UNR E A L ESTAT E
A handful of silver religious school medals, found behind a kitchen cabinet, revealed the story of an Alwyn Court apartment’s previous 70 years. Alwyn Court’s original huge apartments (shown in black and white) gave way to today’s smaller ones (bottom left). The writer’s kitchen before (at top, center) and after (at right) a gut renovation.
Steiglitz, Georgia O’Keefe, Marcel Duchamp and Walter Wanger), Alwyn Court then stayed out of the news until the Depression, when the last tenant moved out, the building was boarded up, its latest owner went bankrupt and Dry Dock Savings, which took it over, announced plans to gut and rebuild it with six one and two bedroom apartments per floor, and four new penthouses. Only the ceiling heights and the footprints of the original entertaining rooms remained the same. Dorothy Draper was hired to design the new halls and lobby. The “new” Alwyn Court was fully occupied by mid-1939. Among the tenants (before and after the building finally became a coop in 1982) were Louis Nizer, Oscar Levant, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson, coloratura soprano June Anderson, cabaret performer Peter Allen, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia and a load of Broadway producers and actors. Our apartment’s occupant wasn’t famous, but he was influential, as I discovered after finding those medals. They led me to Central Synagogue on Lexington Avenue, the successor to the congregation named on several of the medals. Its rabbi explained to me that Leonard Jerome Obermeier, who moved into Alwyn Court after its restoration, had gone to Hebrew school there and won some of the medals of merit in the bamboo box. The others were awarded to his future wife Leah Kraus, who attended a shul at the 40 | AVENUE MAGAZINE • OCTOBER 2014
synagogue that would eventually become Temple Emanu-El. When they married at the turn of the 20th century, it was one of the first inter-marriages between the congregations. Obermeier was a close friend of Fiorello La Guardia, having hired the future mayor of New York as an assistant when Obermeier was a deputy state attorney general, and later becoming La Guardia’s personal attorney. Obermeier also represented a group of Broadway ticket brokers, a possible explanation for another oddity in our new home: an old switch box capable of handling more than a dozen telephone lines. Obermeier died in 1963 at 86, and his wife lived on in the apartment until her death at age 102 in 1984, when their daughter Theresa took it over. Theresa had several husbands, the last of whom survived her. Stuart Steinbrink, the son of a New York Supreme Court justice, would end up living there with his third and last wife, Ruth, who, keeping it all in the family, was Theresa Obermeier’s granddaughter. Stuart and Ruth died within a year of each other at the turn of the millennium and the apartment was finally sold by the co-op’s sponsor to the investor who later sold it to my wife and me. I gave the medals to the archive at Central Synagogue, and sold the apartment earlier this year. An abiding fascination with the back stories of New York real estate remains. Our homes can be windows into our city's history. Often glorious, always fascinating. ✦