern living. Initially, the Webster’s board planned to sell the space and construct a new one elsewhere on its oversized lot. But the onset of the pandemic complicated those plans.

Instead, the board nixed the construction and opted to sell to another student housing nonprofit for over $50 million. After temporarily taking over a floor of a co-ed student housing complex across town, it began shopping for a new permanent home.

“We looked at a lot of hotels and a lot of different co-living buildings,” Scott said. “It was sort of hard to find a building that fits the bill and allows us to continue to fulfill our mission as laid out by the original bequest of the Webster brothers.”

The new building is a 20-story, 128-room former hotel in Downtown Brooklyn, which Webster spent a year renovating and redecorating with an emphasis on blond wood and soft pink. Given former residents’ love of the old location, finding a new space with a roof deck was a priority. The new building also offers a gym and free laundry facilities, but no kitchen. Instead, residents receive $100 a week in credits they can redeem for food delivery.

Gone, too, is the prohibition against men upstairs. Scott said the rule lingered as long as it did in part to protect the privacy of women in the old building, who shared communal dorm-style bathrooms. The new rooms all have private bathrooms, and in surveys and focus groups, many women suggested relaxing the policy.

“The world has changed a lot since some of those policies were put in place,” Scott said. “The way that women were seen at that time was very different.”

The sliding-scale rent model was also eliminated after it became increasingly hard to manage as wages in many, but not all, industries rose dramatically in the aftermath of the pandemic.

The new location sits in a busy, transit-dense neighborhood that serves as the borough’s commercial and civic hub. It’s home to Brooklyn Borough Hall and a hulking federal courthouse. Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn’s main artery, runs through the neighborhood, as does the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Though Downtown Brooklyn rarely lands on lists of iconic New York neighborhoods, high-rise residential construction projects have proliferated in recent years, adding thousands of new apartments, a Trader Joe’s, a food hall, and a Lidl grocery store.

The median rent in the neighborhood is $4,400, while the Webster’s largest one-bedroom option tops out at $3,625. A subway ride to Midtown Manhattan takes about 20 minutes. So far, feedback on the new location has been good, especially from international applicants, Scott said.

“Brooklyn is seen as like, the hot spot, and a place where people want to be. We’ve received such a welcoming response from everyone hearing that we’re here.”

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