Marty Reisman, the table tennis champion and hustler from the Lower East Side, had a birthday last Monday Feb. 1 at Spin table tennis club on East 23rd St.

Marty greeted the fanfare with class.

The crowd was quiet for the remarks of the money player.

Marty regaled with the artist David Beynon Pena, who unveiled a portrait.

Everybody helped themselves to cake, but nobody ate the hat.

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.

At all times is Times Square telling us something. The connection of streets is like a sentence, and the large signs are evidence of a brain working at higher consciousness. Statistics claim that over 350,000 people pass through the neighborhood each day - more foot-traffic than Port Authority Bus Terminal, but less than Penn Station.

For instance, the best spot for electric outdoor advertising, anywhere on earth, is the Times Tower. In 1904, this building on 42nd Street & Broadway was where “all the news that’s fit to print” was made. Today, One Times Sq is vacant but for Walgreen’s, which itself used to be a place in the neighborhood you could sit at the counter and have a milkshake and smoke a cigarette.

The two biggest ads on the north face – the prime face – are for Budweiser and Chevrolet. They want us to drink and drive, especially on New Year’s Eve, when the most numerous of world-citizens gawk at the building.

Budweiser got the Belgian bailout (at least a nod to New York’s original Walloon colonists in the mid-1600s), so its lights have no trouble shining (as they did briefly at Obama’s Beer Summit - the president drank Bud Light). But Chevrolet is on welfare these days, and the delinquency of its energy bill is made a spectacle at the crossroads of the world. Meanwhile, the Virgin Mega Store on 7 Avenue shut down business last month, but its lights still shine on.

When so much signature is clumped together in such commercial flux, the spectator can certainly do much worse than read it, and allow the recognition of grand suggestivity about the human universe. But what tourists do more than shop is take pictures.

Up the Stem btwn 46th & 47th, The Gap is selling the idea of jeans on the spot where the old Howard Johnson’s got recently torn down. One might find fine fantasy in 1969, since it shows up on the adjacent billboard advertising the Recession, a plug for past years similarly hit. Such juxtaposition should only advance the economic-downturn-chic with which Gap Co. now hopes to present itself.

The spectator is also invited to “Lucy’s Legacy,” she the world’s most prime ancestor. The Gap could have just as meaningfully employed the Lucy exhibit’s slogan: “Her story is Your story.” And her bones were in fact discovered in the Ethiopian scrublands of the Afar “Depression”. . .

Sometimes, the jumbotrons in Times Square are in need of tech support. . . .

In New York City there often recurs a phenomenal thing, that when a flag of creativity is stook in an unknown, castaway community, it is soon dispersed and made popular by the those less innovative but just as eager for stimulation, until the system shuts the scene down and the movement chokes dead. These are the last days.

Disco - born as an underground scene in gay black dance clubs in post-industrial Brooklyn outlands - got big. Barnacled by two-tone collared, classically articulate New England collegiates looking for the glamour and edge of nightlife, the scene is kept alive by guys like Bernie, the peppery pony-tailed club owner, who says, indemnifying himself, “I used to be in advertising,” like a shammo music promoter from Woodstock.

Alice and Charlotte find themselves unlikely friends.  Though disparate and awkward at tony rebellious Hampshire College, the girls live together with a third roommate in an Upper East Side railroad apartment. They are always walking through each other’s rooms at inappropriate times, and find asylum at the club, the umbrage of Xenonic strobes, where the girls bounce their own insecurities off one another, under “Doctor’s Orders.”

Charlotte’s idea of sly charm is to say things seriously as if “obviously a joke.” Alice is the character most grounded and humble and eventually the most successful, but she is also the most shamelessly confused. She hooks up with navy-blazer dicko Tom Platt. In the future one imagines Tom writing Op-Ed pieces in the Times which gain him a sociopathic following amongst liberals. Tom sidles up to the dance floor with his pennyloafer lack of rhythm and soul, his late entrance attractively picaresque for Alice, who still believes in novelistic romance. Tom thinks it is a profound thing to collect Scrooge McDuck memorabilia, and it seems as if the situation couldn’t be more lame until poor Alice (too many whiskey sours) tries something she never learned at Hampshire - to talk naughty: “Scrooge McDuck is sexy.”

Disco’s characters are all somewhat obsessed with the camaraderie and excuse for melodrama that a “scene” provides, though their emotions and intellect have been bred to expect the higher sanction of inimitable status without proof of action. Once they arrive in New York, expectations warp, and they pick up a modicum of survival skills - as when Jimmy Steinway has his elder WASP boss from the ad company take Jimmy’s raincoat, “Here, put this on,” so they won’t get rejected by Van, the Blade Runneresque head bouncer. Jimmy is on thin ice anyhow, Van doesn’t let them past the velvet ropes, and instead Jimmy sneaks his party in through the back.

At the end of the night, after the hermeneutics of a “gay mouth” and Lady and the Tramp exegesis, it is shack-up time, the “ferocious pairing off.” Alice falls into a lingering fling with Des, a lovably loquacious lech and Ivy League grad slumming the after-hours with an attuned coke habit. For Des, the new openness of gay-rights serves as a useful masquerade to extract himself from female relationships that become too real for his stunted ideology. When he is suitably disinterested in a woman, he confesses a new-fangled lust for the host of Wild Kingdom. Des is bewildered at the implications of being called a “yuppie” – a fresh catchy term - since he regards himself, though young, as neither upwardly-mobile nor professional. “Those are good things.” But it is because Des is decidedly not good that Alice starts hooking up with him. Des’ fidelity to Alice is brief, though he seems to believe that he has truly changed, unlike Tramp. Alice turns her sensibilities to Josh Neff, a spy for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.

Disco was always comprised of a motley assemblage - trannies and Bay Ridge gavones rubbing polyester shoulders; Broadway dancers and anti-hippie rejects; the Andy Warhol hodgepodge of Brooke Shields and Dali and Schwarzeneggar and Halston; Dolly Parton’s birthday when they decked out Studio like a barnyard. Such pop eclecticism hits the American imagination as it would have (among canonical others) at the last turn of the century, over Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, who assaulted San Juan Hill in Cuba as aggressively as Jimmy Steinway marshals his entourage past the club door (at one point disguised in Wizard of Oz costumes). In the ranks of these heroes of the Spanish-American War were Yalies and Comanches and gold prospectors and bison-hunters. Indeed, the most deliriously enlightened scene in Disco occurs near the U.S.S. Maine monument at Columbus Circle. Josh and Alice step delicately along the Park and Josh confides to Alice his own history of madness. These 59th Street environs, from the Plaza Hotel west to Broadway, is favored territory of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and this scene in Disco near Merchant’s Gate is pregnant of that author’s intimations of epic youth and deep loss. “You think I’m a wacko?” asks Josh. Alice first shakes her head no before she nods yes. Josh is the paranoiac lyrical artist-type with blueblooded learning and a quick pedigree in seersucker espionage – the vocalizer for both the ecstasy of Disco and the glorious trauma of skittish love. He is also the agent of the club’s closing, which puts Van on welfare and Bernie in jail.

“The very early eighties,” as Disco’s opening titles indicate, are a time when New York is backlashing from the zombie vigilante midnight-movie reputation caused by the 1970s. Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau’s office is mobilized to prosecute the disco business, with Josh acting as the Elliot Ness. One might fantasize that a co-worker of Josh in Morgenthau’s office is future Supreme Court Justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor, chain-smoking and equally forward-thinking. Morgenthau went after disco clubs as he did underground cinema in the 60s, impounding prints of Jack Smith’s glitzy gender-bender Flaming Creatures; and in the early 2000s, taking down the toga-clad CEO embezzlers of global manufactures conglomerate Tyco, International. The rest of the country despises Disco as the ultimate curse of good taste – the tripped-out crowd at a Chicago White Sox game burns piles of LPs as if books at a Hitler rally and take to the fields with baseball bats like mobsters. New Yorkers are still too unhinged from the Death Wish decade and don’t deal with things by ratiocinating. Soon enough a new neon decadence sets in, and the preppy ties and shaggy-flared hairstyles will devolve into hairspray flips and 80s womens jumpers.

Charlotte ends up hospitalized with “back spasms” when Jimmy ends their relationship (”she got her period” he explicates), and her recovery is fraught with self-consumption, blaming everything on Alice. She seeks new life in TV, “where my interests truly lie.” By now, Alice is over Charlotte’s continual berating co-dependency, and gains success in the book publishing industry. She has already admitted to Departmental Dan that her “dream book” would be to publish “anything that might become a best-seller.” Only aside from that might she hope for a shot at Salinger’s unpublished short stories. So it is not a surprise, but a heartwarming familiarity, that with her breakout book she “shifts the category from nonfiction to self-actualization,” staking her own light flag in America’s new consciousness-fad. Alice now offers lunch invites at Lutesse while the rest of the old gang picks up checks at the unemployment office. It takes slick bouncer Van to fess up the final reality, before heading to Florida: “Disco’s over. It’s dead. People aren’t just going out like they used to. They’re tired. . .”

Josh and Alice, on the subway love train, can only dance, and all New York City straphangers dance with them - like an Ed Koch-era Lotto ad or ’86 Mets promo on WPIX. Whit Stillman hallmarks unto the living American memory what only 20 years later is revealed as so richly spotlit, so vivacious of meaning.

Watch here: The Last Days of Disco.