Are fireplaces legal in New York City?

Answer 1

Yes. It's just that most people don't have one, because the majority of New Yorkers live in apartment buildings, and it's complex and difficult to install fireplaces and chimney chutes in apartment buildings, especially large buildings with lots of units. It's a lot of money and work for something that is now a luxury/novelty instead of a necessity. Nobody needs fireplaces anymore; we have better ways of heating homes now.

For example, my apartment building has, I believe, about 20 apartments per floor. That's 20 apartment "lines." Each floor has the same layout, so you basically have identical floors of identical apartments, stacked on top of each other. Thus, all of the "A" apartments (3A, 4A, 5A, etc.) are known as the "A line," and all of the B apartments (3B, 4B, 5B, etc.) are the "B line," and so on.

To install fireplaces in each apartment, you'd have to build 20 separate chimney chutes, one for each apartment line, running from the basement to the roof. That would be a lot of very expensive work.

However, a lot of the older luxury apartment buildings have fireplaces. The very expensive, luxury buildings tend to have only 1 or 2 (maybe 3) apartments per floor, so you only have to install 1 to 3 chimney chutes. Also, most of these buildings are relatively old -- 100 years or so -- so they were built at a time when fireplaces were still standard in most homes.

Generally speaking, if a person has a fireplace in their Manhattan apartment, it's safe to assume they are very wealthy.