“Twin Peaks” was born in its present incarnation in 1925 as a radical remodeling of an 1830 rowhouse into a five-story artists’ studio apartment building.

At Twin Peaks’ unveiling, no effort was spared to emphasize its free-spirited and iconoclastic associations. According to press accounts, film star Mabel Normand was invited to christen the building by smashing a bottle of “pre-Napoleon” champagne on one of the chalet-style gables while Princess Amelia Troubetzkoy burned acorns in a bronze brazier as an offering to Pan.

The pagan ritual was complemented by the sprinkling of holy water by Archbishop William Henry Francis of Chicago, and actresses Helen Hayes and Minnie Madern Fisk tossed flowers from above onto onlookers in the street.

At the time, the New York Sun described Twin Peaks as “one of the most curious looking buildings” in the city, while years later architecture critic Paul Goldberger dubbed it a “wonderfully ludicrous mock half-timbered fantasy row-house castle.”

A more recent dour grey and beige paint job has dulled the building’s whimsy somewhat, but nothing can extinguish the flame of one of the Village’s most unusual and eccentric buildings.