The Ansonia, Beaux-Arts apartment building in Upper West Side, Manhattan, United States
The Ansonia is a 17-story Beaux-Arts building at 2109 Broadway on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Its facade mixes limestone, granite, white brick, and terracotta, with corner turrets, light courts along each side, and a three-story mansard roof. The rounded corner tower rises the full height under a dark domed roof, with rows of balconied windows and carved medallions between floors.
Paul Emile Duboy designed the structure between 1899 and 1903 for William Earle Dodge Stokes, who named it after his grandfather. It opened as a residential hotel offering long-term guests suites with hotel services and later converted to apartments.
The building's name honors Anson Greene Phelps, the industrialist grandfather of developer William Earle Dodge Stokes. Its public rooms, including the lobby, basement shopping arcade, and restaurants, were decorated in the Louis XIV style. The Ansonia later became a setting for films such as Hannah and Her Sisters and the TV series Only Murders in the Building, whose fictional Arconia was inspired by it.
The building stands at Broadway and 73rd Street, within walking distance of the 72nd Street subway station. Some units remain rent-regulated while others have been sold as condominiums, so access to the interior is limited to residents and their guests.
In its first years the roof held a farm with over 500 chickens, six cows and a bear, supplying fresh eggs and milk; the health department closed it in 1907. In 1919 White Sox player Chick Gandil met seven teammates here to plan throwing the World Series, the Black Sox Scandal. Bank robber Willie Sutton was arrested in February 1952 at the building's Childs Restaurant.
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