The Ansonia: New York's Most Extravagant Address

There is a building on Broadway between 73rd and 74th Streets that stops people on the sidewalk. Not because it is the tallest thing on the block, though it is substantial, and not because it is the most recent, though it has been restored. It stops people because it is preposterously, magnificently, unapologetically too much — a seventeen-story Beaux-Arts confection of limestone and terracotta, with turrets and balconies and oriel windows and a rounded corner tower, bristling with ornament from the second floor to the roofline, standing on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as though it arrived from Paris by mistake and simply stayed.

The Ansonia Hotel has been stopping people on that sidewalk since 1904. It has housed opera singers and baseball players and sex therapists and jazz musicians and Nobel laureates and one very famous chicken farmer, and it has been, at various points in its history, the finest residential hotel in New York, a crumbling monument to a vanished era, the most acoustically desirable address in the city, and the location of the most notorious private sex club in American history. It has never, in any of these incarnations, been easy to ignore.

The Building

Architecture

The Ansonia was designed by the French-born architect Paul Emile Duboy in partnership with William Earl Graves and completed in 1904. Duboy had trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and the building shows it: the Ansonia is Beaux-Arts in the most literal sense, not merely a stylistic borrowing but the direct application of French Second Empire and Beaux-Arts principles to a corner site on Broadway, as though Duboy had mentally transported a Paris apartment block to Manhattan and then enlarged it.

The structure is seventeen stories of steel-frame construction — then a relatively recent technology — clad entirely in limestone and buff brick, with the upper floors treated in terracotta of great elaboration. The massing is complex: the building occupies its full lot, with a rounded corner tower at 73rd and Broadway that anchors the composition visually, two secondary towers rising from the roofline, and a continuous profusion of balconies, bay windows, and oriel projections that breaks the facade into constant movement. There are no long flat stretches of wall. Every surface is doing something.

The ornamental programme is Baroque in its density and Beaux-Arts in its vocabulary: cartouches, swags, keystones, pilasters, console brackets, decorative ironwork balconies, and terracotta panels filling the spaces between the windows with a thoroughness that approaches the medieval in its refusal to leave anything plain. The roofline, in particular, is extraordinary — the two corner towers, each differently topped, the elaborate cornice between them, the mansard-influenced treatment of the top floors — a skyline silhouette that rewards examination from a distance as well as close.

The building's footprint covers most of the block between 73rd and 74th Streets, with Broadway on the west side and a secondary facade on 73rd Street. The main entrance, on Broadway, opens into a lobby of considerable grandeur that has been restored multiple times over the building's history and continues to evoke, even in its current residential-hotel configuration, something of the scale and ambition of the original public rooms.

Construction and the Man Behind It

The Ansonia was built by William Earle Dodge Stokes, a real estate developer and heir to the Phelps Dodge copper fortune, who commissioned the building as a residential hotel of the highest order at a time when the Upper West Side was still establishing itself as a serious alternative to the Upper East Side. Stokes was eccentric in ways that the building reflects: he kept a rooftop farm during the Ansonia's early years, with chickens, ducks, goats, and, reportedly, a pet bear, the products of which were sold to residents at a slight discount. The bear was eventually removed after it became a nuisance; the chickens lasted longer.

Stokes intended the Ansonia as the grandest residential hotel in New York — grander than the Plaza, more ambitious than the Waldorf, the definitive address for the wealthy Upper West Sider who wanted both the space of a private apartment and the services of a first-class hotel. The building was designed accordingly: not just apartments and corridors but a full range of hotel amenities, including a swimming pool, a ballroom, a Turkish bath, a restaurant, shops, and every modern convenience then available to the New York well-to-do.

The Acoustics

The feature that has most defined the Ansonia's cultural life is one that was not necessarily planned as such: the building's extraordinary acoustic isolation. The walls of the Ansonia are massively thick — in some places over two feet of brick and concrete — and the building contains virtually no parallel interior surfaces, which means that sound generated in one apartment does not travel to the next. Where a standard apartment building provides its occupants with unwanted access to their neighbours' arguments and music and domestic arrangements, the Ansonia provides near-total silence.

For musicians, and especially for singers, this is not an amenity but a necessity. Opera singers at the turn of the century — and through much of the twentieth century — needed to practise for hours daily at full voice, which is to say at volumes that would make ordinary residential occupancy impossible. The Ansonia was known, within a few years of its opening, as the building where singers could practise without complaint or apology, and that reputation attracted a concentration of musical talent that has never been fully replicated at any other address in New York.

The same acoustic quality that suited opera singers eventually suited recording studios, and the basement of the Ansonia housed a succession of recording facilities through the mid-twentieth century that recorded, among many others, Benny Goodman and Gloria Gaynor. The Continental Baths, which occupied the basement in the 1970s and to which we will return, also benefited from the acoustic properties that allowed live performances at volumes that would have been impossible elsewhere.

The Neighbourhood

The Ansonia sits on Broadway at 73rd Street, which places it in the heart of what New Yorkers understand by the Upper West Side — the neighbourhood bounded roughly by 59th and 110th Streets, Central Park to the east, Riverside Drive to the west, and by a set of cultural associations that have accumulated over more than a century: Jewish intellectual life, classical music, Columbia University, progressive politics, independent bookstores, the Zabar's deli counter.

The Upper West Side at the Turn of the Century

When the Ansonia opened in 1904, the Upper West Side was in the middle of its first great transformation. The completion of the Ninth Avenue elevated railway in 1879 and, more importantly, the IRT subway line under Broadway in 1904 — the same year the Ansonia opened — made the neighbourhood accessible from Midtown and downtown in a way that the remote geography of Manhattan's west side had previously prevented. The result was a building boom of considerable intensity.

The Dakota, at 72nd Street and Central Park West, had opened in 1884 and demonstrated that a luxury residential building on the west side of Central Park could attract the city's wealthiest residents. The Ansonia, opening two decades later and twice the size, was a deliberate amplification of that argument: the Upper West Side was not merely acceptable for the New York upper class but, with the right building, could rival anything on Fifth Avenue.

The stretch of Broadway in the 70s and 80s where the Ansonia stands developed rapidly in the early twentieth century into one of the most densely cultural blocks in the city. The Beacon Theatre, a few blocks north, opened in 1929. Symphony Space, at 95th Street, would come later. The concentration of musicians, performers, and cultural professionals that the Ansonia attracted spilled into the neighbourhood's restaurants, cafes, and rehearsal spaces, creating an ecosystem of musical and theatrical life that defined the Upper West Side for decades.

The Neighbourhood Today

The Upper West Side neighbourhood around the Ansonia today is the product of that accumulated history, adjusted by the gentrification of the 1990s and 2000s that raised rents, changed the commercial character of Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues, and replaced many of the neighbourhood's more eccentric institutions with the standard equipment of prosperous Manhattan: yoga studios, farm-to-table restaurants, organic groceries. But the bones remain: the West Side YMCA, Zabar's, the Beacon Theatre, the dense concentration of cultural institutions between 59th and 110th Streets, and the buildings themselves — the Dakota, the San Remo, the Majestic, the Ansonia — that give Central Park West and Broadway their particular architectural character.

The Ansonia anchors its block on Broadway with a presence that the surrounding buildings — competent, well-maintained, but ordinary — do not come close to matching. Standing on the opposite side of Broadway and looking at the building, you are looking at something that belongs to a different scale of architectural ambition than most of what surrounds it.

Famous Residents

The Ansonia's roster of former residents is long enough and varied enough to constitute a kind of cultural history of New York in the twentieth century.

The Singers

The building's musical reputation began with its acoustic properties and was cemented by the early arrival of several major figures in the operatic world.

Enrico Caruso, the most famous tenor of his era and arguably the most famous opera singer of the twentieth century, lived at the Ansonia during his years performing at the Metropolitan Opera, which was then a short walk away at 39th and Broadway. Caruso's voice — famously the first great operatic voice to be captured adequately on early phonograph recordings — was precisely the kind that required acoustic isolation to practise freely, and the Ansonia provided it. His presence attracted others.

Fyodor Chaliapin, the Russian bass whose interpretations of Boris Godunov and Mephistopheles defined those roles for a generation, also lived at the Ansonia, as did Geraldine Farrar, the American soprano who was one of the Metropolitan Opera's principal stars in the first two decades of the century and one of the first opera singers to achieve genuine celebrity outside the traditional operatic audience.

The tradition of singers at the Ansonia continued well into the mid-century and beyond. The building's acoustic properties did not diminish with time, and the reputation it had established among musicians maintained the concentration of musical residents long after the original generation had gone.

The Athletes

Babe Ruth lived at the Ansonia during his years with the New York Yankees, a period that produced some of the most celebrated statistics in the history of American sport. The Sultan of Swat — who hit 714 home runs over his career, a record that stood for nearly forty years — required, apparently, the same kind of domestic privacy that the Ansonia's thick walls provided to its musical residents. The building was, in this sense, equally suited to a man whose professional life was conducted in front of tens of thousands of people and who needed, when he went home, not to hear his neighbours.

Lou Gehrig, Ruth's teammate and the man whose consecutive games record of 2,130 games stood for fifty-six years until Cal Ripken Jr. broke it in 1995, also had an association with the Ansonia, making the building — improbably — a site significant to the history of the New York Yankees as well as the Metropolitan Opera.

The Writers and Intellectuals

Theodore Dreiser, whose novel Sister Carrie (1900) had established him as one of the defining voices of American literary naturalism, lived at the Ansonia during a period of his New York years. Dreiser's work — the unsentimental depiction of urban poverty and the mechanisms of social aspiration — was written, in part, in a building that represented the pinnacle of the social world his characters were struggling to enter.

Igor Stravinsky maintained a residence at the Ansonia during his American years, the period following his emigration in 1939 when the composer who had written The Rite of Spring and The Firebird was writing his late neoclassical works in New York. The building's acoustic properties were, for Stravinsky as for the opera singers, a practical necessity; for the residents sharing the building with him, they were a protection.

The Athletes of a Different Kind

Jack Dempsey, the heavyweight boxing champion who held the world title from 1919 to 1926 and whose fights attracted some of the largest crowds in sports history, lived at the Ansonia during his championship years. Dempsey's presence added to the building's reputation as the residence of people whose public lives were conducted at a scale that most apartments could not accommodate.

The Later History

Decline and the Mid-Century

The Ansonia's first era as the grandest residential hotel in New York lasted through the 1920s and into the early Depression years, after which the economics of maintaining a first-class hotel in a neighbourhood that was gradually changing proved increasingly difficult. The building transitioned through various ownership structures and operational models across the middle decades of the century, and the physical condition of the building — never easy to maintain, given the complexity of the facade and the scale of the public spaces — deteriorated in ways that the original investment had not anticipated.

By the 1950s and 1960s, the Ansonia was no longer a first-class hotel but remained a residential building of considerable distinction, its apartments occupied by a mix of long-term residents, musicians, and others for whom the acoustic properties remained the primary recommendation. The building's fabric was in partial decline; several of the original public amenities had been closed or converted; but the essential character — the scale, the ornament, the thick-walled silence — remained intact.

The Continental Baths

In 1968, the basement of the Ansonia was converted into the Continental Baths, a gay bathhouse that became one of the most significant and celebrated venues in the New York gay community of the late 1960s and 1970s. The Continental Baths was not, by the standards of the era, an unusual kind of establishment — gay bathhouses existed throughout the city — but it distinguished itself by its scale, its ambition, and its entertainment programme.

The Continental Baths regularly booked live performers to entertain its clientele, and among the performers who appeared there was Bette Midler, accompanied by her pianist and arranger Barry Manilow. Midler's performances at the Continental Baths — campy, exuberant, theatrically fearless, addressed directly and without condescension to an audience that mainstream entertainment did not acknowledge — became legendary in the gay community and eventually attracted a broader audience that recognized something genuinely new in the performer's sensibility. The engagement launched both Midler's and Manilow's careers.

The Continental Baths closed in 1976. In 1977 the space was converted into Plato's Retreat, a heterosexual sex club operated by Larry Levenson that became, through the late 1970s, one of the most written-about institutions of the sexual liberation era — featured in mainstream publications, visited by journalists, academics, and curious civilians, a product of a specific cultural moment that ended with the AIDS epidemic and the closing of Plato's Retreat in 1985. The combination of these two successive establishments in the same basement of the same building makes the Ansonia's lower level one of the more extraordinary spaces in the cultural history of New York.

Restoration and Conversion

The Ansonia's exterior restoration — a complex and expensive undertaking given the elaboration of the terracotta and limestone facade — was completed in stages across the 1980s and 1990s, returning the building to something approaching its original appearance. The work required the replacement and repair of thousands of individual terracotta units, the restoration of the ironwork balconies, and extensive work on the limestone surfaces that had deteriorated over eight decades of New York weather.

The building's interior was converted during this period from its hotel configuration to luxury condominiums and rental apartments, a transformation that has been made across many of New York's former grand hotels as the economics of residential ownership have become more favorable than hotel operation. The conversion retained the building's public character at street level while subdividing the upper floors into individual apartments whose thick walls still provide, as they always have, an acoustic privacy unavailable in conventional residential construction.

The Ansonia and New York Music

No single building in New York has a stronger continuous claim on the city's musical life than the Ansonia, and the claim rests on the same physical fact across more than a century: the walls are too thick to hear through.

The opera singers of the early twentieth century — Caruso, Chaliapin, Farrar — established the building's musical character in its first decade. Their presence was not accidental but the result of deliberate choice, and the choice was made possible by an architectural quality that no amount of deliberate design for musicians had achieved elsewhere. The Ansonia was not built as a musicians' residence; it became one because musicians discovered, by trial and experience, that it was the best place in New York to live with music.

That reputation sustained the building's musical character through the middle decades of the century, when the grand hotel era was over but the acoustic properties remained as valuable as they had ever been. The recording studios in the basement and the concentration of performing artists in the apartments above constituted an informal music industry campus long before the phrase existed, and the work produced in and around the Ansonia — recorded, rehearsed, conceived, and argued about in its rooms and its neighborhood — represents a significant portion of the history of American classical, jazz, and popular music.

The Bette Midler connection, specifically, illustrates how the Ansonia's musical legacy extended beyond the concert hall into the broader culture: the Continental Baths was a space that could host live performance at serious volume, in a residential building, without disturbing the apartments above, because the building was designed to prevent exactly that kind of acoustic transmission. The circumstance that produced one of the more significant career launches in American popular entertainment was, at its structural foundation, an architectural decision made by a French-trained architect in 1903.

What to Know

The Ansonia today operates as a residential cooperative, having completed its conversion from the original hotel configuration over the course of its restoration and redevelopment. The building is not open to the general public beyond the lobby and street-level commercial spaces, which include retail tenants on the ground floor.

The exterior can be viewed at any time from Broadway, and the view from the opposite side of the street — stepping back to see the full height of the building, the corner tower, the roofline ornament, the continuous play of the facade — is the correct way to approach it. Early morning, before the Broadway traffic builds, provides the clearest view; late afternoon, when the west-facing facade catches the light, is the most photogenic.

The neighbourhood around the Ansonia rewards the full visit. Zabar's, at 80th and Broadway, is three blocks north and among the essential food shops in New York. The Beacon Theatre, at 74th and Broadway, is directly across the street and still hosts concerts in its original 1929 Art Deco interior. Riverside Park, a few blocks west, runs along the Hudson from 72nd to 158th Street and is among the finest urban parks in Manhattan. The 72nd Street subway station on the 1/2/3 line is at the southern end of the block.

The building has no official tours and no public access to its upper floors or historic spaces. What it offers, and what it has always offered, is the experience of standing outside it and looking — at the corner tower, at the ironwork balconies, at the thousand decisions made by a Beaux-Arts architect who had no interest in restraint and every material and technical resource required to pursue that conviction to its logical extreme. The Ansonia does not ask for your attention politely. It has never needed to.

The Ansonia is one of those buildings that makes New York's architectural history feel like a series of improbable choices that all worked out better than anyone had a right to expect. It was built by an eccentric millionaire with a rooftop farm, designed by a Parisian architect with an unlimited budget and a horror of plain walls, became the home of the greatest tenor in the world and the greatest baseball player of his generation, launched Bette Midler's career from its basement, and has stood on Broadway for 120 years as proof that excess, correctly executed, is a form of civic generosity. The city has never quite deserved it, and it has never quite cared.