My favorite example of this style: Alwyn Court
NYTIMES:
April 6, 1997
The Lavish 'Studio Palace' Called Alwyn Court
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
WHEN it opened in 1910, the 12-story Alwyn Court, at 58th Street and Seventh Avenue, attracted attention with its fabulously intricate facade.
Now the dark streaks of damaged terra cotta panels spot the landmark building, as the co-op that owns it evaluates repairs.
By 1900 Seventh Avenue around Carnegie Hall had New York's most important collection of apartment houses: the block-long Van Corlear, from 55th to 56th Street: the Rembrandt (New York's first co-op) at 152 West 57th; the massive Osborne at 201 West 57th and the eight-building Navarro Flats, stretching east from Seventh at Central Park South.
The apartment market had been invigorated by the new popularity of the co-op, a concept revived beginning in 1902 in a series of buildings on West 67th Street. Their sponsors were several artists, including Walter Russell. In early 1907 Russell had the architects Harde & Short begin work on the cathedral-front studio building at 44 West 77th Street. That summer Russell, working with the developer Alwyn Ball Jr., bought a Seventh Avenue plot at the southeast corner of 58th Street; in September the Real Estate Record & Guide said Russell would build a ''studio palace'' co-op, designed by the same architects.
For some reason Russell dropped out, and Ball reworked the project into one of the most lavish apartment buildings up to that time. The Alwyn Court had two apartments per floor, each with 14 rooms and 5 baths, renting for up to $10,000 a year; one 32-room duplex was offered at $22,000 per year. Harde & Short created a plan with a square, 12-story central light court and groups of entertaining spaces -- music room, living room, library, dining room, gallery and conservatory, which could be thrown together to create 2,000 square feet. In the typical apartment, the largest room was 18 by 30 feet.
Using the new medium of glazed terra cotta, Harde & Short developed the most intricate apartment facade in New York, executed by the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company. The delicate, Gothic details at the entrance and the expanse of French Renaissance styling, all in light gray, rebuked the Victorian brick and brownstone of Seventh Avenue's earlier buildings.
The magazine Architecture praised the ''consummate skill'' of the terra-cotta work and the ''considerable charm'' of the entrance. But it added that while the design of the facade ''if made by a pastry cook, would be of the highest excellence . . . it can hardly be considered at all in the light of architecture.'' The overall result it said, ''defies description.''
In late 1909, the Alwyn Court opened to tenants. Most of them moved from private houses, like Jacob Wertheim, president of United Cigar Stores, who left a 50-foot-wide house at 5 West 76th Street to occupy the duplex. Another was Frederick Steinway; in 1925, as president of his family's piano company, Steinway moved the firm from East 14th Street to its new headquarters at 119 West 57th Street. In 1910 The New York Times noted that these new apartment houses could be just as palatial as private houses, but needed half as many servants. Repairs by the building staff were quick and it was easy to close up the apartment for travel; many tenants spent only a few months in the city.
Only five apartments had been taken by the night of March 4, 1910, when Patrick Quinn, a doorman, saw the reflection of flames in the windows of the Navarro Flats across 58th. He raced to alert the occupants, and Edward King and Robert Casson ran the elevator through the smoke until the motor shorted out.
No one was seriously hurt, although three housemaids, thinking the entire building was in flames, almost jumped from the roof to Seventh Avenue.
''Great Blaze Lights the City,'' said The New York Tribune on page 1, and 10,000 people watched; The Times described the Alwyn Court as ''a huge torch.'' The fire had started in an unoccupied apartment on the ninth floor, and broken through the windows; tongues of fire leapfrogged the blaze to the top.
Despite its luxury, the Alwyn Court was short on fire protection: with no fire escapes and without fire doors, its single narrow stairway served as a perfect chimney flue. There was no central standpipe so firefighters had to thread hose up floor by floor.
The damage was repaired and census records for the 1910's and 1920's indicate the Alwyn Court was fully occupied. But by the 1930's Seventh Avenue was no longer a desirable address and there were only six residential telephone listings in the building in 1936. By 1937 the building was empty.
The Dry Dock Savings Institution foreclosed and gutted the building in 1938, creating 75 apartments where there had been two dozen. Their architect, Louis S. Weeks, removed the heavy cornice and balustrade, and reworked the apartments to retain most of the large rooms.
The original corner entrance was closed, replaced with the present one on Seventh Avenue, and the new Alwyn Court was soon 100 percent rented, producing a gross income of $137,000 a year.
According to research by the architectural historian Andrew Alpern, one of the last tenants, John MacEnulty, salvaged four decorative stone lions for his house in Sands Point, L.I. The paneling from the Wertheim apartment -- described as taken from a French chateau -- was moved to the Squadron A Armory on 94th and Madison Avenue.
IN 1980, with a co-op conversion underway, the architects Beyer Blinder Belle supervised a $500,000 facade restoration, cleaning the terra cotta and replacing damaged blocks with cast concrete replicas. The artist Richard Haas painted a full-height trompe l'oeil mural in the central courtyard; with a new skylight, it became an atrium. The corner entrance was reopened as an entrance for a commercial tenant.
Now, 17 years later, the facade needs more work. Because large chunks of masonry are missing from the fifth-floor balcony, a sidewalk bridge has been erected on Seventh Avenue to protect pedestrians. Although the flat panels on the facade appear intact, about one-third of the window and balcony soffits are visibly damaged.
Gerard Meehan, the property manager for NRK Management, which oversees the building, says that last year a piece of terra cotta fell to the sidewalk. Now engineers are being interviewed, and any work will flow from a consultant's recommendations. Mr. Meehan says he doesn't think this project will be a major one.
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, Posted by me on Flickr, Published by the ITALCARDS Company, and the actual photo was taken by Bruno Marino.
Speaking of The Fox theatre.
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