4. The Ansonia, 2109 Broadway

In the early 1900s, eccentric real estate developer William Earl Dodge Stokes had a vision that the Grand Boulevard, as Broadway was known at the time, would become the Champs-Élysées of New York. He wanted to build the boulevard’s grandest hotel. Stokes had been piecing together parcels of land from the former site of the New York Orphan Asylum at 73rd Street for years and in 1899, he broke ground on The Ansonia Hotel.

French architect and student of the École des Beaux-Arts, Paul E.M. Duboy designed the hotel, which opened in 1904. The steel-framed structure was 550,000 square feet with 1,400 rooms and 340 suites spread throughout 17 stories. Notable guests included Babe Ruth (who would walk around in his silk bathrobe) and Igor Stravinsky. Stokes named the building after his grandfather, industrialist Anson Greene Phelps. Stokes, after his mother Caroline Phelps and along with his eight brothers and sisters, was heir to a fortune from the Ansonia Copper and Brass Co., which Anson Greene Phelps founded in 1845 on the banks of the Naugatuck River in Connecticut. In the 1970s, The Ansonia was converted into 430 rental apartments.