Hulu series fans”There are only murders in the buildingReturning for a second season this week, know the building at the heart of the series is the Arconia, where Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez play a trio of unlikely residents turned professional cameramen. surplus with podcasts. But the Renaissance-style apartment building on Manhattan’s West Side is actually called Belnord, and it’s been causing a stir for more than a century.
From the very beginning, Belnord had been a newspaper salesman – a mansion of excess, a home for the flamboyant. When it was completed in 1909, covering an entire neighborhood on West 86th Street and Broadway, the architect boasted that it was the largest apartment building in the country and possibly the world. Newspaper, include thisthe courtyard is touted as the largest courtyard in Manhattan – a half-acre open space, with a garden and lawn “for the children to roam around in”, decorated with a multi-tiered stone fountain Jade.
They marveled at its spacious rental units, 175 of which, each 50 feet deep, stretched from street to courtyard, with “Louis XVI-style” interior decor – Pale painted panels and “harmonious tinted silks” on the walls – and the most up-to-date modern conveniences. The refrigerator has an ice maker, so no ice people will enter Belnord, as one newspaper wrote. On the rooftop, each apartment has its own laundry room, low-tech luxury amenities including a bathtub, iron and clothesline – for the maid’s convenience.
The newspaper notes that it will be its own city, with a population of more than 1,500. Over the years, there have been notable tenants: Lee Strasberg, the authoritarian father of the acting Method, who is often visited by his shy nanny Marilyn Monroe; Walter Matthau, when he was a rising stage actor with a young family; actor Zero Mostel, who played Tevye in the original Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof”; and Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Prize-winning author, who loves to jog around the yard in a granny suit.
But by the 1970s, that city was in turmoil. The ornate limestone and terracotta structure was dilapidated, the roof leaked and the plumbing cracked. The ceiling has collapsed. The New York Times reported that in 1980, stalactites had formed in the basement. The fountain has been broken for many years, and the garden is a fenced-in jungle, which does not allow residents.
The owner of the building, Lillian Seril, would get the obvious difference one of the worst landlords of the city: By all means, she’s both guilty and stubborn, refusing to fix even the simplest of problems, but with enough energy to sue not only her tenants but the association as a whole. The landlord threw her out for not paying her dues. (Tenants recall buying their own refrigerators and sneaking in with the help of sympathetic building staff, because Ms. Seril would not allow their broken appliances to be repaired or replaced.) .)
The residents of Belnord, many of whom pay just a few hundred dollars a month for their huge, home-like apartments, are organized and rebellious. In 1978, they started the longest rental strike in the city’s history.
In the 16 years that have passed, the battle in Belnord has been so controversial that a housing court judge declared the two sides worthy of each other, before washing his hands of the case when a settlement he brokered. fall. “I believe the tenants and owners will sue the building to death,” he said. One city official likened the situation to the siege of Beirut.
The battle ended in 1994, when developer Gary Barnett, then 38 years old, buy building with a group of investors for $15 million. (As part of the deal, Ms. Seril insisted on keeping a controlled 3,000 square meter rental unit to herself – when she passed away in 2004, she was only paying $450 a month.) A decade later, Mr. Barnett and his company, Extell Development, will build One57, the funnel-shaped, blue-glass skyscraper in West 57, was the city’s first super-tall tower and in doing so has outraged conservationists, urban planners and civic groups . But in those years, he was a hero. Belnord is his first Manhattan property and he will spend $100 million building it.
He made various arrangements with individual tenants when trying to turn the place into a luxury rental building, with some apartments renting for up to $45,000 a month. For a rabbi and family paying $275 for a 4,000-square-foot apartment, Mr. Barnett bought a home in upstate New Jersey. Then there was one penthouse resident who longed for the desert: He took her to Las Vegas to pick up a house with a pool, arrange to buy it, and pay her moving expenses. Other tenants chose to keep their rents low, but agreed to swap their large, 11-room apartments for smaller units.
Mr Barnett once joked that the fountain he resuscitated at great expense – a project that involved dismantling and chiseling to repair – was the fountain of youth, because no one seemed to died in Belnord.
“It was a labor of love to restore that building,” he said recently. “But I don’t really understand what I’m doing. It’s a pretty nice picture. “
By 2015, Mr. Barnett was off the list, in a reported $575 million deal.
Like everything else in Belnord, Mr. Barnett’s mortgage terms were questionable, and for a time, after he stopped making payments on the loans, the city classified the property as “difficult”. (Calculating the building’s debt and its rental revenue never quite add up.) And so a new group of investors has reached out – the cast is constantly changing, as more players play. abandoned by defaults, lawsuits, and other woes – this in turn became a luxury condominium, converting about 100 existing apartments into a showcase with marble-clad Italian-style kitchens.
Robert A.M. Stern, the architect whose firm handles the transformation, describes the process as “a very advanced Botox treatment.”
Prices for refurbished apartments ranged from about $3.6 million to more than $11 million, although some tenants bought their own apartments at a deep discount. After a rough start, condominiums are now selling well, catching up with the high-end market in the city, said Jonathan Miller, a veteran real estate and market appraiser.
And now Belnord is once again in the spotlight thanks to the Hulu series. John Hoffman, who co-created the show with Mr. Martin, was delighted and stunned to score his spot as producer, especially in the midst of a pandemic. While the atmospheric apartments of the characters of Mr. Martin, Mr. Short and Mrs. Gomez are built on a sound stage, the story needs a building like Belnord, with epic appointments and paintings. Panoramic view of a courtyard.
“I was obsessed,” Mr. Hoffman said. “I knew we could do something as tall as that amazing building. It’s a cliché to say that the building itself is a character, but I like the challenge of going beyond that cliché a bit. What pulls us out of our apartments to meet people? How do you know your neighbors? Do you only connect when necessary? The way we come together while living in these spaces is really exciting.”
On a Friday evening in early June, Debbie Marx, a Latin language teacher and longtime Belnord resident, led a guest through her not-so-popular set of seven classics, winding corridors. , full of books, a time capsule from 1959, the year her parents moved in. Her father, Josef Marx, is an oboist and musicologist who has his own music publishing company; Her mother, Angelina, was once a ballerina. Ms. Marx moved back to her childhood apartment in the late 1980s, when she was pregnant with her first child and her mother lived there alone. Mrs. Marx’s father was died in 1978In a way, a victim of the Battle of Belnord, suffered a heart attack in court during a hearing with his fellow tenants.
Mrs. Marx recalls growing up in the building – playing handball in the yard, being banned by Mrs. Seril, and crawling through the bars of the fence to the unlimited garden, then a thicket of shrubs. She has the gang in her own yard, with Jenny, daughter of Walter Matthau, and others, but their offenses are light: wearing a hat from the doorman, commanding the service elevator, dropping the fruit weird water bomb.
“It’s like an archeological site,” Richard Stengel said of the building. “The deeper you dig, the more culture and history you get.”
Mr. Stengel, author, journalist and former State Department official, has been a tenant since 1992, when he moved into an apartment that had been destroyed by fire and had been vacant for years. (If you see Mr. Stengel on MSNBC, where he’s a contributor, with a dark red bookshelf behind, he’s broadcasting from his flat in Belnord.)
John Scanlon, evil public relations man died in 2001. (He’s a spokesperson for Ivana Trump.)
Like Mr. Stengel, Mr. Scanlon is a member of the Belnord demographic that you might call the literary and publishing juxtaposition. He liked to tease Mr. Stengel, then editor of Time magazine, when they collided on the field: “How does it feel to be on the edge of the pass?”
Previous waves of tenants included European Jews, unconstructive socialists, and many psychoanalysts.
Peter Krulewitch, a real estate investor who arrived 35 years ago with his wife, Deborah, a retired Estee Lauder executive, said: “When we moved in, it felt like an Eastern enclave. Europe. Belnord 18, one of several groups of tenants who tried to negotiate with Ms. Seril. “There are these wonderful aging right-handers that have been there for years – and have fought Mrs. Seril for years.”
In many cases, those tenants have succession rights for their children. So despite the influx of apartment buyers, says Mr. Krulewitch, Belnord is a city that still – albeit moderately – has a more culturally diverse population than the richer classes that have dominated most of the population. big Manhattan.
As Mr. Krulewitch said, “It’s been quite an exciting adventure.”
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