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 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.[2] 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.[3][4]
In what might be the earliest harbinger of the
current developments in urban farming,[5]
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.[6]
Contents
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 eighteen-story steel-frame
structure. Upon its completion in 1904 The Ansonia was the largest residential
hotel of its day. The exterior is decorated in the Beaux-Art style with a Parisian style mansard roof.
Striking architectural features are the round corner-towers or turrets. Unusual
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.
For several years Stokes kept farm animals on the building’s roof next to his
personal apartment. Another unusual feature of the building is its cattle
elevator, which enabled dairy cows to be stabled on the roof.[7]
The building’s original, elaborate copper cornices
were removed during World War II and melted down for the war effort.[8]
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. In
1980, the then Mayor Ed Koch shut the club down due to health concerns for
public safety. Prior to Plato’s Retreat, the building housed the Continental
Baths, a gay bathhouse where Bette
Midler provided musical entertainment early in her career, with Barry
Manilow as her accompanist.[citation needed].[9][10][11] It
was added to the National Register of Historic
Places in 1980.[1]
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 details.
The TD
Bank branch on the ground level plays a short video documentary near the main
entrance to the bank, which covers the history of the Ansonia.
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.[12]
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.[13] She
disappeared for many years, but she was eventually caught and charged for
trying to fence the Glemby Jewels taken in a 1932 robbery.[14]
·
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.[15]
In popular culture
·
It was featured in the film Single White Female (1992) starring Bridget
Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh.
·
It was featured in the
film My Super Ex-Girlfriend
(2006) starring Uma Thurman and Luke Wilson.
·
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.”[16]
·
The Ansonia was the basis for the fictional
Balmoral building in Jed Rubenfeld’s literary novel The Interpretation of
Murder (2006).
·
In the film Three Days of the Condor (1975), the
alley behind the hotel is used as a rendezvous for Robert
Redford‘s character, which becomes an ambush for a failed assassination.
·
In the film The Sunshine Boys (1975), Walter
Matthau‘s character has an apartment in the building.
Notable residents
Famous former residents include:
·
Artist Clemens
Weiss
·
Ballerina Suzanne Farrell[18]
·
Cartoonist and Disney Animator Walt Kelly
·
Fashion designer Koos van den Akker (1980-1992)
·
Opera stars Feodor
Chaliapin, Italian baritone Giuseppe Danise , Geraldine
Farrar, Lauritz Melchior (famed Metropolitan Opera tenor who “practiced archery
in the 110-foot (34 m) corridors”[19]), Ezio Pinza,
Lily Pons,
Eleanor
Steber, and Teresa Stratas
·
Actress and Emmy-winning writer Clarice
Blackburn
Famous present resident
include:
·
NSF award-winning scientist Elizabeth Dogue Hicks
·
Duchess of York Allison Harrington
Education
Children living in the
Ansonia are eligible to attend schools run by the New York
City Department of Education.
The building is zoned to P.S. 87, the
William Sherman School, but it is unzoned for
middle school. Residents of the Ansonia may contact Region 10 to determine the
middle-school assignments.
See also
References
·
The Cardinals, The Ansonia: A Pictorial
History of Manhattan’s Beaux-Arts Masterpiece (New York City: Campfire
Network, 2015), ISBN
0692420576.
·
The Cardinals, The Ansonia: Images &
Memories of one of the Largest, Handsomest and Most Complete Apartment Hotels
in the World! (New York City: Campfire Network, 2015), ISBN
978-0692421727.
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