The Manhattan apartment building Alwyn Court turned 100 this year. . .

In April 1908, Walter Russell, a New Yorker, filed for bankruptcy. The Tribune listed the man’s assets at nearly $30,000, and his debts at $330,000. They were tabloid figures. Most of Walter Russell’s money was in real estate. Russell was a builder of cooperative studio apartments north of 57 ST in Manhattan, and recognized as an innovator in the field. Investments in his projects had totaled nearly 2 million dollars. These ventures were multiple dwellings located near Central Park with good light and working artist’s quarters. In an era when most New Yorkers whose esteem could afford it preferred a single family home, Russell and his associates marketed to the high-business end of the Art World as first tenants. Popularly, Artists lived freewheeling, communal lives, predisposed to inhabit a room that is surrounded on all sides by other rooms of other inhabitants, in continuation. But the cooperative system engendered a new kind of shareholder, so the buildings were more often occupied by stockbrokers and executives bent on the flair of culture’s forward-guard.

At the time of Russell’s bankruptcy, a new apartment building on the southeast corner of West 58 ST and Seventh AV was being completed; planned as a select, cooperative setting of luxuriant living. Walter Russell, a green man with Van Dyke beard, aesthete’s beret, orator’s pedigree and a stable of Arabian horses in Oyster Bay, had been instrumentally involved in the origins of the co-op, though no sooner were the building’s emblazonments being molded by the Atlantic Terracotta Company in Staten Island, than Russell was listing as a dischargeable creditor Mr. Alywn Ball, the chief broker of the building as well its namesake, Alwyn Court.

As if in a new light zone, no exterior proportion of building Block in town has been as densely assigned an imaginative identity in proportion to its available square footage as has Alwyn Court. Flurries of up-fanned earth grow snarled silhouettes while stalactites of indescribable adornment rhapsodize the entranceway arch; vases disgorge petals like floating majorette boots, in low niches are flagstaffs banded shapeshiftingly to hold the night oracle. Space girth and space use grapple like wrestlers. In such a way, Alwyn Court is an indigenous work of New York City architecture.

As a young man Walter Russell worked as a magazine illustrator and covered the Spanish-American War for Collier’s. His folkloric business acumen combined with a grave penchant for Beauty to move Russell into the city’s real estate market. Manhattan’s potential for development was like the act of railroads through the frontier over bridges where ferries once ran. Wall Street freebooters had forced the city’s environs up the island, and no longer did only immigrants live in appartements.

In 1902, Andrew Carnegie, the steel maven, had built for himself a mansion on East 92 Street and Fifth Avenue. This would be the first house in America to be reinforced with a steel infrastructure, as well as the first single-family dwelling in New York City with a personal passenger elevator, itself reliant on steel cables. Carnegie had made an intergalactic fortune in steel. Steel made skyscrapers, and steel made the cables for the elevators which caused skyscrapers to be actionable. So, as any man would, Carnegie put these innovations into his house, inscribing his own personal space with the two biggest achievements his life investments had yielded.

In comparison to the precepts of Carnegie, Walter Russell operated on the lower sides of Central Park, concerned with elements less joistable than steel. “Elements are not things,” said Russell, “they are conditions.” The man was a sculptor and portraiturist commissioned by Mark Twain, both Presidents Roosevelt, songster Victor Herbert, and the State of Florida, where Russell made a statue of the first American soldier killed in World War II. Rudyard Kipling penned Russell a letter that would be The Great Gamesman’s very last. Russell also wrote music; presided over the Society of Arts and Sciences; founded the New York Ice Skating Club; and taught himself the practice of physics. He supported his formulas with phrases a philosophical steamfitter would use. “Every particle of matter in the universe is separated from its condition of oneness.” He comported the easygoing camaraderie of the motivational speaker with the disturbed conviction of the rocket engineer, and worked out of the studio bowers atop Carnegie Hall, the music emporium which also provided residencies to Artists of acceptable renown. Carnegie Hall is one block south of Alwyn Court, same side of the street, just north of the Times Square fantasy factory where cannonball jugglers, sandhogs, schmeg-meists and hustlers shared seats in the grindhouse. “Say thou to him that his moving is My moving, for without Me he can in no wise move.” Alwyn Court is an architecture of the element Neptunium, which Walter Russell is loosely – as well as Plutonium - credited with having discovered for The Periodic Chart.

Though more rooms were built for personal maids and servants to live and work, the apartments of Alwyn Court, originally, featured music rooms, salons, and a conservatory where private performers of refined, abstruse taste may have played. Who knows what adventures of the subconscious were inspired in the few children who grew up creating Transvaal cavernscapes in its deep arched hallways, who heard voices in the window ledges over which the homunculus giggles and The Sun Man shrieks.

Preeminent to the new-looker of the building are the giant salamanders breathing fire. These salamanders are the largest forms and placed as if according to project housing along expressways: 54 each like a deck of playing cards including the jokers. As noted on the Landmark Preservation Commission plaque at the building’s entrance, the salamander is the royal symbol of King Francis I of France, Court of Angouleme, coronated 1515-1547. The salamander, like a gargoyle, will protect - Builders Rites have accorded a certain shazam. Because the creature is said to live in fire, it staves fire; a whole world that lives in that which destroys it. In 1910, this mythos was exploited when Alwyn Court went up in flames. The exterior was unharmed, and the few residents temporarily displaced by the incident could not in effect call themselves refugees.

A deaf animal, the salamander respires through its skin and responds firstly to ground vibrations. In appearance it is an otherworldly thing, passed over by zoos and toymakers; its own name slick and sinewy. Alwyn Court is a product of an era of New York City regional design, Post-Civil War to pre-WW II, when so many new things were influenced, modeled or inspired by the way France made itself look: the creators of The Statue of Liberty, the bar at the Knickerbocker Hotel, the words “apartment” and “vaudeville.” As the emblem of King Francis I – his standard, pendants, drapeaux, sword-hilts and crownwork - it is what the Lion is to Great Britain, the Harp to Ireland, the Beaver to New York State (in prehistoric times beavers stretching six feet in length, like krakens of the Jersey Meadowlands).

Walter Russell was a highly disciplined individual, variously so, who in his many books and writings set forth a mystical belief reflecting both the bootstrap New England childhood and Old World education abroad. “I draw strength from a super-power which is Light,” Russell confides to his readers. Light, guise of Energy, like the cloak of spies in war, and all the presence and absence of human action colludes around the right use of that Energy. The only published biography of the man, by an acolyte, is titled The Man Who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe. If published today, fairly, Russell would resemble the spirituality/self-help section of the bookshop rather than occult or philosophy. He would most suitably trigger Discourse online.

In the late 1920s and 30s Russell was an ally of Thomas J. Watson, the prime mover of IBM. Russell lectured that company’s administrative brass on Two-Way Thinking and The Hydrogen Age: “the very secrets of life and death, which have eluded men for ages, lie within a knowledge of space.” Never much of a stylist with words, Russell wrote lengthy, panascopic novels for children’s reading, preciously bound in leather and lavishly illustrated by the author. These books were not liquid assets. Later in life, he and his second wife Lao Russell, whom he married in Reno, Nevada, collaborated on treatises that warned of the effects ozone erosion would have on the new human. Russell, in ways, is the grandfather whose anxious influence is dismissed by your parents but whose self-published books on civic constancy, landscape architecture and necromancy are sitting in trunks in the attic, still unrid of.

Voluminous cups garlanded by swamp-snakes given heads of fey thespians, merman faces gawking at the public, token cherubs clinging to bowl bottoms. The presence of secret sophistication within the living units seduces the potential lessee: that wealth goes hand-in-hand with the imagination of history and that one may gain it. Soon after Alwyn Court was constructed, residential development snowballed up Manhattan island. The prestige of initial northwardness wore out quickly. And the French style by which the building was influenced was not that which would be found en masse in buildings like Grand Central, the Public Library, the Farley Post Office, the Old Police Headquarters, or even the Ansonia Hotel up on West 75 Street & Broadway where a Bohemia of august consequence became legion - Babe Ruth, Theodore Dreiser and Arnold “the Big Fixer” Rothstein never made it to Alwyn Court. The building emptied of tenants by the 1930s and new owners carved the inside into smaller pieces, like when T.G.I.F.’s, originally a swinging East Side singles bar, went franchise offering the same fried fare for the same.

King Francis I was known for his grandiloquent promotion of the Arts. The King persuaded the immigration of Leonardo da Vinci to French domain, where Mona Lisa was given final strokes. Paintings in the halls of Fontainebleau show the Master dying in His Majesty’s arms. Amongst King Francis’ legacy of letters is a correspondence dated 1524 from Giovanni da Verrazzano, the sea-voyager. Da Verrazzano was born near Florence at a time when that city was a capital of the Holy Roman Empire - the publication of Dante’s Divine Comedy having been two hundred years earlier, the rough equivalent in time scheme of today’s U.S. Constitution. Verrazzano is the first European to have sailed into Lower New York Bay, his expedition kickjumped by King Francis I for reasons similar to those of the Dutch East India Co. sending off Henry Hudson: to unsaddle Spain’s ride upon the laurels of Christopher Columbus, whose adventures were already passed down like the tales of The Argonauts and Uncle Remus and the Whirling Dervish. Verrazzano may have been a pirate executed by the Spanish during The Italian Wars, as some records claim, or eaten by tribes in Canada. Either way, the Narrows over which spans the bridge named in the 1960s for Verrazzano lead to New York Harbor, the galaxy’s greatest while territory called New World is still being discovered by water. For unknown reasons, Verrazzano stopped short at the Upper Bay, like “Just the Tip” Tommy at the Elk Hotel most afternoons down in the Glittering Gulch. But Verrazzano named the land his ships encountered as Angouleme, for Francis, like Virginia for the Queen, and the Abbott who rode the sea’s dragon to the isle of St. Brendan.

Alwyn Court is an Upper West Side building in what years later commuters call Midtown. In 1908, immigrant communities in the Lower East Side, by ethnicity count, were often larger than that of their homeland capitals, and, compounded, they lived in Grotesque tenement buildings. The downtown slums were chiefly owned by those New Yorkers bathed in the money of the Mauve Decade, who sought mythology in their own expedition up past 42 Street so that the current peerage did not register them as fugitives. Fifteen years later Russell would propose to the Real Estate Board of New York a six-mile extension of landfill south of Manhattan Island into the bay. His pitch was based on “the law of centralization of the wheel principle and which is immutable as the law which forces water to seek its own level.” He feared that commercial districts would rampage Upper Manhattan, whose re-fertilization was Russell’s own personal concern, and claimed that “nothing in New York is permanent, but that great centers form themselves as nuclei for the time being, live their lives of brief prosperity and move on, ever obeying the law.” Unable to envision the Bowery or Soho scenes in the 1970s, Russell stumped to graft Broadway, already the longest avenue in the state, another 120 blocks toward the Atlantic Ocean.

Whether discussing realty method or The Sex Principle, Russell’s writings grant highest priority to the materialistic maximization of balance. Each May, Russell would retreat from the urban routine and seek “solitude and aloneness in forests.” He admitted that, ever since the age of seven, as Spring set in, he experienced an ineluctable seizure of illumination. In order to foster this flash of deeper realms, mine it for clues upon clues, he must flee the world, out to “checker-ferns, Arbutus leaves, pulpit-jacks.” He published a lyrical recording of these experiences in 1949, The Book of Early Whisperings, “varying lack of body awareness balanced with my ever-increasing cosmic God-consciousness with God and Nature.”

By May Day 1909, Walter Russell’s debts were cleared by the U.S. District Court, after a brief dispute by his most-owed creditor over language regarding equity in land versus cooperative shares: quantifiable air-rights, bought and sold, and, at the time, elusive of the Bankruptcy Code. The way to comprehend all multitudes of things at once, which stillness is a rapid motion through space. The surface of Alwyn Court elicits no mystery to the order of the skybox. Each day dozens of red doubledecker sightseeing buses barrel past the structure, though often enough the Tour Guide is finishing up with facts on Central Park and gearing up to point out the Carnegie Deli, where pastrami sandwiches are made in imitation of prehistoric sizes.

References.