“Many people had expected cooperatives to be affected by the recent slump in Wall Street, as indicated by the number of calls from bargain hunters looking for so-called distress sales,” an industry analyst at the time said. “We found that less than half a dozen apartments were offered for resale as a result of the market break.”

The analyst could have been describing the panicked freeze that settled over Manhattan after the credit crisis and the fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008, but he was not.

The year was 1929, just months after the crash. What followed was a rarity in New York real estate: a decade in which the residential property market, measured in purchase price per square foot, declined, according to an analysis of the last 100 years of Manhattan values by Jonathan Miller, president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel. Mr. Miller looked at a representative sampling of available sales and rental data from news and market reports for Prudential Douglas Elliman, which is celebrating its centennial this year.

“People think that Wall Street is a new phenomenon and that 100 years ago it was all manufacturing, but financial services played such an important role in the economy, and especially in real estate,” Mr. Miller said, adding that analysts in the 1930s predicted that the market would recover quickly, just as many did when the most recent real estate bubble popped.

“You have this long run-up and then catastrophe strikes and everybody says, ‘Oh, it will just be a short period of time and then it will be business as usual,’ ” he said. “But it was a decade after the crash before you start to see a pickup of activity.”

According to Mr. Miller’s analysis, sales prices dropped during the 1930s to $15 per square foot, down from $46 during the boom of the 1920s and $25 in the 1910s, adjusted for inflation. Toward the end of the decade, foreclosures slowed and mortgages became more available, with banks beginning to offer 90 percent financing. Although property values have increased significantly over the years since then — reaching a high of $1,531 per square foot in the last decade — they dipped sharply again at the beginning of this one, declining to $1,070.

Dorothy Herman, president and chief executive of Prudential Douglas Elliman, said she was struck by the parallels between the boom-and-bust cycle then and now, and the role of credit.

“In that era of the Roaring ’20s, Wall Street was going great, there was easy credit and there was an emergence of creative financing instruments, to say the least, and all of those factors together created that boom,” she said. “We would never have had our boom if we hadn’t had easy credit.”

It would take nearly two decades for purchase prices to recover to their pre-Depression levels. But much like now, with banks hesitant to lend and some buildings forced to lease what they could not sell, rentals became more appealing, even to those with the means to buy. Famous tenants of that time included John D. Rockefeller Jr., who rented a 15-room apartment at 740 Park Avenue in 1936, and Walter Chrysler Jr., who took a furnished penthouse at 720 Park in 1934.

For those of more modest means, there were buildings like 230 Riverside Drive, which began offering one- to four-and-a-half room suites for rent in September 1931, according to a brochure from the era. “With “a magnificent view up, down and across the Hudson,” proximity to buses, an express subway station at 96th Street and trolleys on Broadway and “more than ample” closet space, the building, like many in that era, was marketed as offering both access to the city’s center and an escape from it.

At 25 East 83rd Street, one of the first apartment buildings in New York to have central air-conditioning — still mentioned as an enticement in a recent listing on Streeteasy.com — the appeal was an apartment building with the most up-to-date amenities. The brochure explains, in a section titled “What Air-Conditioning Means to You,” that families would have fewer colds and that housekeepers could claim victory in “the everlasting battle against New York’s dirt and grime,” adding, “The curtains you hang in October will be spandy clean in May.” At root, though, air-conditioning would provide a bulwark against the vicissitudes of city life: “If New York gets on your nerves, it means that the peace and quiet of this ultra modern apartment house will help you to relax.”

It was not just grime and noise from which apartments were meant to protect their residents; it was also the wrong kinds of people. At the Mount Vernon, an apartment complex in Queens with inset gardens, the marketing materials from that time mentioned the proximity to shopping areas, churches, schools and transit, but also that it was in “restricted Jackson Heights,” a neighborhood that barred blacks and Jews. Amid the details that occupants could expect to find, like Venetian blinds and a waterproof scenic wall covering above the bathroom tile, was the promise that “great care is taken in the choice of tenants so as to maintain the splendid character of the Mount Vernon.”

And then there were the most exclusive properties of all, like 1020 Fifth Avenue, whose penthouse was still in the hands of the family of its original buyer when it went on the market for $46.5 million the day before Lehman collapsed. It sold this summer for $26.75 million. A sales brochure that appears to be from the 1930s lists that apartment as the most costly, at $150,000; a New York Times article from 1925 reported its sale at that price to Samuel H. Kress.

But there was still something for the budget-minded: a duplex apartment with its own entrance on 83rd Street was priced at $40,000 because of its relatively small salon and second-floor space. “Here again, however,” the brochure read, “the cost as compared to equivalent space and location in a private house is amazingly low.”

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