When the Ansonia Hotel (later an apartment building) was going up in frontier territory on Broadway and 73rd Street in the early 1900s, no expense was spared.
The goal was to make it the “most perfectly equipped house in the world,” as colorful and combative developer W.E.D. Stokes proclaimed.
The 340 suites had hot and cold running water, message tubes so staff and guests could communicate, and primitive AC in the form of frozen brine pumped through flues hidden inside walls, states Steven Gaines‘ The Sky’s the Limit: Passion and Property in Manhattan.
The lobby contained a fountain with live seals. The basement held the world’s largest swimming pool. A sweeping interior staircase led to an enormous glass skylight. A curator was on hand to help shape the hotel’s art collection.
But the Beaux-Arts beauty (nicknamed the Upper West Side’s “wedding cake” because of its mansard roof and decorative touches) had an amenity no other luxury apartment house in New York could boast of.
It was a rooftop farm—complete with ducks, geese, six goats, a bear, a pig named Nanki-Poo, and roughly 500 chickens, from which bellhops collected fresh eggs every day and delivered them to tenants.
This “farm in the sky” capped off Stokes’ vision for the Ansonia as kind of a self-sufficient utopia, wrote Gaines.
And while a roof farm would definitely be a plus for today’s well-heeled locavore co-op dweller, the Board of Health back then wasn’t too pleased.
In 1907, officials threatened to raid the farm. It’s unclear what happened to most of the animals.
But Nanki-Poo and the geese, pets that belonged to Stokes’ young son, were safely rounded up before the inspector arrived.
These critters were eventually moved to the Central Park Menagerie. The Ansonia’s roof farm, like other parts of the Ansonia’s long and storied past (its stint as the site of a notorious sex club, for example) passed into history.
Now, what happened to the live seals in the lobby fountain?
[Top photo: Ansonia, 1904; second photo: looking north from the Ansonia roof, 1911, NYPL; third image: New-York Tribune, 1908; fourth photo: Ansonia in 1970, MCNY; fifth image: 1910, NYPL]
Tags: Ansonia Hotel, Ansonia Upper West Side, Beaux Arts New York City, Broadway Upper West Side, Luxury Apartments Ansonia, Upper West Side 1900, W.E.D. Stokes
Ephemeral New York 
June 9, 2016 at 1:30 pm |
That building would have been something to see! Love the touch about the seals in the fountain. 🙂
June 9, 2016 at 3:14 pm |
Yes…if only I could find a photo of the seals or the farm animals!
June 13, 2016 at 4:01 pm |
and the home of plato’s retreat for a couple of decades :)..and the first building with air conditioning in nyc
August 28, 2017 at 1:55 am |
Really good story about the Ansonia: http://nymag.com/nymetro/realestate/features/1871/
January 13, 2020 at 4:59 am |
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November 30, 2020 at 12:03 pm |
[…] Interesting fact: The Ansonia Luxury Hotel on the Upper West Side in New York City had the first liv… The farm included vegetation, as well as a variety of animals – until it were eventually closed down by the department of health after several years. […]
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