William Earle Dodge Stokes (May 22, 1852 – May 18, 1926) was an American multimillionaire who developed many buildings on New York City's Upper West Side.

When his father died in August 1881, Stokes contested the will, sued his brother Anson for conspiring to throw him out of the family business, and gained a $1 million inheritance.

Named after Stokes' grandfather industrialist Anson Greene Phelps, the hotel opened in 1903 at 2109 Broadway between West 73rd and 74th Streets.

The $3 million Ansonia had 350 suites with several restaurants, a bank, a barbershop, a ballroom, a swimming pool and full hotel services, along with an imposing Parisian-style facade of turrets and balconies.

[7] In 1907, the New York Board of Health planned to raid the Ansonia hotel's roof and confiscate the four pet geese and a pig, called Nanki-Poo, that they had been informed that Stokes kept there.

[5][7] In 1900, as reported in The New York Times, Stokes bought at auction, for $25,000, the Chesapeake & Western Railroad, a bucolic venture that in an earlier incarnation, circa 1870s, was to be part of the Washington, Cincinnati & St. Louis Railroad, linking through the Shenandoah Valley at Harrisonburg, Virginia and into the central and southern coal producing areas of West Virginia and southern Ohio.

The Allegheny and Blue Ridge Mountains proved to be formidable obstacles to further expansion, and without serious financial backing there was no chance of true success.

Eventually, the Chesapeake Western Railway became a subsidiary of the Norfolk Southern and survives to this day, primarily linking Harrisonburg to Staunton, Virginia.

[8] In this book, Stokes, who was a horse breeder, extended his theories from the equine, advocating selective breeding in humans and the grading of men who are candidates for marriage.

[19] In 1923, after paying $1 million in legal fees,[20] Stokes' request for a divorce from his wife was denied; she won a counterclaim for separation.

However, in 1928 that estimate was reduced to $300,000, and even that would be erased, The Times said, "if his estate lost all the many pending lawsuits that plagued his controversial career, even after death".