BOOK REVIEW : How Tall Buildings Changed Manhattan in a Single Bound : NEW YORK, NEW YORK: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City (1869-1930) <i> by Elizabeth Hawes</i> ; Knopf $30, 284 pages

Like others before her, my mother fled the Texas desert for New York, traded her violin for an easel and moved into an apartment house. In those pre-World War II days, New York was the magnet for aspiring artists and entrepreneurs.

It had not always been that way. “Sometime in the 1880s, after Emerson died, the intellectual center of the country had quietly shifted from Boston to New York,” writes Elizabeth Hawes in “New York, New York.”

And while this social-architectural history of Manhattan during its glory days stops in 1930, that center shifted again 20 years later as New York began to lose its cultural hegemony. Both shifts, one thinks after reading these pages, may well have been linked to changes in the residential habits of the very rich.

Hawes, a one-time staff writer at The New Yorker, traces the growth of Manhattan from a provincial city of private brownstones with a narrow social hierarchy of 400 select families into a metropolis where the super-rich shared the social pages with cafe society, and traded their mansions for the comforts and prestige of apartment living.

Hawes suggests that the old family-centered, socially narrow world seen in Henry James’ novel “Washington Square” was destroyed by three architecturally inspired phenomena: the department store, hotels with large reception rooms and the apartment house. The first two allowed women, especially, to mix with strangers in public places, breaking traditional social barriers.

The apartment house, an import from France, is a different matter. Whether it fostered or reflected a more worldly society is debatable. How it rose to preeminence is not.

Real estate developers visiting France realized that they could earn a lot more money renting to 20 families than to eight on the same acreage, Hawes explains. But it was a hard sell. They had to impress Americans that this import was distinctly different from another, less alluring form of group living--the tenement.

They did this by bypassing the middle-income buyer and appealing to the very rich with apartments whose advantages surpassed those of private town houses. This is why Hawes’ book concerns only luxury apartment buildings. Others, like the one I grew up in overlooking Central Park, are not listed in her addendum of “extant” buildings because they were downscale imitations.

The first apartment houses were built in the 1870s, thanks to Otis’ invention of the elevator. But the city fathers resented their imposition on the skyline and passed the Daly Law in 1885 limiting the height of buildings. This was repealed in 1901, which accounts for the 16-year lull in apartment development.

Initially, Hawes points out, inhabitants of these “skyscrapers” (for a time they were known equally as “cloudpressers”) preferred lower floors. They did not want to look out on the green expanses of Central Park. She attributes this to the inhabitants’ desire to see their apartments as private houses. Society in the late 19th Century, she explains, was still family-oriented. People drew their draperies and turned in on themselves. A room with a view was to be an aspiration of later generations.

Many of the early luxury apartment buildings were indeed self-contained communities, Hawes writes, with elegant dining rooms (apartments often lacked kitchens), their own electrical plants (the city did not have its own grid for at least a decade), stables, telegraph offices and florists.

Whether you love or loathe it, New York has a special role in American history. It is not a prototype for any place else and it didn’t grow like Topsy, but was manipulated by adventurous land developers and imaginative architects. For anyone who has ever lived there and wondered how it got to be the way it is, “New York, New York” is a hard book to put down.