The 17-Story Hotel with a Roof Farm and a Swingers' Club

The Ansonia was built between 1899 and 1903 as a residential hotel. French architect Paul Emile Duboy was drafted to design the Beaux-Arts masterpiece. However, the developer William Earle Dodge Stokes demoted Duboy to a draftsman after only one set of drawings was completed. The final product is a 17-story structure constructed of limestone, granite, white brick, and terracotta, featuring turrets at its corners and a three-story mansard roof.

The original specifications were extensive. The facility boasted as many as 2,500 rooms, its own power plant, and a system of pneumatic tubes and cooling pipes. In the early 1900s, the hotel even featured a small roof farm. The public rooms, including the lobby, were decorated in the Louis XIV style. The structure was so massive that, prior to larger buildings being constructed on Broadway, it was visible from as far south as 59th Street and as far north as 105th Street.

The building's history shifted significantly over the decades. It stopped offering hotel services in the early 1930s and was sold three times between 1945 and 1948 before being auctioned in 1950 to Jacob Starr. By the late 20th century, the basement swimming pool was repurposed into a gay bathhouse called the Continental Baths and eventually into a swingers' club called Plato's Retreat.

Currently, the structure serves as a New York City landmark and a condominium building. It houses 425 apartments where residents live, while the facade remains largely intact. The building remains a notable example of architecture and design on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons