I think every single apartment having its own kitchen and every person having their own set of cutlery/dishware/pots/pans/etc is very, very new.
The top floors in most prewar walkups in NYC are the cheapest today, even though all have sturdy fire escapes. People don't want to walk up 5 flights of stairs every day, and they also get swelteringly hot on the top floors during the summer, whereas lower floors stay cooler.
Being on the top floor of a building without A/C can definitely be an issue with respect to heat.
However, while having to lug a bunch of groceries (or whatever) up multiple flights of stairs can be an pain, is "walking up 5 flights of stairs a day" really a big issue? [Obviously for some people with infirmities it will be.] I work--well, when I commute--in a 4 story office building and most people, including myself, take the stairs when we move between floors for meeting, cafeteria, etc. We at least used to have signs encouraging taking the steps.
Just thinking anecdotally, myself and many of my neighbors in NYC are probably dealing with a dozen or more flights or stairs up and down on a daily basis (two flights down out of the apartment building, half a flight up to the street level from the sunken entrance, another 2 flights back down into the subway station, 2 flights up on the other end of the train ride, a flight in the grocery store, two flights at the gym, etc, etc, etc). Escalators are often present, but many people walk up those anyways. I'd feel comfortable saying people living here are generally in far, far better stair-climbing-shape than most of the country.
Some examples:
- I biked to work. Carrying my bike up 5 stories of narrow stairs, bumping into everything, every evening was not a fun way to end my day.
- Moving any heavy/bulky object will make even paid movers cry.
- It makes coming and going feel like a sizable task.
That said, I still preferred it over a lower floor, because it meant no noise from above and less street noise.
This all depends of course on the overall state of your fitness, and how heavy you are. Ideally, one never would use an elevator and hence be very fit and less overweight. And this doesn't count in any kind of medical condition which limit or even prohibit you from taking many (or any) stairs.
For all the practical benefits both elevators and cars have brought to the modern human, they certainly have a big drawback on the average fitness. I try to use stairs as much as possible, and on an average day I certainly klimb 12 flights, but would no longer consider an appartment in the 3rd floor without an elevator for when it is needed.
How common is this? I never see people take the stairs when there's an elevator. I always take the elevator even if it's just one floor and I have to wait a while.
Also, if you had heating, somebody had to lug up coal, and parents (about everybody was one, at the time, and the mothers were pregnant quite often) would have to lug up small children.
And it isn’t “5 flights of stairs a day”. Chances are the toilet was at least one stair away, too.
That isn't my experience with the top floors of NYC prewar walkups today (and trust me, I've had a lot of that!), but I could see that being an issue in other places or in previous times.
I don't think that'd have been a driving factor in ancient Rome, though, given how different their uses of their plumbing technology were from ours. They had public toilets and baths (at ground level), so water pressure for washing and bathing wouldn't be a concern for top-floor apartments the way it would be for us today.
I believe that the upper floors of all the pretty buildings in Paris were cheaper before elevators, too. (Perhaps the streets were quieter then too.)
Apart from the stairs being a pain, your water pressure is also weak.
In a five story building, the water can get that high just with pressure from the mains, though the pressure will be much weaker than on lower floors, so the building doesn't need to have any mechanism for increasing the pressure. It probably wouldn't be done for newer buildings, but when the older walk-ups were constructed it would have been considered acceptable as a way of keeping costs lower.
My understanding is that this was fairly standard in tall buildings everywhere.
Obviously there were no elevators.
People. Furnishings. Possessions. Food. Water. Waste.
If something didn't move independently, you moved it personally.
Privies tended to be outside, at ground level. Pisspots were standard items.
Gardyloo!
This isn't really true - the Aurelian walls were about 14 square kilometers, but a significant portion of the city's 1 million people lived outside the Aurelian walls. We don't have a good sense of how many people lived within the Aurelian walls, but number that's often cited (1 million people/14 square km = 70,000 people/square km, 2.5 times the most dense city in the world today) is not actually representative of what ancient Rome looked like at any period in history.