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The Ansonia (formerly the Ansonia Hotel) is a condominium building at 2109 Broadway, between 73rd and 74th Streets, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. The 17-story structure was designed by French architect Paul Emile Duboy in the Beaux-Arts style. It was built between 1899 and 1903 as a residential hotel by William Earle Dodge Stokes, who named it after his grandfather, the industrialist Anson Greene Phelps. Over the years, the Ansonia has housed many conductors, opera singers, baseball players, and other famous and wealthy people. The Ansonia is a New York City designated landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The building occupies a large, irregular site on the west side of Broadway. It has a facade of limestone, granite, white brick, and terracotta, as well as turrets at its corners, along each side, and a three-story mansard roof. The Ansonia Hotel was constructed with as many as 2,500 rooms, many of which were arranged as multi-room suites, although these have since been downsized to 425 apartments. Originally, the hotel had its own power plant and air-filtration plant, as well as a system of and cooling pipes. The public rooms, including the lobby, basement shopping arcade, and restaurants, were decorated in the Louis XIV style, and the hotel also had a small roof farm in the 1900s. There was also a basement swimming pool, which in the late 20th century housed a gay bathhouse called the Continental Baths and a swingers' club called Plato's Retreat. The apartments themselves ranged from small studios to multi-room suites with parlors, libraries, and dining rooms. Over the years, both the apartments and public spaces have been substantially rearranged, but the facade has remained largely intact.
Stokes headed the Onward Construction Company, which acquired the site in July 1899 and built the hotel there. The restaurants in the hotel were dedicated in February 1903, though the hotel itself did not formally open until April 16, 1904. Frank Harriman leased the Ansonia in 1911, turning it into a short-term hotel, and the Bowman-Biltmore Hotels chain took over in 1918 and renovated the hotel. Stokes's son W. E. D. "Weddie" Stokes acquired the hotel after his father's death in 1926. The Ansonia passed through multiple operators during the 1920s and stopped offering hotel services in the early 1930s. The building was sold three times between 1945 and 1948 before being auctioned in 1950 to Jacob Starr. The Ansonia gradually fell into disrepair through the 1970s, and Ansonia Associates eventually acquired it in 1978. Ansonia Associates repaired many of the building's issues but was involved in hundreds of lawsuits during that time. The Ansonia was converted into a condominium building in 1992, although rent-regulated tenants remained in the building into the 21st century.
The building is near several other notable structures, including the Rutgers Presbyterian Church to the south, the Hotel Beacon and Beacon Theatre to the northeast, the Apple Bank Building to the east, and the Dorilton one block south. Directly south of the Ansonia is Verdi Square and an entrance for the New York City Subway's 72nd Street station, serving the .
The city's first subway line was developed starting in the late 1890s, and it opened in 1904 with a station at Broadway and 72nd Street. The construction of the subway spurred the development of high-rise apartment buildings on the Upper West Side along Broadway; many of these buildings were constructed on land that had never been developed. The Ansonia was one of several large apartment buildings developed on the Upper West Side in the early 1900s, along with such structures as the Dorilton and the Astor.
The Ansonia is 17 stories tall. Early plans called for the building to be 12 stories, 14 stories, or more than 20 stories. In a letter to the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), the developer's son William Earl Dodge Stokes Jr. claimed that "they just put one floor on top of another and they got up to the seventeenth floor, and they decided they wouldn't build any more". Other sources have cited the Ansonia as being 16 or 18 stories tall.
The Ansonia has a facade of limestone, granite, white brick, and terracotta. The base is clad with rusticated blocks of limestone, and there are balconies just above the base and near the top of the building. On 73rd Street is a archway (which originally led to a tea room) and two full-height windows, which were restored in the 2000s as part of the construction of a North Face store at the building's base. All three windows, which had been hidden behind a masonry wall for several decades, have cast-iron frames and large roundel windows.
On the intermediate stories are with elaborate iron balconies. The balconies, many of which span several bays, visually divide the facade into several groups of windows. Some parts of the facade are characterized by smooth brickwork, limestone, and terracotta details, while other sections are ornamented with and rusticated limestone blocks. The facade was decorated with Louis XVI style grilles and scrollwork, leading the Ansonia to be nicknamed "the Wedding Cake of the Upper West Side". The building is topped by a convex mansard roof, which measures three stories high. Prior to World War II, the building had a copper cornice and seven copper cartouches, each weighing . Each domed cupola is topped by and widow's walk rooftop platforms.
The hotel was also planned with "more and finer banquet halls, assembly rooms, and reception rooms than any other hotel". All of the public rooms were decorated in the Louis XIV style. An art curator, Joseph Gilmartin, was hired to display the hotel's collection of 600 paintings.
There were originally six elevators for guests, two elevators for housekeepers, two freight elevators, and numerous dumbwaiters. Although the Otis Worldwide had offered to install elevators in the building, Stokes considered them too expensive, so he created his own elevator company and his own hydraulic-elevator model, which could travel at up to . Upon the Ansonia's opening in 1903, it was cited as having 362 telephones, 18,000 electric burners, 2,500 steam radiators, 400 refrigerators, and 1,000 faucets. The building also had 600 toilets and 400 washrooms, more than any other residential building in New York City at the time.
The ground floor was devoted to public rooms and consisted of various offices and corridors. Originally, there were several storefronts at ground level, including a bank, a florist, and a pharmacy. The hotel's lobby included a fountain with live seals and was flanked by two banks of elevators. Next to the main entrance, on 73rd Street, was a palm court and assembly room. The ground-floor restaurant, decorated with chandeliers and hand-painted murals, could fit 550 people and included a balcony from which an orchestra performed at night. Also on the ground floor was a small grill room. There was a ballroom on the second floor, which was briefly converted into a mini-golf course in 1929. In the 21st century, American Musical and Dramatic Academy occupied the lower stories, with a theater, studios, private rooms, and performance spaces.
The top stories included a restaurant and a roof garden. The restaurant, on the 16th floor, was designed in an English style and could fit 1,300 people. During the summer, orchestras played music in the roof garden. The hotel's roof included a small farm, where Stokes kept farm animals next to his personal apartment, as well as a cattle elevator next to the farm. Stokes's decision to create a roof farm was influenced by his belief that the Ansonia could be either partially or fully self-sufficient. The farm housed bears, chickens, ducks, goats, and hogs; it also reportedly housed four geese and a pig owned by W. E. D. Stokes. Every day, a bellhop delivered free or half-priced fresh eggs to all tenants. The New York City Department of Health raided the roof farm in November 1907 after receiving a tip about it. In a failed effort to prevent its closure as an illegal farm, W. E. D. Stokes claimed the animals belonged to his son, W. E. D. "Weddie" Stokes Jr. Thereafter, the farm was closed, and the animals were sent to Central Park. When Weddie was 12 years old, he installed a radio transmitter on the roof of the hotel. For a short time in 1929, the roof contained handball courts.
Each apartment's ceiling measured or tall. The building had extremely thick masonry walls measuring between thick, which made each apartment nearly soundproof. The thickness of the walls might be derived from Stokes's mistrust of insurance companies and his desire to make the structure fireproof. There were also reportedly of pipes and tubes laid throughout the building. Embedded in the walls was a system of , which allowed residents and staff to communicate easily. Each apartment had a landline for long-distance calling and call bells to summon staff; there was also a hall attendant on every floor. The walls also included a system of pipes that carried freezing brine, which was characterized as an early version of an air-conditioning system. The brine pipes allowed the building to maintain a constant temperature of year-round. Many of the smaller guestrooms initially did not have kitchens because they were intended for short-term guests; instead, there were refrigerators in these units. Apartments with kitchens were equipped with .
After the Ansonia was converted to condominiums, many of the old apartments were combined. Some apartments on the south side of the building retained their original layouts in the 2010s.
By mid-1900, the ironwork had reached the fourth floor, while the facade had been built to the second floor. At the time, the building was expected to cost $800,000 and rise 14 stories. The structure was significantly taller than most of the other buildings in the vicinity, which were generally three to four stories at most. Stokes said in late 1900 that 150 people had applied for apartments at the hotel, although he had not publicly announced the building's name. Sixteen hundred workers were employed in the structure's construction by early 1901, when the hotel's facade was nearly complete. The hotel was known at the time as the Anson-Stokes, after William's grandfather, and was projected to be the world's largest hotel, beating out the old Waldorf-Astoria.
The hotel's construction was delayed by numerous Strike action, including a six-week strike among bricklayers and a two-month strike among masonry workers. After the masonry workers went on strike in May 1902, Stokes offered $1,000 to end the strike. That August, the Bank for Savings lent the Onward Construction Company $1.5 million to complete the building. The hotel's construction was delayed by numerous other labor strikes. For example, plasterers went on strike in July 1902 for six months. Carpenters and painters, plumbers, gas installers, and marble installers each went on strike for several weeks. As the building was being completed, the plasterers struck again, prompting Stokes to abandon his plans to install Caen stone in the hotel; the painters and decorators also struck after discovering that some tenants had hired decorators from a different Trade union. The strikes may have contributed to the cancellation of an 11-story stone tower at the center of the hotel, which had been proposed in early architectural drawings.
Although it was intended as an apartment hotel with long-term residents (many of whom remained there for decades), the Ansonia had many features characteristic of a transient hotel. When the Ansonia was completed, housekeeping service was offered to each apartment. Each room had 18 table napkins and 18 bath towels. Servants changed the table napkins and towels three times a day and the twice a week. Other objects such as soap, stationery, and light bulbs were cleaned or replaced regularly. Although the apartments were originally priced at $600 to $6,000 a year, some of these suites were rented for $14,000 a year. Hawes wrote that the Ansonia, with its massive size, "effectively outdid every apartment building that had preceded it". Ansonia's thick walls and large apartment sizes attracted many musicians, particularly opera singers and conductors. It also attracted gamblers, prostitutes, and other "shady characters" in its early years. As early as 1906, Stokes had rented an apartment to gangster Al Adams, who had recently been released from prison; the next year, Adams was found in his room, dead of a gunshot wound. The Ansonia also faced several lawsuits after its completion. For example, contractor Vinton Improvement Company sued Stokes for $68,000 in 1904, claiming that Stokes had failed to pay the company while the labor strikes were ongoing. Another contractor sued Stokes in 1907 for $90,000. Stokes defended himself by claiming that Duboy was in an insane asylum in Paris and that, when Duboy signed the final plans for the hotel in 1903, he was already insane and should not have been making commitments in Stokes's name concerning the hotel. A grillroom opened at the Ansonia Hotel in December 1908.
Unlike his father, Weddie never had any interest in operating the Ansonia, choosing to lease it to more experienced hotel operators instead. In May 1918, the Ansonia became part of the Bowman-Biltmore Hotels chain, operated by John McEntee Bowman. George W. Sweeney was appointed as the hotel's manager. Bowman announced plans to renovate the Ansonia for $500,000, converting 300 "non-housekeeping" suites into guestrooms with bathrooms. He also planned to renovate the ground level and add a ballroom there. The hotel began to attract sportsmen like boxer Jack Dempsey, in part because of what writer Steven Gaines described as "the Ansonia's racy reputation as a home to gamblers and spies and deposed dictators". After World War I, many New York Yankees players stayed at the Ansonia, including Babe Ruth, Bob Meusel, Lefty O'Doul, and Wally Schang. One resident, Chicago White Sox first baseman Chick Gandil, held a meeting at his apartment in which he told several teammates to intentionally lose the 1919 World Series; in the ensuing Black Sox Scandal, Gandil and his teammates were permanently banned from professional baseball.
After the Ansonia was refurbished in the early 1920s, its operators published a promotional booklet for travelers who "expect more of a hotel than just a place to sleep and leave their luggage". By 1922, the hotel was worth $6.5 million, of which the land was worth $2.65 million and the building was worth $3.85 million. At the time, Stokes's wife Helen sought to divorce him, and Helen's lawyer claimed that Stokes was intentionally undervaluing the Ansonia and was receiving tens of thousands of dollars in annual rent. The same year, federal agents raided the Ansonia after discovering that its operators were selling alcoholic beverages in violation of Prohibition-era restrictions. Although the Stokeses did not divorce, W. E. D. Stokes moved out of his apartment at the Ansonia in 1925, less than a year before his death. Edward Arlington subleased the upper levels of the hotel in January 1926. At the time, the hotel had 1,218 rooms; Arlington planned to add eight stories to the hotel, with another 1,000 rooms, but this never happened. When W. E. D. Stokes died that May, Weddie inherited the hotel, which was estimated to be worth $4.5 million.
Childs Restaurants leased the hotel's Fountain Room and ground-level bank for use as a restaurant in 1927, and Keens Chop House leased the main dining room the same year. The Onward Construction Company then leased the hotel to the Ansonia Hotel Corporation until November 1928. Zue McClary, proprietor of the Ansonia Hotel Corporation, then operated the hotel on a monthly lease from November 1928 to April 1929. McClary reportedly spent $160,000 on renovating the hotel. Although McClary claimed to have given up the hotel's lease of her own volition. her company filed for bankruptcy several months afterward. Ansco Hotel Systems Inc. took over the hotel at the beginning of May 1929, with Paul Henkel in charge. The new operators, a group of men who operated Keens Chop House, agreed to lease the hotel for 20 years for a total of $5.5 million. Walter S. Schneider was hired to design a renovation of the building costing $500,000. The plans included a gymnasium, swimming pool, ballroom, and indoor golf course. The golf course on the second floor, as well as handball courts on the roof, were unpopular and were removed shortly thereafter. The Stokes family continued to own the hotel, refusing a $14.3 million offer for the building in October 1929.
During World War II, the apartments were placed under rent control, a measure that was intended to be temporary but remained in place for half a century. In September 1942, workers began removing the Ansonia Hotel's ornamental copper cartouches and copper cornices to provide scrap metal for the U.S. military during World War II. This effort produced of scrap metal. The hotel's manager Louis Zuch had said of the copper decorations, "Before we start taking off the metal railings around parks, we should collect all our useless junk"; at the time, city officials had considered removing metal railings in Central Park. In addition, the brine pipes and pneumatic tubes were removed from the walls, and the skylight at the top of the building's main staircase was blacked out. A piece of the hotel's masonry cornice fell to the ground in 1944, killing an employee.
Dajon resold the building in April 1948 to a group of investors known as Ansonia House Inc. At the time, the Ansonia was cited as containing 476 apartments and ten stores. The building was operated by Samuel Broxmeyer, president of Ansonia House Inc., until January 1949, when Abraham I. Menin was appointed as Receivership for Broxmeyer's company. Residents claimed that Broxmeyer was significantly increasing their rent, while employees alleged that they could not cash the Cheque that they had received as salary. Federal officials also investigated claims that Broxmeyer was collecting advance rent from tenants and failing to pay his creditors; instead, he used the money to buy more apartment buildings. That February, tenants formed a committee to fight Broxmeyer's management of the building, and state and federal judges signed separate orders preventing the Ansonia's furnishings from being sold off. Menin was appointed as trustee of Ansonia House Inc. the same month. Some tenants refused to pay rent after Menin took over the Ansonia, prompting him to begin evicting these tenants that June. Broxmeyer was subsequently sentenced to five years in prison, and his assets were sold off.
Following a series of robberies at the hotel, its managers added CCTV systems to the elevators in 1960, and vigilante groups of residents began patrolling the top floors. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) began collecting photographs and other documents for several buildings, including the Ansonia, in 1963 after Fortune magazine published an article titled "Vanishing Glory in Business Buildings". At the time, the LPC did not have the power to designate buildings itself. The nonprofit organization American Music Center was headquartered at the Ansonia in the 1960s. To earn money from the hotel, Starr converted its long-abandoned basement pool to a gay bathhouse, the Continental Baths, during 1967 or 1968. The Continental Baths also hosted cabaret shows, and Bette Midler provided musical entertainment there early in her career, with Barry Manilow as her accompanist. The Continental Baths' cabaret performances attracted large crowds, especially during the weekends.
Meanwhile, the Ansonia had been reclassified as a residential hotel after the city's zoning codes were modified in 1968. Harry Garland, one of many who lived at the Ansonia, established the building's first tenants' association, the Ansonia Residents Association (ARA). Members of the ARA petitioned a state judge to freeze the Ansonia's rents until Starr had made the repairs. After the judge ruled in the ARA's favor, Garland said that "people were concerned for my safety" because Starr was furious at him.
Despite the landmark designation, the Ansonia continued to suffer from what the Times called "steadily deteriorating mechanical systems and a warren-like layout". In addition, the designation only applied to the facade, as interior-landmark designations did not yet exist. By the early 1970s, dozens of crimes were being reported at the Ansonia every year, and Starr agreed to hire security guards to protect the building 16 hours a day and install alarms and taller gates. Increasing crime had prompted tenants to patrol the corridors themselves. Residents filed multiple lawsuits against the Ansonia Holding Corporation, the building's legal owner, in an attempt to force Starr to fix the hotel's many issues. The tenants only won one lawsuit through 1978, which blocked the landlord from raising the rent by 13 percent between 1976 and 1977. One tenant claimed the pipes were so dirty that she had to run her faucet for half an hour before taking a bath. while another tenant said that constant flooding had damaged a light socket in her apartment.
The Continental Baths in the basement had closed by 1973. When Starr died, his heirs also sought to sell the building, but they could not do so without first fixing the building-code issues. The New York City Conciliation and Appeals Board (CAB) placed a rent freeze on 500 rent-regulated apartments at the Ansonia in 1976, having received multiple complaints from tenants. The Plato's Retreat club opened at the hotel in late 1977. The club routinely attracted over 250 couples per night but did not allow single men to enter. As a result, men began loitering outside a pornographic shop at the building's base, which prompted the owners to close the 74th Street entrance to the building for security reasons. In addition, during the late 1970s, many , , and Mediumship began moving into the building.
Krasnow had spent $21 million on renovations by 1980; he had created a $4 million reserve fund for the building, and he opened a 100-space parking garage in the basement to provide income for the Ansonia. Even so, Krasnow continued to face considerable opposition from residents. The owners had renovated the 12th-floor hallway with and two types of wallpaper and carpeting, intending to extend these design features to the rest of the interior. Existing residents disliked these changes so much that they asked the LPC to designate the building's interior as a city landmark. An article in The Village Voice, documenting the changes, was published under the headline "Barbarians Rape the Ansonia". Residents and officials also raised concerns that the Ansonia was being classified as a residential hotel despite no longer providing hotel services. As such, residents requested that the city's CAB recategorize the building as an apartment house.
The CAB unfroze rents for 333 apartments in early 1980 after the owners had announced their intentions to repair these apartments. The CAB unfroze each apartment's rent after that unit had been repaired. Krasnow then notified each tenant of the rent increase, to which the tenants had 72 hours to respond. The owners indicated that they would raise these apartments' rents by 46 percent, to make up for rent increases that had been deferred during the rent freeze, but some tenants received a 300 percent rent increase. This prompted the ARA to begin a rent strike in March 1980, making their rent payments to an escrow account. Some of the tenants were unable to pay the increased rates, as they were retired and lived on Social Security payments. The owners and the ARA settled their dispute in February 1981. The settlement limited the extent to which the rents could be raised, provided tenants with rent abatements and concessions, and placed restrictions on the scope of the renovations. A group of dissenting residents, led by Thomas Soja, formed the Ansonia Tenants Coalition (ATC). Members of the ATC also paid rent into an escrow account, then sued Krasnow using the interest collected from that account.
The New York City Department of Sanitation fined the Ansonia's owners $400,000 in 1988 for failing to remove asbestos from the building, as was required under city law. Ansonia Associates had completed several aspects of the renovation by early 1990. These included a new boiler room; upgraded telephone and wiring systems; repairs to the roof; and addition of storm windows. The building also experienced several major incidents during this time. For example, a resident died in a fire in January 1990. That March, one person was killed and 16 others were injured after the plaster ceiling of a croissant shop at the Ansonia's ground level collapsed. An investigation found that the collapsed ceiling had supported the weight of a false ceiling and mechanical equipment that had been installed in the 1980s; the original ceiling had been further weakened when contractors drilled holes to install pipes and wiring.
Meanwhile, Krasnow began buying out the tenants who had most strongly opposed the condo-conversion plan. In 1990, the tenants and Ansonia Associates finally agreed on a condo offering plan, wherein they could either buy or continue to rent their apartments. Tenants who wished to buy their apartments would pay 60 percent below market rates; for a one-bedroom apartment, this equated to $125,000, although many tenants could not afford even the discounted price. Ansonia Associates initially proposed selling 50 condos for between $101,000 and $939,000, and they planned to spend between $9 million and $11 million on further renovations. The proposed renovations included restoration of the lobby, sitting rooms, and elevators; adding kitchens; adding ventilation ducts and fans to 250 units; and replacing the electrical distribution system, The main entrance on 73rd Street, a porte-cochère, would be restored. The Ansonia Tenants Association agreed to the proposal, but the Ansonia Tenants Coalition did not want the conversion to proceed until the building-code violations had been fixed.
Condo sales lagged until the late 1990s. Ansonia Associates had sold 60 apartments by 1996, at which point it had hired Zeckendorf Realty to market the building; Zeckendorf opened a sales office with three employees. The American Society of Interior Designers' New York City chapter was also hired to design four model apartments for the Ansonia, each of which was designed for a specific buyer. The Tower Records store at the Ansonia's base had closed by 1997, when Ansonia Associates was negotiating with The Food Emporium to open a store at the building. Some of the building's apartments were combined over the years after tenants had died or relocated. By the late 1990s, the building had 410 apartments, compared with 520 before the condominium conversion had started. The Food Emporium store at the building's base opened in late 1998.
The building continued to face lawsuits over the years, and it had been the subject of more than 800 lawsuits by 2014. For instance, a resident sued the Ansonia's managers in 2007, alleging that the building was infested with cockroaches, and a family sued their neighbor over cigarette smoke the next year. Nonetheless, by 2011, the Times reported that prices at the Ansonia, and at other condominiums on the Upper West Side, were higher than at housing cooperatives along Central Park. Apartments continued to be sold for millions of dollars, although 27 apartments were sold between 2009 and 2014 for less than $500,000. Some rent-regulated tenants also remained in the building.
After the building was converted to condominiums in the 1990s, it began to attract lawyers, doctors, and financiers. One writer for the Times wrote in 1985 that the "Ansonia has probably gotten as much panache from the names who have lived there as it has gained from its own name". Over the years, residents have included:
The building has been depicted in several media works. The facade was used as a set for the 2012 TV show 666 Park Avenue, whose producer David Wilcox said he had been attracted by the building's "absolutely fascinating" history. Its facade was also depicted in the TV show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, standing in for the fictional "Dansonia". In addition, the Ansonia has been used as a setting or filming location for movies such as The Sunshine Boys (1975), Three Days of the Condor (1975), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Life and Nothing But (1989), Single White Female (1992), Uptown Girls (2003), and Perfect Stranger (2007). Rod McKuen included a song titled "Full Moon Over the Ansonia Hotel" on his 1977 album Slide... Easy In.Luca Locati Luciani9788897637226, Vololibero. ISBN 9788897637226
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