The Ansonia

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, New York, United States. 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...