The Ansonia Hotel

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El otro día cité el Ansonia Hotel de Nueva York en el comentario de la exposición de Guastavino y no puse ninguna fotografía.

Luego me di cuenta que es posible que no lo conozcais porque iba solo cuando lo vi.

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Pongo unas fotografías del edificio y algunas cosas que dice la Wikipedia del mismo, aunque no hace referencia a nuestro compadre.

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The Ansonia is a building in the Upper West Side of New York, located at 2109 Broadway between 73rd and 74th Streets. It was originally built as a hotel..

History
The Ansonia was a residential hotel. The residents lived in luxurious apartments with multiple bedrooms, parlors, libraries, and formal dining rooms that were often round or oval. Apartments featured sweeping views north and south along Broadway, high ceilings, elegant moldings, and bay windows. The Ansonia also had a few small units, one bedroom, parlor and bath; these lacked kitchens.

There was a central kitchen and serving kitchens on every floor, so that the residents could enjoy the services of professional chefs while dining in their own apartments. Besides the usual array of tearooms, restaurants, and a grand ballroom, the Ansonia had Turkish baths and a lobby fountain with live seals.

Erected between 1899 and 1904, it was the first air conditioned

hotel in New York. The building has an 18-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. Unusually for a Manhattan building, the Ansonia features an open stairwell that sweeps up to a huge, domed skylight. The interior corridors may be the widest in the city. The building has the unusual feature of possessing a cattle elevator which enabled milk cows to be stabled on the roof.By mid-century, the grand apartments had mostly been divided into studios and one-bedroom units almost all of which retained their original architectural detail.
After a short debate in the 1960s, a proposal to demolish the building was fought off by its many musical and artistic residents.

In 1992 the Ansonia was converted to a condominium apartament building with 430 apartments. By 2007 most of the rent-controlled tenants had moved out, and the small apartments were sold to buyers who purchased clusters of small apartments and threw them together to recreate the grand apartments of the building's glory days, with carefully restored Beaux Arts detail. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

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