In retrospect, early radiation treatments were often worse than the disease they were meant to cure. Radiation caused severe burns and, in some cases, additional cancers. There may have been cause for hope at West 106th Street, but there was no end to suffering, a suffering made all the more dreadful by the vision, through the windows, of a smokestack to the west of the main building. Back there was the crematorium.  Only after Memorial moved out of the building to the East Side of Manhattan (where it expanded into the present day Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center) did life at the castle reach its full measure of dreadfulness. In 1955, the building became the Towers Nursing Home, the largest and most infamous member of a nursing home empire run by Bernard Bergman and his family. By the early 1970's, the Towers was at the center of state and federal investigations into Medicaid fraud and other crimes.  In the meantime, the home's elderly charges went neglected. A Times reporter visiting in 1974 noted that patients looked bleary-eyed and stupefied. Floors were filthy, and a "pervasive odor" tainted the air. Patients testified to "atrocious conditions," including inadequate heat, pest infestations and physical abuse.  The nursing home was finally closed in 1974. There was talk of tearing it down, but in 1976, the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the building a landmark, thereby condemning it not to the wrecking ball but to slow death by decrepitude.  Where Beasts Were Born (on Film)  It was during this third, and seemingly terminal, stage of the castle's life that many Manhattan Valley residents first came to know it. Even those who never dared set foot in the place felt its gravitational pull. Michael Kelly, a local filmmaker, often trained his camera on the building for hours at a time, transfixed. Gary Dennis, now owner of a neighborhood video store, recalls sneaking out at lunch from Public School 145 to surveil the castle with his friends.  "We never got real close," Mr. Dennis said. "It was too scary."  Among Mr. Dennis's current wares is a 1982 movie entitled "Q: The Winged Serpent." The plot concerns a dragonlike beast that lives atop the Chrysler Building and preys on Manhattanites. In the last shot, after the beast has been slain and order restored, the camera pans down 106th Street, into a burnt-out turret of the castle, then closes in on a giant egg hidden inside the ruin. The castle was exactly the sort of place you'd expect to find the giant egg of a man-eating serpent.  Years passed, and trees grew from the mortar between the bricks. Mysterious fires lit the roof, graffiti blemished the walls. But as it crumbled, its allure grew. Martha Flach, a graduate student at Columbia in the early 90's, was intrigued enough to devote her master's thesis to the building. The project required frequent excursions to what was then a dicey neighborhood.  "I'd go to photograph it, and the police would see this skinny white girl and tell me to be careful," said Ms. Flach, who now works for the World Monuments Fund. "But the people who lived around there, even the drug dealers and the prostitutes, were always coming up to me to ask me questions about it. They were fascinated."  Occasionally, a developer expressed interest in the property, most promisingly Ian Schrager, the hotel impresario, who bought it in the late 1980's. But inevitably, the deals fell through, and the decay continued.  "We used to stand in the dog park on top of the hill, and people would play this game," Mr. Kelly said. "We called it the Castle Fantasy Game. Given unlimited resources, what would you do with the building?"  A condo might not have been high on anyone's fantasy list, but it was the solution favored by Daniel McLean, the Chicago developer who purchased the property in 2000. He would have many opportunities to regret his decision. No sooner had he secured financing than 9/11 struck, causing the bank to withdraw its loan. After resuming construction a year later, he fired the superintendent, who exacted revenge by reporting the building for health code violations.  "Six weeks into the deal he's calling the city telling them we have dead birds inside and West Nile virus," Mr. McLean said. "It just for some reason was the kind of building that anything that could go wrong, went wrong."  The hardest challenge may be yet to come. Trying to entice very wealthy buyers to live above West 96th Street flies in the face of conventional real estate wisdom. Then there is the building's macabre past. "We obviously don't dwell on that part of the history," Mr. McLean acknowledged. "We don't go into the crematorium part."  At least one buyer has no trouble accepting either the building's location or its history. Daniel Lufkin, founding partner of the securities firm Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, has bought what may be the most spectacular apartment in the complex, if not the city: the former Chapel of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, now a duplex with high arched windows and original wooden beams.  Mr. Lufkin is aware of the building's past, but said it did nothing to dampen his or his wife's ardor. "It could have been a prison and we'd have been interested," he said. "The history is fascinating, but what's really fascinating is the building itself." Mr. Lufkin is convinced that, after a year or so, other buyers will flock in behind. "Everybody and his brother will be trying to move in."  He may be right, and there, in a nutshell, is the moral of the tale. One person's haunted castle is another's park-vu condo. A building's history, however gripping or traumatic, is not lapidary, not even when posted on a plaque. That buildings find new reasons for being is not in itself a bad thing.  "You go to Rome, you go to Paris, you go to any old city, buildings keep being reused," said Françoise Bollack, an architect and historic preservationist who has studied the castle. "And some of them have really terrible pasts." Formerly Fascist monoliths in Berlin, she points out, are filled with ghosts far less friendly than any likely to haunt the old castle on Central Park West.  Old buildings are there to tell us who we were. When their stories are odd or chilling, all the more reason to listen. The trick, Ms. Bollack said, is to acknowledge a building's previous life while embracing its future. "The past should never be forgotten," she said. Still, she added, "Life goes on."  It's a paradox Ms. Polasek struggles to accept as she watches the neighborhood she has lived in for more than 20 years change under the shadows of the castle that has so long defined it.  "They just put millions of dollars into a place that was falling apart," Ms. Polasek said. "I don't want to be judgmental. I want to try to like what has happened. I want to try to accept that nothing stays the same."  After Ms. Polasek and her husband divorced, a boyfriend persuaded her to purge some of the objects she'd gathered from the castle that night long ago; he thought they reminded her too much of her ex-husband. As she stood by, weeping, he tossed out the old things, including the exquisite toilet, an apt metaphor for flushing away the past.  The boyfriend is gone now, too. Ms. Polasek still has the photographs, though, and on a cold bright day she sat by her window, just a stone's throw from the old castle, looking down at the faces of the dead people. She wishes the castle's new tenants the best. But she is fairly certain they will be sharing the place with ghosts.  This is exactly how it should be. Those who wish to seize the day may go ahead and seize it. Those who care to see the ghosts are free to see them. In a great old building like the castle, there is room for both the living and the dead.  Jim Rasenberger is the author of "High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline."
Abandoned building on Central Park West and 106th Street called 'the castle' is being reborn as luxury condominium; photos (M)