The Ansonia

The Ansonia is a building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, located at 2109 Broadway, between 73rd and 74th Streets. It was originally built as a residential hotel by William Earle Dodge Stokes, the Phelps-Dodge copper heir and shareholder in the Ansonia Clock Company, and it was named after his grandfather, the industrialist Anson Greene Phelps. In 1897, Stokes commissioned French architect Paul Emile Duboy to design the grandest hotel in Manhattan.

Design

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 views north and south along Broadway, high ceilings, "elegant" moldings, and bay windows. There were three thousand rooms. Arrangements could be made to rent a suite varying in size from a room and a bath to thirty rooms. Some of these suites were rented for $14,000 a year, the equivalent of more than $400,000 in 2018. The smaller units, with one bedroom, parlor, and bath, 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.

William Earle Dodge Stokes listed himself as "architect-in-chief" for the project and hired Paul Emile Duboy, a French architect 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. The assignee of the contractor proceed against Stokes in 1907, suing for $90,000. But Stokes defended himself, explaining that Duboy was in an insane asylum in Paris, and it was his belief that he was insane when, in 1903, he signed the final certificate on the plans, and should not have been making commitments in Stokes's name concerning the hotel.

Stokes established a small farm on the roof of the hotel, where he kept farm animals next to his personal apartment. There was a cattle elevator, which enabled dairy cows to be stabled on the roof. ''Note:'' This includes an
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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. The feature was not popular with the city government, however, and the Department of Health shut it down in 1907.

History

Erected between 1899 and 1904, it was the largest residential hotel of its day and the first air-conditioned hotel in New York. The building has an eighteen-story steel-frame structure. The exterior is decorated in the Beaux-Art style with a Parisian style mansard roof. The Ansonia features round corner-towers or turrets and an open stairwell that sweeps up to a domed skylight.

The building's copper cornices were removed during World War II and melted down for the war effort.

The Ansonia has had many celebrated residents, including baseball player Babe Ruth; writer Theodore Dreiser, in 1912; the leader of the Bahá'í Faith `Abdu'l-Bahá; Nobel prize winner in literature Isaac Bashevitz Singer; conductor Arturo Toscanini; composer Igor Stravinsky; fashion designer Koos van den Akker; and Italian tenor Enrico Caruso.

By the mid-twentieth-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.

From 1977 until 1980, The Ansonia Hotel's basement was home to Plato's Retreat, an open door swinger sex club. Prior to Plato's Retreat, the building housed the Continental Baths, operated by Steve Ostrow, a gay bathhouse where Bette Midler provided musical entertainment early in her career, with Barry Manilow as her accompanist.

In 1980, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

In 1992, the Ansonia was converted to a condominium apartment building with 430 apartments. By 2007, most of the rent-controlled apartment tenants had moved out, and the small apartments were sold to buyers who purchased clusters of small apartments and combined them to recreate grand apartments.

The Ansonia is home to part of the New York campus of the American Musical and Dramatic Academy.

Scandals

* 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 $10,000 bail. Skipping bail, she disappeared for many years, but was eventually caught and charged for trying to fence the Glemby Jewels taken in a 1932 robbery.
* 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.
* Willie Sutton, the bank robber, was arrested for the sixth time (of eight) two days before Thanksgiving, 1930, while having breakfast at Childs Restaurant in the Ansonia.

In popular culture

* In the film '' Perfect Stranger'' (2007), 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."
* The building was used in the 2012 TV show ''666 Park Avenue''.

Notable residents

* ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, son and chosen successor of Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of the Bahá’í Faith
*Italian baritone Giuseppe Danise
*Operatic Soprano Teresa Stratas
* Fashion photographer Deborah Turbeville
* Lauritz Melchior (Metropolitan Opera tenor who "practiced archery in the corridors")
* Lily Pons
* Martin Charles Ansorge (1882–1967), United States Representative from New York
* Stage actor James T. Powers
* Babe Ruth
* Vincent La Selva, conductor and founder of the New York Grand Opera
*Clemens Weiss, German Artist

See also

* List of former hotels in Manhattan
* National Register of Historic Places listings in Manhattan below 14th Street
* List of New York City Designated Landmarks in Manhattan below 14th Street

References

External links

History and pictures
The City Review.com

Steven Gaines, "The Building of the Upper West Side,"
''New York Magazine'', May 21, 2005.


''The Cooperator'', September 2005.

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Apartment buildings in New York City
Bowman-Biltmore Hotels
Broadway (Manhattan)
Condominiums and housing cooperatives in Manhattan
Defunct hotels in Manhattan
Hotel buildings completed in 1904
New York City Designated Landmarks in Manhattan
Residential buildings on the National Register of Historic Places in Manhattan
Residential skyscrapers in Manhattan
Upper West Side