For other other articles about the general life and career of architect Lamont Young, see this link and this one.) You will gather that none of Young’s grandiose plans from the 1880s— not the metropolitana, not the Venice Quarter, not the grand seaside resort in Bagnoli—none of that came to fruition. It all shattered against the risanamento, the great and drastic urban renewal of the city in the face of the terrible cholera epidemics of the 1880s. At best, we have handed down from Lamont Young, a few individual buildings, the most impressive of which is the Aselmeyer Castle on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele (C.VE), in these photos (below).

Young had to give up on his sweeping plans to rebuild entire sections of the city once it became clear that the city council was going ahead with the risanamento. He, thus, concentrated his efforts on putting up some individual buildings that still stand today. In 1895, Young acquired the rights to build on sections of the C.VE. (At the time, that street was almost bucolic and nothing like the mass of buildings you see today.) Even then, his plans reached well beyond what actually wound up being done. For example, he had come into possession of the Villa Lucia in the Floridiana Park in the Vomero section, high above the C.VE. He proposed joining that property to the C.VE with an elevator: you would have his Villa Santa Lucia at the top and a new hotel, which he proposed to build, at the bottom.

After all was said and done, he had to give up his plans for the new hotel (although construction was partially completed and even today serves as a conference and reception hall. (It is named for one “Bertolini,” who acquired the building from Young in the early 1900s.) Young had to settle for simply putting up as his own residence on the C.VE, the building seen in these photos. It was built in 1902 and sold two years later to banker, Carlo Aselmeyer, whose name the building still bears. (More correctly, the name of the building is Castello Grifeo dei Principi di Partanna.) Young moved away to the small isle of Gaiola on the Posillipo coast.

Architecturally, the building is, quite simply, English Gothic (“Dracula Victorian,” as they say) as are most of Young’s other works. (An exception is the Neo-Renaissance Grenoble Institute on via Crispi.) That was the greatest criticism levelled against him—his buildings don't look as if they belong in Naples. (Well, that was the second greatest criticism; the big one was that his sense of “city” was not Neapolitan; it involved the new concept of “urbanization” —moving people out of the center of town (using his never-to-be-built metropoliana as the primary people mover). That may not have been Neapolitan, but that is, however, what eventually happened, anyway, with the invention of the automobile, with or without Lamont Young.) A fair criticism would be that he thought Naples could eventually live from tourism. New 20th-century industry played no role in his thinking.

In any event, the Aselmeyer Castle still exists, but has been kept up only marginally at times. It has long since been sub-divided into many different apartments and suffers from the same problem that all condominiums do in Naples: you can’t get everyone to agree on major repairs. The building has also been architecturally defaced by the addition of two additions on either side of the main entrance: cream- colored, smooth blocks of junk, not in keeping with rough-hewn stone of the rest of the building.