The main entrances were on the side streets, linked by a robustly decorated through-block gallery to the elevator lobby and the major public rooms: the Assembly room, the Palm Garden, the grille Room and, at the center of the Broadway arcade, a public restaurant with a glass and metal roof.
A swimming pool and a garage were provided in the basement. The individual suites reflected both the exigencies of the oddly shaped lot and an extraordinary variety of room shapes," they wrote. 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.
In , a former opera singer named Steve Ostrow rented the long abandoned swimming pool. Ostrow wanted a gay bathhouse reminiscent of the glory of ancient Rome. Well, almost. The Continental baths had palm trees, a waterfall, and vending machines that dispensed KY-Jelly. It also had Bette Midler and Barry Manilow. Word soon got out. On Saturday night, the line snaked around the block.
Gay men in bath towels mingled with straight couples dressed to the nines. It was Studio 54 before there was a Studio Eventually, the gay crowd abandoned The Continental and moved on to a more hardcore scene downtown, which is ironic given what took it's place.
In what had once been William Stokes's grand basement, a club called Plato's Retreat opened. Mattresses lined the orgy rooms and swingers, porn stars, and dentists from New Rochelle acted out the sexual revolution.
After a brush with fame in the early 90s as the location for Single White Female, the Ansonia went condo. 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. The crowd wore black towels in lieu of formalwear. None of this amused Jake Starr.
The frozen rents brought Jake Starr—then nearly 80 years old—to a spiteful decision: The Ansonia would be better off demolished. I am not, nor is the owner, aware of any particular historic significance to the building. That did it. A weeklong protest and demonstration eventually followed; a petition drew 25, signatures, calling for Mayor John V.
Lindsay to save the building. A few months later, on March 15, , after the intervention of Congresswoman Bella Abzug, it was done: The Ansonia Hotel became a landmark. But only the exterior of the building was protected, leaving Jake Starr to do what he wished with the inside—which was nothing.
The Ansonia became a decaying shell. I n , The Continental Baths closed. Gay men, it turned out, wanted to get down to business without straights ogling them, and they had decamped for the hard-core bathhouses that were opening all over the city.
Once the men in towels were gone, so was the Continental charm. Another tenant soon moved into the basement, and things got decidedly worse. Adding to the seedy atmosphere, a sex shop moved into a street-level storefront. Unattached men who were denied admission began to hang around the entrance to the building and solicit women.
He left his money in a trust that was forbidden to contribute to the upkeep of the building, which was left to his grandchildren. His heirs were eager to sell the building, but with frozen rent, legal problems, and a sex club in the basement with a long-term lease, it seemed hopeless.
About that time, the ramshackle Ansonia began to attract as tenants, for indefinable reasons, all sorts of mediums, psychics, spiritualists, and fortune-tellers. Clifford Bias began holding quasi-religious services in a chapel off the lobby on Sunday afternoons. One week, Dr. It has become his great love as well as the bane of his professional career.
Some elderly residents faced percent increases. Outraged tenants accused Krasnow of doing only patchwork repairs. The leaky roof became a joke. He also caught hell for his taste. When he started renovating the hallways and stairwells, he began with one floor, the twelfth, and the tenants hated the admittedly rather middle-class results so much they started a new petition to have the interior of the Ansonia landmarked. Asked about this fight, Krasnow responds with a folder of photos.
The photographs evoke the hallways of a medieval mental ward. Discolored linoleum, fluorescent lights, bare bulbs, and old tiles. In , the Ansonia Residents Association declared a rent strike. ARA members began to pay their rents into an escrow account, and they used the interest from the account to hire a lawyer to sue Krasnow. When that group seemed close to negotiating a compromise, another, more radical splinter group formed, with its own escrow account and its own lawsuit. In the long run, Krasnow realized the best way to make the building functional again was to buy out the tenants who were unhappiest, and in , the tenants accepted a condo plan allowing them either to continue renting or to buy their apartments at a 60 percent discount.
For all the big numbers the apartments are fetching, the Ansonia Hotel remains a bit funky. Though the dusty dried floral display that sat in the lobby for years has been removed, somehow the building never looks as chic as most other high-priced condominiums.
But a little dowdy is probably the way the Ansonia should look. Already a subscriber? Log in or link your magazine subscription. Account Profile.
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