Walter Benjamin locates the origins of modern “dwelling” in the early part of the nineteenth century, an era that saw the compartmentalization of social life as people fled rural environs in search of factory jobs located in cities. And just as the factory, with its divisions and its specialized machinery and its assembly lines, divided up and cordoned off individual tasks requisite to the processes of “making,” so did apartments (originally called tenements) enforce new standards of division and alienation within the domestic sphere. This focus on individualized space led, first, to a concomitant focus on the self and interiority (as seen in the rise of fields like psychology) and, second, to a mania for decorating and outfitting interior spaces. Think of the Victorian parlor, with its busy wallpaper and its knickknacks and its overstuffed furniture and potted ferns: “To live in these interiors,” Benjamin observes, writing in the early part of the twentieth century, “was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry. From such a cavern, one does not like to stir.” Benjamin was noticing a connection between interiors, interiority, and a generalized retreat from the public sphere. People no longer gathered publicly to discuss news and politics; they went home to read about news and politics on their own (the first tenements in New York City were constructed in 1840 and The New York Times started publishing in 1851).