Ansonia Hotel
The Ansonia is a building on the Upper West Side of New York City, located at 2109 Broadway, between West 73rd and West 74th Streets. It was originally built as a residential hotel by William Earle Dodge Stokes, the Phelps-Dodge copper heir and share holder in the Ansonia Clock Company, and it was named for his grandfather, the industrialist Anson Greene Phelps. In 1899, Stokes commissioned architect Paul E. Duboy (1857–1907) to build the grandest hotel in Manhattan.
Stokes would list himself as "architect-in-chief" for the project and hired Duboy, a sculptor who designed and made the ornamental sculptures on the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, to draw up the plans. New Orleans architect Martin Shepard served as draftsman and assistant superintendent of construction on the project. A contractor sued Stokes in 1907, but he would defend himself, explaining that Duboy was in an insane asylum in Paris and should not have been making commitments in Stokes's name concerning the hotel.
In what might be the earliest harbinger of the current developments in urban farming, Stokes established a small farm on the roof of the hotel.
- Stokes had a Utopian vision for the Ansonia-that it could be self-sufficient, or at least contribute to its own support-which led to perhaps the strangest New York apartment amenity ever. "The farm on the roof," Weddie Stokes wrote years later, "included about 500 chickens, many ducks, about six goats and a small bear." Every day, a bellhop delivered free fresh eggs to all the tenants, and any surplus was sold cheaply to the public in the basement arcade. Not much about this feature charmed the city fathers, however, and in 1907, the Department of Health shut down the farm in the sky.
History
The Ansonia was a residential hotel. The residents lived in luxurious apartments with multiple bedrooms, parlors, libraries, and formal dining rooms that were often round or oval. Apartments featured sweeping views north and south along Broadway, high ceilings, elegant moldings, and bay windows. The Ansonia also had a few small units, one bedroom, parlor and bath; these lacked kitchens. There was a central kitchen and serving kitchens on every floor, so that the residents could enjoy the services of professional chefs while dining in their own apartments. Besides the usual array of tearooms, restaurants, and a grand ballroom, the Ansonia had Turkish baths and a lobby fountain with live seals.
Erected between 1899 and 1904, it was the first air conditioned hotel in New York. The building has an 18-story steel frame structure. The exterior is decorated in the Beaux-Art style with a Parisian style Mansard roof. A striking architectural feature is the round corner towers or turrets. Unusually for a Manhattan building, the Ansonia features an open stairwell that sweeps up to a huge, domed skylight. The interior corridors may be the widest in the city. The building has the unusual feature of possessing a cattle elevator, this enabled milk cows to live on the roof.
It has had many special guests, as the baseball champion Babe Ruth, the writer Theodore Dreiser, Arturo Toscanini the composer Igor Stravinsky, and the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, who chose this Hotel because of its thick walls. For several years Stokes kept some farm animals on the building's roof next to his personal apartment.
By mid-century, the grand apartments had mostly been divided into studios and one-bedroom units almost all of which retained their original architectural detail.
After a short debate in the 1960s, a proposal to demolish the building was fought off by its many musical and artistic residents.
In 1992 the Ansonia was converted to a condominium apartment building with 430 apartments. By 2007 most of the rent-controlled tenants had moved out, and the small apartments were sold to buyers who purchased clusters of small apartments and threw them together to recreate the grand apartments of the building's glory days, with carefully restored Beaux Arts detail. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Commerce Bank branch on the ground level plays a documentary covering the history of the Ansonia. The short video is played in the front of the entrance in the bank.
Movies, Books, Scandals and Stars
A video of Bett Midler singing at the Continental Baths with Barry Manilow on the piano can be found here [1]
- In 1916, the Ansonia was the scene of a blackmail plot. Edward R. West, Vice President of the C. D. Gregg Tea and Coffee Company of Chicago, had checked into the hotel with a woman known to him as Alice Williams. Alice Williams was an alias of Helen Godman, also known as "Buda" Godman, who acted as the "lure" for a blackmail gang based in Chicago. West and Godman were together in their room at The Ansonia when two male members of the gang, impersonating Federal law enforcement agents, entered the room and "arrested" West for violation of the Mann Act.
- After transporting West and Godman back to Chicago, West was coerced into paying the two "agents" $15,000 in order to avoid prosecution, and avoid embarrassment or soiling the reputation of "Alice." West reported the incident after becoming suspicious that not everything was as it seemed. Several of the male blackmailers earned prison terms, but "Buda" Godman was released on bail. She disappeared for many years, but she was eventually caught and charged for trying to fence the Glemby Jewels taken in a 1932 robbery
- The Ansonia housed the famous gay sex club, Continental Baths and Plato's Retreat, a heterosexual swing club, in its basement during the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. Bette Midler famously started her singing career at the Continental Baths.
- The Ansonia is said to have been the inspiration for the Hotel Gloriana in the Saul Bellow novel Seize The Day, although the Ansonia itself is mentioned as visible from the Gloriana. The basement bathhouse is just an ordinary pool and steambath facility, not a sex club.
- The Ansonia was also used as the apartment building Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh were supposed to have lived in the 1992 film Single White Female. The Apartment scenes were filmed in a studio but the stairwell scenes were actually filmed in the hotel.
- In The Sunshine Boys, Walter Matthau lived in The Ansonia.
- In Perfect Stranger, Halle Berry plays a news reporter who lives in a "professionally decorated $4 million condo in the lavish Ansonia building on the Upper West Side."
- A key player in the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, the Chicago White Sox first baseman Chick Gandil had an apartment at the Ansonia. According to Eliot Asinof, in his book Eight Men Out, Gandil held a meeting in the Ansonia apartment with his White Sox teammates to recruit them for the scheme to intentionally lose the 1919 World Series.
- "It looks like a baroque palace from Prague or Munich enlarged a hundred times, with towers, domes, huge swells of metal gone green from exposure, iron fretwork and festoons. Black television antennae are densely planted on its round summits. Under the changes of weather it may look like marble or sea water, black as slate in the fog, white as tufa in sunlight," observed novelist Saul Bellow in his 1956 book, "Seize The Day."
- Willie Sutton the bank robber, was arrested at Child's Restaurant in the Ansonia.
- The characters in the HBO show Don't say a Word live in the Ansonia. [2]
- Famous former residents include Teresa Stratas, Geraldine Farrar, Feodor Chaliapin, Lauritz Melchior, (who Selwen maintained "practiced archery in the 110-foot corridors"), Ezio Pinza, Lily Pons, musicians Arturo Toscanini, Igor Stravinksy, Mischa Elman, Yehudi Menuhin and impresarios Florenz Ziegfeld and Sol Hurok, authors Theodore Dreiser, Cornell Woolrich, and Elmer Rice, athletes Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth, mobster Arnold Rothstein and actress Angelina Jolie.
- Photo of Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey in Ruth's apartment at the Ansonia, [3]
Ghosts
The most common story has to do with the elevators. People claim that they have seen an elevator door open to reveal two couples, the men wearing tail coats and top hats, the ladies dressed for the evening in Edwardian style. They are said to invite you to come with them to "the party." It is said that when the door closes the elevator goes up.
Some residents claim to have witnessed a party taking place on the seventeenth floor. This was built as a floor of servants' quarters, but it is now a residential floor with interestingly shaped apartments, frequently with porthole-style windows and fabulous views. The ghosts attending the party are said to be very friendly.
References
External links
- Condominium home page
- History and pictures
- Images and history at
- tom fletcher's new york architecture images and notes
- Picture at New York Skyscrapers
- The Upper West Side Book
- Steven Gaines, "The Building of the Upper West Side", New York Real Estate
- Mary K. Fons, "Inside the Ansonia, A New York Classic", New York Real Estate
- The Building of the Upper West Side
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