Master Apartments, 1930.

The Master, a 27-story Art Deco skyscraper — the tallest on Riverside Drive — was commissioned by financier Louis Horch to house the Master Institute of United Arts, a school founded by the Russian artist, explorer and theosophist Nicholas Roerich. The new building included 24 stories of residential apartments, intended to generate rental income to support the Master Institute and Roerich Museum of the building’s lower floors.

Roerich, a painter, set designer (best known for Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”), philosopher, and mystic who traveled extensively through East Asia, immigrated to the United States in 1920, having left Russia shortly after the October Revolution of 1917. In New York, he found an audience for his theories about the relationship between art and daily life — as well as benefactors, including Horch, whose Riverside Drive townhouse previously occupied the site of the Master building.

For the Master, Horch and Roerich enlisted Harvey Wiley Corbett, a noted skyscraper architect. Corbett’s Art Deco design featured colored brick gradually shifting to lighter tones in the building’s upper stories, and the first instance of corner windows in a New York skyscraper.

The Master was completed in October, 1929, shortly before the market crash, and immediately came under financial pressure. Horch spent much of the early 1930s attempting to sort out its various debts and liabilities, and was eventually able to wrest control of the building in 1935. Roerich, meanwhile, got out of town — he continued his Asian expeditions, and would eventually settle in India.

In 1938, Horch closed the Roerich Museum (the patronage relationship had become strained), and opened the Riverside Museum in the same space. That museum operated until 1971, when its collection of contemporary American art was transferred to the Brandeis Museum. The Equity Library Theater hosted productions at the Master from 1961-1989.

In 1988, as the surrounding Manhattan Valley neighborhood began to rebound from a period of blight, the Master was converted to a housing co-operative. During the mid-90s, this new ownership structure undertook a multi-year restoration project.