One for all you New Yorkers:
One or two of the key scenes in my novel take place in mansions, and two of my heroes (both detectives) own houses. As far as I can tell, Manhattan is wall-to-wall apartment buildings, but what suburbs or boroughs of NYC would have had houses as opposed to apartments? Also, what parts of NYC would there have been mansions, or would I be better off re-setting the mansion action in one of the edge cities just outside the Big Apple?