The public rooms, including the lobby, basement shopping arcade, and restaurants, were decorated in the Louis XIV style, and the hotel also had a small roof farm in the 1900s.

[15] Its developer, William Earl Dodge Stokes, listed himself as "architect-in-chief" for the project and hired French architect Paul Emile Duboy to draw up the plans.

[25][24] On 73rd Street is a 27 ft (8.2 m) archway (which originally led to a tea room) and two full-height windows, which were restored in the 2000s as part of the construction of a North Face store at the building's base.

[25][24] The facade was decorated with Louis XVI style grilles and scrollwork, leading the Ansonia to be nicknamed "the Wedding Cake of the Upper West Side".

[50] In the 21st century, American Musical and Dramatic Academy occupies the lower stories, with a theater, studios, private rooms, and performance spaces.

[22] In July 1899, the Onward Construction Company acquired additional land on the western side of Broadway between 73rd and 74th Streets, and the Equitable Life Assurance Society placed a $500,000 mortgage loan on the site.

[14][22][a] He was closely involved in the hotel's development, having traveled to France to study other buildings' architecture and floor plans before hiring Paul Emile Duboy, a French architect.

[52] Federal and city officials thwarted a 1916 plot by German operatives Franz von Papen and Karl Boy-Ed to detonate a bomb at the Ansonia's ballroom.

[104] The hotel began to attract sportsmen like boxer Jack Dempsey, in part because of what writer Steven Gaines described as "the Ansonia's racy reputation as a home to gamblers and spies and deposed dictators".

[99] After World War I, many New York Yankees players stayed at the Ansonia, including Babe Ruth, Bob Meusel, Lefty O'Doul, and Wally Schang.

[134] The Stokes family's Onward Construction Corporation agreed in August 1945 to sell the building to a client of attorney Abraham Traub for $2.5 million.

[143] Federal officials also investigated claims that Broxmeyer was collecting advance rent from tenants and failing to pay his creditors;[145][146] instead, he used the money to buy more apartment buildings.

[146][147] That February, tenants formed a committee to fight Broxmeyer's management of the building,[148] and state and federal judges signed separate orders preventing the Ansonia's furnishings from being sold off.

[46][154] When Starr submitted alteration plans to the Department of Buildings, he discovered that the hotel had never received a proper certificate of occupancy; before he could obtain one, he had to repair several building-code violations that the DOB had issued over the years.

[155] Following a series of robberies at the hotel, its managers added CCTV systems to the elevators in 1960,[155] and vigilante groups of residents began patrolling the top floors.

[54] The Continental Baths also hosted cabaret shows,[53] and Bette Midler provided musical entertainment there early in her career, with Barry Manilow as her accompanist.

[d][167] By the early 1970s, dozens of crimes were being reported at the Ansonia every year, and Starr agreed to hire security guards to protect the building 16 hours a day and install alarms and taller gates.

[68][171] Residents filed multiple lawsuits against the Ansonia Holding Corporation, the building's legal owner, in an attempt to force Starr to fix the hotel's many issues.

[167] The New York City Conciliation and Appeals Board (CAB) placed a rent freeze on 500 rent-regulated apartments at the Ansonia in 1976, having received multiple complaints from tenants.

By contrast, in 1980, Paul Goldberger of The New York Times characterized the interior as having "gone from Beaux-Arts grandeur to near dereliction", with unreliable elevators clad in false wood and a lobby that resembled "the vestibule of a skid row hotel".

[178] Krasnow paid the club's operator Larry Levenson $1 million to break his lease,[47][178] and Plato's Retreat moved out of the basement in 1980,[173][181] The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places the same year,[17][1] at which point it had been divided into approximately 540 apartments.

[25] Krasnow began to remedy the Ansonia's building-code violations,[14] and the owners spent $2 million on a waterproof flat roof and renovating vacant apartments.

[183] The owners had renovated the 12th-floor hallway with dropped ceilings and two types of wallpaper and carpeting, intending to extend these design features to the rest of the interior.

[183] The Ansonia's owners planned to convert the 471 apartments on the 15 upper stories to residential condos, while retaining ownership of the ground-level storefronts and basement garage.

[189] In addition, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection issued the owners a building-code violation in 1995 after finding that the walls retained high amounts of asbestos.

[206] Apparel company The North Face renovated the ground-floor retail space at 73rd Street in the early 2000s, restoring some windows that had been hidden behind a masonry wall for several decades.

[209] Nonetheless, by 2011, the Times reported that prices at the Ansonia, and at other condominiums on the Upper West Side, were higher than at housing cooperatives along Central Park.

[232] The Laureate condominium building at Broadway and 76th Street, completed in the 2000s, also contains balconies, curved corners, and rusticated blocks inspired by those of the Ansonia.

[233][234] The building has been depicted in several media works In the film Perfect Stranger (2007), Halle Berry plays a news reporter who lives in an Ansonia condo.

[239] In addition, the Ansonia has been used as a setting or filming location for movies such as The Sunshine Boys (1975),[17][240] Three Days of the Condor (1975),[240] Hannah and Her Sisters (1986),[236] Life and Nothing But (1989),[240] Single White Female (1992),[241][240] and Uptown Girls (2003).