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About The Belnord, 225 West 86th Street
One of a handful of full-block apartment buildings in the city with major garden courtyards, the Belnord was designed by H. Hobart Weekes and completed in 1908.
The Renaissance Revival-style, rental building has two very imposing and large arched entrances on 86th Street that lead to a very large, landscaped courtyard with a large and handsome fountain. It was designed so that carriages could drive around the entire courtyard, which has canopied entrances at the four angled corners.
The courtyard is actually more interesting than the exterior because of its immense sale and different façade treatment. The facades are entirely rusticated except for double stacks of bay windows in the center of the east and west walls and two single columns of bay windows on both the north and south facades that also have one column of high windows in their centers.
The original planting was encircled by attractive four-globe light-posts and was quite formal and to the modern eye evocative to a certain extent of the black-and-white photographs of the gardens in Alain Renais's film, "Last Year at Marienbad." Indeed, this is almost a de Chiricoesque vista as the tall, textured walls encompassing the space offer both security and imprisonment, awe and ire, dream and reality.
Some observers have viewed such courtyards as pathetic attempts to introduce the Holy Grail, from an urban planner's viewpoint, of "light and air." They seem to think that the Roman atriums and Parisian and Venetian courtyards were refined because they were largely suffused with warm sunlight because the buildings themselves were low-rise. When exploded to the modest mid-rise height of 12 to 15 stories in New York, however, these observers have bemoaned the benefits of such courtyards, arguing that the walls are so high that the "light and air" are limited.
In his book, "The City Observed, New York, a Guide to the Architecture of Manhattan," Vintage Books, 1979), Paul Goldberger, for example, made the following observation in his commentary about the Belnord, the Apthorp and the Astor Court buildings:
"All of the buildings share the liability of courtyard apartment houses, which is poor light in all too many of the units, but they also share the ability of all good courtyard buildings to create - far more than conventional buildings could - a sense of a private, secure world."
The Belnord is the largest of these and its scale is such that one must imagine that its courtyard had to be considered one of the great urban wonders in its early years just as John Portman's atrium hotels of the 1970's were the commercial bedazzlements of American architecture. In his fine book, "Luxury Apartment Houses of Manhattan, An Illustrated History," (Dover Publications Inc., 1992) Andrew Alpern noted that "The Belnord boasted the largest interior court in the world - 94 feet wide by 231 feet long - and an underground delivery tunnel for trucks and wagons reachable via a ramped driveway from West 87th Street. Architecturally nowhere near as successful as the Astor buildings, the Belnord, with is vast number of very large apartments, did not reach full occupancy until World War II. Since then, however, it has never had a vacancy for long, but has been embroiled for years in an acrimonious battle between its tenants and the building's elderly and eccentric owner."
There is no hard-and-fast rule about such courtyards. Depending on their scale and treatment and site, they can be neighborly, invasive, inspiring, or industrial. Only a lack of imagination precludes finding exciting ways to make them inviting and sensational for they are great spaces. In their wonderful book, "The A. I. A. Guide to New York City, Third Edition," (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), Elliot Willensky and Norval White, described the Belnord as "Brilliant, but boring."
Another major courtyard building, the Apthorp, which occupies the full block between Broadway and West End Avenue and 78th and 79th Streets, was erected the same year. Another major courtyard building in the vicinity is the Astor Court on the east side of Broadway between 89th and 90th Streets, but it occupies less than a half that big block.
In 1999, this impressive building, which has a three-story, rusticated limestone base, rusticated quoins enclosing one stack of windows and a large cornice, was cleaned. The façade has three bandcourses with escutcheons on the fifth floor and swags on the 11th and 12th floors at the corners. The 13th floor has handsome decorative rectangles beneath the cornice.
The east and west facades are nicely proportioned and quite grand, but the south and north facades, which have an asymmetrical sprinkling of very small windows amid the otherwise symmetrical fenestration, are very long and merely imposing. The windows on the sixth through the 12th floors have slightly arched tops, which is an interesting touch.
The building has no balconies, no garage and no sundeck, but there are four large entrance marquees in the corners of the very large courtyards.
There is a subway station at Broadway and there is excellent cross-town bus service on 86th Street. This neighborhood abounds in good shopping and restaurants. Riverside Park is a couple of blocks to the west and Central Park is a couple of longer blocks to the east.
On September 18, 2008, Extell Development hosted a very large centennial party for the building in its courtyard with many black-tie musicians, many hors-d'oeuvres and two sushi bars. Gary Barnett, the president of Extell, was the host.
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