Ansonia Hotel

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The Ansonia Hotel on Broadway at the intersection with Amsterdam Avenue

The Ansonia Hotel is a building in the Upper West Side of New York, New York in the United States, located at 2109 Broadway. The hotel was built by William Earle Dodge Stokes, the Phelps-Dodge copper heir and share holder in the Ansonia Clock Company, and was named after his grandfather industrialist Anson Greene Phelps. In 1899, Stokes commissioned architect Paul E. Duboy to build the greatest and grandest hotel in Manhattan, New York.

Erected between 1899 and 1904, it was the first air conditioned hotel in New York. The building has an eighteen story steel frame structure. The exterior is decorated in the Beaux-Art style with a Parisian style Mansard roof. A striking architectural feature is the round corner towers or turrets.

It has had many special guests, as the baseball champion Babe Ruth, the writer Theodore Dreiser, the composer Igor Stravinsky, and the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, who chose this Hotel because of its thick walls. For several years Stokes, who held unpleasant views on immigration, kept some farm animals on the building's roof next to his personal apartment.

After a short debate in the 1960s, a proposal to demolish the building was fought off by its many musical and artistic residents. The Ansonia housed the famous sex club, Plato's Retreat, in its basement during the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1992 the Ansonia was converted to a condominium apartment building with 430 apartments. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Commerce Bank branch on the ground level plays a documentary covering the history of the Ansonia. The short video is played in the front of the entrance in the bank.

[edit] Education

Ansonia is assigned to schools in the New York City Department of Education.

Ansonia is zoned to P.S. 87 William Sherman. The Ansonia is unzoned for middle school; residents may contact Region 10 to determine the middle school assignments.