Located at a major bend in Broadway, the Ansonia is highly visible up and down the famous boulevard. The plan of the Ansonia is quite unusual as it is asymmetrical, because of the angle of Broadway, and indented by two light courts on its north and south facades and one each on its east and west facades.
Its corridors form an "H" running east to west. Black television antennae are densely planted on its round summits. Under the changes of weather it may look like marble or sea water, black as slate in the fog, white as tufa in sunlight," observed novelist Saul Bellow in his book, "Seize The Day.
In his book, "Upper West Side Story," Abbeville, , Peter Salwen recounts that Stokes, an heir to the Phelps-Dodge copper and manufacturing fortune, "decided he would build the world's grandest hotel with a great central tower and his own apartments, like an eagle's nest, on the topmost floor.
Salwen wrote. Describing the building as "a rich, startling mass of scrolls, brackets, balconies and cornices, with leering satyrs over the doorways," Mr. Salwen wrote that "The apartments were sumptuous, many with oval or circular rooms giving panoramic views over the city.
Standard furnishings included specially woven Persian carpets, ivy-patterned 'art glass' windows, and domed chandeliers inset with mosaic. That the ground floor has been altered and the lobby turned into a drab gathering place for a set of characters that resembles a George Price cartoon is a sadness, but one that does not destroy the Ansonia's lyrical glory," chimed Paul Goldberger in his book, "The City Observed, New York, A Guide to the Architecture of Manhattan," Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Salwen wrote, adding that official New York City landmark designation did "not come in time to protect the building or its residents from a series of predatory owners: one removed fifty tons of copper ornament, including majestic rooftop lanterns; another was ultimately jailed for embezzling the tenants' rent money.
Before moving to a midtown location, Keene's Chop House was on the ground floor as was the Child's Restaurant where famed bank robber Willie Sutton was arrested.
The Ansonia even had its own curator, Joseph Gill-Martin, who collected paintings for the hotel to display. Altogether, with the ballrooms and the dining rooms at full capacity, the hotel could accommodate 1, dinner guests. Children who lived in the building with their families were mesmerized by the cascading white-marble staircase with its dark mahogany balustrade, seventeen stories of it, snaking round and round, getting smaller and smaller until it vanished into a clear skylight feet above.
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.
Not much about this feature charmed the city fathers, however, and in , the Department of Health shut down the farm in the sky. The animals went to Central Park and lived happily ever after. The Ansonia might have been luxurious, but it was never considered chic. He stayed two years, badgered by police and reporters, before Stokes found him dead of a self-inflicted bullet wound in Suite There was immediate conjecture that Stokes had shot him over a gambling debt, but the coroner ruled it a suicide.
Jack Dempsey trained for the heavyweight-championship bout of against Jess Willard while living there, and after World War I, the Ansonia became the preferred lodging of professional baseball players in New York. Ruth, who thought of the entire hotel as an extension of his apartment, would sometimes wear his scarlet silk bathrobe down in the elevator to the basement barbershop for his morning shave.
He was inspired to take up the saxophone while living at the Ansonia, and his squeaky bleatings were familiar up and down the hallways on his floor. J ust before Babe Ruth arrived, the mixture of bad guys and baseball turned bitter. Though the players were found innocent by a grand jury, they were later banned from baseball for life.
Adding to the constant air of melodrama and excitement at the hotel around this time, the Broadway impresario Florenz Ziegfeld moved into a ninth-floor suite with his first wife, the siren Anna Held, the greatest of all his Follies stars. When Held became pregnant, Ziegfeld demanded she undergo an abortion—in the apartment—so as not to affect her performance schedule. The showman kept a gold-painted, life-size statue of his voluptuous wife in the foyer. And in an apartment on the tenth floor, Ziegfeld kept an equally voluptuous mistress, another Follies showgirl named Lillian Lorraine.
If real life at the Ansonia had operatic overtones, it was appropriate to the music that seemed to fill its every room. But what is clear is that the Metropolitan Opera—looking to make a splash right around the time the Ansonia opened—was a factor.
More significant, when Conried retired in , Kahn enticed the legendary manager of La Scala, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, to assume the role of general manager of the Met and moved him into the Ansonia. Gatti-Casazza was the Ziegfeld of opera, a showman who produced and booked all aspects of his productions.
Dozens of opera stars followed them to New York, and almost all rented in the same building. Lauritz Melchoir, the foremost Wagnerian tenor in the world, lived in the building from to the early fifties and used his stuffed hunting trophies for archery practice in the hallways. At night the lobby would come alive as the stars returned from the opera house, hungry for dinner. Claques of fans congregated in the lobby, loudly debating the merits of their favorite stars. The Ansonia even brought love to W.
Stokes again: a year-old Titian-haired beauty from Colorado named Helen Elwood, who was a hotel guest visiting her sister. Stokes and Elwood eloped in February to Jersey City. Stokes, she fainted, reported the Times. In June, only four months after the marriage, the police found Stokes clinging to a banister on the fourth-floor landing of the Varuna Hotel on West 80th Street, bleeding profusely from three gunshot wounds in his legs. Stokes never once left his rooms at the hotel to testify in court, citing a variety of illnesses.
On December 12, a specialist, Dr. As for Helen Elwood, she stuck it out with Stokes for ten years after the shooting and even gave him two more children, a son, James, born in , and a daughter, Helen Muriel, in She finally cracked when Stokes moved 47 chickens into their apartment.
She hoped to end the marriage as quietly as possible and move back to Colorado. It was a calculated move driven by the New York State law of the time, which said that if Stokes could prove his wife had committed adultery, he could end their marriage at little cost. He presented in court a letter from Weddie—to whom, by this time, Stokes had transferred ownership of the Ansonia—backing up the assertion.
There were two full-scale trials, plus an ancillary trial for perjury in Illinois, where Stokes had paid witnesses to say that his wife had worked in an infamous whorehouse. He was correct. Soon after, he said good-bye to his beloved Ansonia and moved across the street into a dreary four-story brownstone building, and there he died from lobar pneumonia on May 19, , just four days before his 74th birthday.
He never cared much about the Ansonia and left its operation to a series of management companies, one of which installed a miniature-golf course in the ballroom, and all of which let the building fall into disrepair. The restaurants and kitchens closed with the Depression. In , the elegant central entrance on Broadway was bricked up and storefronts were installed. In , the most grievous affront to the building occurred. In a patriotic gesture, nearly all its glorious metal ornamentation was stripped to supply material for bullets and tanks for World War II.
The copper cartouches on the corner domes, each seven feet tall and weighing half a ton, came down. The old cooling systems and pneumatic tubes were pried out of the walls. The skylight at the top of the staircase was tarred over to comply with blackout regulations, and it remains dark today. If Starr knew that he was buying an icon, he showed no recognition of it. But to get a certificate of occupancy, the building needed to be brought up to code, and that would cost millions: The pipes were rusting, the roof leaked in dozens of places, and the balconies were held on with wire.
So Starr did nothing, letting the Ansonia grow shabbier and shabbier while hundreds of complaints piled up at the Department of Buildings. In , Starr rented the abandoned basement swimming pool and Turkish baths to a former opera singer named Steve Ostrow, who fit perfectly in the great tradition of oddball entrepreneurs at the Ansonia. In retrospect, the Continental Baths, as he named the place, was more Disneyland than hard-core sex palace except for the orgy room, that is.
A candy machine dispensed K-Y jelly, and a warning system of colored lights tipped off patrons when the vice squad dropped in. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Continental Baths was its cabaret. By the early seventies, going to the Continental Baths to watch an emerging act while sitting alongside the towel-clad young men at the pool was an au courant activity.
The line to get in on a Saturday night went down the block, a mix of women in mink coats with their husbands in suits and gay men in leather jackets with their boyfriends. In some ways, it prefigured that other exotic mix of entertainment and public sex, Studio Melba Moore, Peter Allen, John Davidson, and the jazz vocal group Manhattan Transfer also appeared at the baths early in their careers.
One night in , the former Metropolitan Opera soprano Eleanor Steber, who lived upstairs, even recorded an album titled Live at the Bath House at the Continental.
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