On September 18, 2008, Extell Development hosted a very large party in the enormous courtyard of the Belnord apartment building to celebrate its centennial.

Gary Barnett, the president of Extell, which had submitted the most exciting plan by Steven Holl for the redevelopment of the MTA rail yards, was the host. He bought the full-block apartment complex that is bounded by 86th and 87th Streets and Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, in 1994.

The party had many black-tie musicians, many hors-d'oeuvres and two sushi bars as well as a tent that surrounded two-thirds of the wide sidwalks around the lushly landscaped courtyard that has a very large central fountain.

One of a handful of full-block apartment buildings in the city with major garden courtyards, the Belnord was designed by H. Hobart Weekes in the Renaissance Revival-style, and the 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.

The courtyard is actually more interesting than the exterior because of its immense sale and different facade 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.

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."

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.