The Ansonia
The Ansonia 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, light courts 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 pneumatic tubes 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 with a swimming pool, which in the late 20th century housed a gay bathhouse called the Continental Baths and later, 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.
Site
The Ansonia is at 2109 Broadway, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. It occupies the eastern end of a trapezoidal city block bounded by Broadway to the east, 74th Street to the north, West End Avenue to the west, and 73rd Street to the south. The land lot covers. The site has frontage of about on 74th Street, on Broadway, and on 73rd Street. It occupies what was originally 42 land lots. The Ansonia is on a curved section of Broadway, which runs diagonally to the Manhattan street grid to the south, but which parallels other avenues to the north. Prior to the development of larger structures on Broadway, the building was originally visible from as far south as 59th Street and as far north as 105th Street.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.
Architecture
The Ansonia was built as a residential hotel and is designed in the Beaux-Arts style, with ornamentation such as brackets, moldings, scrolls, and medallions. Its developer, William Earl Dodge Stokes, listed himself as "architect-in-chief" for the project and hired French architect Paul Emile Duboy to draw up the plans. Duboy made only one set of drawings before Stokes demoted him to a draftsman, and it is not known how much of the Ansonia's final design is derived from Duboy's original plans, as Stokes modified them later. The New Orleans architect Martin Shepard served as draftsman and assistant superintendent of construction, while George Vassar's Son & Co. built the structure. The building was named for industrialist Anson Green Phelps, the developer's grandfather.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, 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.
Form and facade
The Ansonia measures about. The building includes turrets with cupolas at its corners and light courts along each side. Early drawings also called for a large tower at the building's center, but this was dropped in the final design. There are two light courts each on 73rd and 74th Streets and one light court along Broadway. This gives the building an irregular "H" shape, which allowed each guestroom, suite, and apartment to receive as much natural light as possible.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 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 French windows 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 quoins 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 finials and widow's walk rooftop platforms.
Features
When the Ansonia opened in the 1900s, it covered. Sources disagree on the size of the hotel, which has been variously cited as having 1,400 guestrooms and 340 suites, or 1,218 guestrooms and 400 suites. One source described the hotel as having 2,500 total rooms. There were about 400 full bathrooms and about 600 additional sinks and toilets; at the time of the Ansonia's construction, it was the largest-ever plumbing contract. Of the 340 original apartments 222 were classified as housekeeping suites, whose residents could hire one or two servants who lived in the apartment. The modern-day Ansonia has 425 apartments, as well as a garage and a rooftop terrace.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.
Mechanical features
The hotel contained about of pipe, about ten times as much as in similarly sized office buildings. The pipes carried gas; hot, cold, and iced water; electrical wiring; and sewage. The boilers had a total capacity of. The building had its own power plant with coal-fired generators. The power plant occupied one-fourth of the basement. The Ansonia also included an air-filtration plant, which drew air from the western side of the building; the air was filtered, heated in the sub-basement, and distributed to each room through pipes in the walls. Air was ventilated from a flue on the roof.There were originally six elevators for guests, two elevators for housekeepers, two freight elevators, and numerous dumbwaiters. Although the Otis Elevator Company 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.
Public areas
In the basement was a shopping arcade with a butcher, a barber, and a laundry room. There was also a theater, bakery, a milk shop, hairdressers' salons, cold-storage vaults, safe-deposit vaults, and a vehicular garage, in addition to a liquor store and milliners' shop. The basement reportedly had the world's largest indoor swimming pool at the time of the Ansonia's completion, The swimming pool was cited as measuring either or. The Continental Baths, a gay bathhouse operated by Steve Ostrow, began operating within the Ansonia's basement in 1967 or 1968. The bathhouse had "private encounter rooms", a sauna, a massage parlor, and Turkish baths. From 1977 to 1980, the Ansonia's basement housed Plato's Retreat, a club for heterosexual couples characterized in The New York Times as a swingers' sex club. The space was accessed by a mirrored staircase, and also featured a 60-person Jacuzzi, an "orgy room", a dance floor, and private rooms. In the 1990s, the basement was converted into storefront space.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.