In Seize the Day, the Hotel Gloriana is close to the Ansonia Hotel, a famous edifice at 2109 Broadway. That hotel, built in 1904, is not just an architectural marvel but a cultural touchstone of the city, most recently the inspiration for the building in the television show Only Murders in the Building. It behooves us to ask what makes the building so famous, so iconic?
The man behind the Gilded Age residential hotel was William Earl Dodge Stokes, an heir to the Ansonia copper fortune. The architect was Paul E. Duboy, though Stokes decided to list himself as architect-in-chief. The project ran 800% over budget and cost $6 million dollars. The hotel has 1400 rooms, 340 suites, ballrooms, restaurants, a palm court, writing rooms, Turkish baths, and the world’s largest indoor swimming pool. For a time there was a rooftop farm, supplying eggs and milk to the residents. Tom Miller writes of the experience of the residents, “The residents would not want for much. In the summer, frigid salt water was piped through the walls to keep the apartments at a constant 70 degrees. An ingenious pneumatic tube system connected apartments with the staff so messages could be whisked back and forth. The Persian carpets in the suites were custom woven and there were stained glass windows. Three times a day a maid would replace the towels, soap, table linens and stationery in each suite. A wide white marble staircase with a Beaux Arts iron and mahogany bannister spiraled down all seventeen floors. For those occupants who had no intention of cooking for themselves there were apartments with no kitchens.”
The building has been home to many notable people, such as Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Isaac Bashevitz Singer, and was the site of many notable events, such as the 1919 World Series being fixed here.
During the Great Depression, Stokes relinquished ownership, and the rooms were subdivided to be available to poorer families. The metal ornamentation on the facade was melted down and use for bullets in World War II.
In the 1960s, the new owner Jake Starr presided over a decrepit building that needed dramatic repairs, but he brought in revenue through entrepreneur Steve Ostrow’s Continental Baths, a gay bathhouse. NYC LGBT Historic Sites explains, ““The Tubs,” as they were affectionately nicknamed, were a vital, sexually-liberating alternative to the bar scene during the pre- and post-Stonewall period. Although not operated by the Mafia, Ostrow, employees, and patrons were repeatedly subject to police harassment, including over 200 raids.” The Baths closed in 1976 and were reopened as a straight sex club for swingers called Plato’s Retreat.
Residents clamored to landmark the building, which was achieved in 1980. Cooperator News explains that in the 1980s, “the ramshackle Ansonia began to attract as tenants, for indefinable reasons, all sorts of mediums, psychics, spiritualists, and fortune-tellers. A Dr. Clifford Bias began holding quasi-religious services in a chapel off the lobby on Sunday afternoons. One week, Dr. Bias was blindfolded and summoning up the dead when the great singer Geraldine Farrar appeared to deliver the message, ‘The Ansonia isn’t what it used to be when I was there.’”
A consortium of investors purchased it in the late 1970s and bought out some of the tenants, turning it into a condominium.
