Master Apartments, or, as it used to be called Master Building - skyscraper, associated with the name of Nicholas Roerich. If the tourists interested in the famous painter and mystic, visited the Roerich Museum (107th West Street), it makes sense to take a few quarters to take a look at a skyscraper with a strange and sad story.

Roerich, who arrived in the United States for a large exhibition tour of American cities, in 1922, became acquainted with a rich New York broker Louis Horch. Admiring the broker completely fell under the influence of the artist: to pay his debts and started to finance projects gurus (including two concessions in the USSR). The main project was the Master Building.

In 1929, on Riverside Drive, the site of the old house Horsch, designed by architect Harvey Corbett erected a 29-storey skyscraper in the Art Deco style. It was supposed to erect the immense Buddhist stupa cost five additional floors (which is why Roerich terribly upset). For the first time in New York is a novelty - Panoramic corner windows. The color of the lining of the facade was changed from dark purple at the bottom to light gray at the top of the building as it sought up (facing right now faded and covered with mud, and it's hardly noticeable). On the ground floor is the Roerich Museum, which exhibited more than a thousand canvases, works of Tibetan art, manuscripts. The upper floors were occupied apartments.

The building was officially opened October 17, 1929. Exactly a week market collapsed, the Great Depression. The project quickly became unprofitable. Trying to save him, Horsch build complex financial combination, meaning that Roerich did not understand. Increases between the guru and the broker voltage open-ended rupture and scandalous trial. His claim to have been the artist and the US government (the accusation of tax evasion).

Minister of Agriculture Henry Wallace, the Roosevelt administration initially also among the admirers of Roerich. He arranged financing for the expedition to Manchuria - to search for plants that help to cope with soil erosion in the United States. Plants are not revealed, but it turned out that Roerich, who dreamed of creating an independent state in Manchuria, led the political game, and even entered into negotiations with the Japanese. Wallace from disown the expedition, and when Horch won the case against Roerich, saw to it that the artist never got a visa to enter the United States. This story had a continuation: letter from the Minister to the guru became available to the Republicans, and they threatened to publish them in the proof of the "idiocy of Wallace."

After all the scandals of the Roerich Museum in the Master Building was closed. The house belonged to Horsham until 1971, and then the building was renamed and turned into a housing cooperative. On the relationship between the skyscraper with the name of the famous mystic and artist recalls today only the foundation stone (at the corner of West 103rd Street and Riverside Drive), which is clearly visible emblem of the museum. Inside the stone - a figure of the Bodhisattva Maitreya, the letter "Mahatma Moria", two Tibetan coins and 17 Mexican dollars.