New York Architecture & My Favorite Building in the City

Having traveled to some spectacularly beautiful cities- Savannah, Barcelona, London, Cairo, Sante Fe, Paris and San Francisco to name some favorites, nothing compares, architecturally speaking to New York City. The skyscrapers of midtown (Chrysler, Flatiron) and downtown (City Hall, 8 Spruce Street) have their creative charms and immeasurable epicness, but the architecture of New York is encapsulated by far more than the well known. Sure, we all love the Empire State Building and Brooklyn Bridge, but a conversation about the best buildings in New York could go on for hours. Dozens and dozens of it's massive neighborhoods offer architecture that no place on earth can top. To the endlessly gorgeous buildings and museums surrounding Central Park to the ridiculously stunning brownstones of Greenwich Village to the unforgettable beauty of Columbia University's campus, there is no city that has more to offer. From the colorful and breathtakingly intricate buildings of the Meatpacking District, SoHo, Chelsea and the Lower East Side to the stunningly detailed buildings on Broadway, Park or 5th avenue, there is no city, when it comes to architecture, that can touch New York.

So...of the thousands and thousands of unbelievably stunning buildings, which stands alone? Can one truly pick a favorite? I say, we all have ours. We just have to look. What building speaks to me? What do I love the most? Easy. I've always been in love and most impressed with The Ansonia. Like half the buildings in SoHo, I could stare at it for hours. You have to see it to believe it. Located in the Upper West Side on 74th and Broadway, you can't miss it. It takes up the whole block.

Some of the buildings many claims to fame, from Wikipedia:

• The Ansonia housed an infamous gay bathhouse, the Continental Baths, in its basement during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1977, the club became Plato's Retreat, a heterosexual swing club. Bette Midler started her singing career at the Continental Baths, with Barry Manilow as her accompianist.
• In his 1956 novella Seize The Day, Saul Bellow incorrectly attributes the Ansonia Hotel to Stanford White. Bellow's description is otherwise memorably evocative:

"The Ansonia, the neighborhood's great landmark, was built by Stanford White. It looks like a baroque palace fromPrague or Munich enlarged a hundred times, with towers, domes, huge swells of metal gone green from exposure, iron fretwork and festoons. Black television antennae are densely planted on its round summits. Under the changes of weather it may look like marble or sea water, black as slate in the fog, white as tufa in sunlight. This morning it looked like the image of itself reflected in deep water, white and cumulous above, with cavernous distortions underneath."

• The Ansonia was also used as the apartment building where Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh lived in the 1992 film Single White Female. The apartment scenes were filmed in a studio but the stairwell scenes were filmed on location at the hotel.
• In the Neil Simon film, The Sunshine Boys, the character Willie Clark, played by Walter Matthau, lives in the Ansonia.
• In the film, Perfect Stranger, Halle Berry plays a news-reporter who lives in a "professionally decorated $4-million condo in the lavish Ansonia building on the Upper West Side." ^[8]
• In 1916, the Ansonia was the scene of a blackmail plot. Edward R. West, Vice President of the C. D. Gregg Tea and Coffee Company of Chicago, had checked into the hotel with a woman known to him as Alice Williams. Alice Williams was an alias of Helen Godman, also known as "Buda" Godman, who acted as the "lure" for a blackmail gang based in Chicago. West and Godman were together in their room at The Ansonia when two male members of the gang, impersonating Federal law enforcement agents, entered the room and "arrested" West for violation of the Mann Act.^[9] After transporting West and Godman back to Chicago, West was coerced into paying the two "agents" $15,000 in order to avoid prosecution, and avoid embarrassment or soiling the reputation of "Alice." West reported the incident after becoming suspicious that not everything was as it seemed. Several of the male blackmailers earned prison terms, but "Buda" Godman was released on bail.^[10] She disappeared for many years, but she was eventually caught and charged for trying to fence the Glemby Jewels taken in a 1932 robbery.^[11]
• A key player in the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, first baseman Chick Gandil, had an apartment at the Ansonia. According to Eliot Asinof, in his book Eight Men Out, Gandil held a meeting there with his White Sox teammates to recruit them for the scheme to intentionally lose the 1919 World Series.
• The Ansonia was also featured in "Don't Say a Word" starring Michael Douglas along with "My Super Ex-Girlfriend starring Uma Thurman and Luke Wilson.
• Willie Sutton the bank robber was arrested at Childs Restaurant in the Ansonia.
• Famous former residents include opera stars Teresa Stratas, Eleanor Steber, Geraldine Farrar, Feodor Chaliapin, Ezio Pinza, Lily Pons, and Lauritz Melchior(who, some maintained, "practiced archery in the 110-foot corridors"); musicians Arturo Toscanini, Igor Stravinksy, Mischa Elman, and Yehudi Menuhin; impresarios Florenz Ziegfeld and Sol Hurok; authors Theodore Dreiser, Cornell Woolrich, and Elmer Rice; athletes Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth; mobsterArnold Rothstein; the film actors, Angelina Jolie, Natalie Portman, and Eric McCormack, and soap opera actress and writer, Clarice Blackburn.
• The Ansonia was the basis for the fictional Balmoral building in Jed Rubenfeld's 2006 literary novel "The Interpretation of Murder".
• The building was featured in the 2003 movie,"Uptown Girls", as the location of Mollie's apartment. (The outside, stair case, and lobby were in the movie).

If you have read this, what is your favorite building in New York?