Alwyn Court 180 West 58th Street New York
Alwyn Court 180 West 58th Street New York is a 12-story apartment building located at on the corner of Seventh Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, one block south of Central Park. It was built between 1907 and 1909, and was designed by Harde & Short in French Renaissance style, with elaborate terra-cotta ornamentation in the Francis I style covering the entire facade.The interior courtyard has a painted architectural facade by artist Richard Haas.The building was constructed with 14-room 5-bathroom apartments which were subdivided during the Depression.Although the interior has changed over time, the exterior, with its intricate terra-cotta decoration, has largely remained unchanged. The facade was cleaned and restored in 1980-81 by Beyer Blinder Belle.
The Alwyn Court was designated a New York landmark in 1966 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.The city's most ornate building, the Alwyn Court is a classic New York real estate story of riches to rags and back.When it was completed in 1910, the area around Carnegie Hall had several of the city's most important apartment buildings such as the Osborne on the northwest corner of Seventh Avenue at 57th Street, the Rembrandt, the city's first co-op at 152 West 57th Street and the Navarro Flats on Central Park South, east of Seventh Avenue.This 12-story building instantly became one of the city's most famous because its façades are completely covered in French Renaissance-style, glazed terra-cotta decoration.
The exterior lavishness was not isolated and the building had only two large apartments, with 14 rooms and five baths each, per floor with carved Caen stone, marble and fine wood paneling, according to Andrew Alpern in his excellent book, "New York's Fabulous Luxury Apartments With Original Floor Plans From The Dakota, River House, Olympic Tower And Other Great Buildings," Dover Publications, Inc., 1987, a reprint of "Apartments For The Affluent: A Historical Survey of Buildings in New York," originally published in 1975 by McGraw-Hill Book Company. "The dressing rooms had storage closets fitted with plate glass shelves and multiple full-length mirrors," he added.
