LIMESTONE demons with wicked smiles decorate the landmark Beaux-Arts facade of the Ansonia Hotel on Broadway at West 73d Street. The faces are fitting symbols of discord for this building, which has been a battleground for tenants and landlords for several decades. Squabbles have revolved around rents, services and repairs, and now a possible conversion to a condominium.
The Ansonia story, set in the surreal housing market, is a classic New York story: bigger-than-life, tinged with eccentricity, vision, glamour, greed, scandal, decay, revival and turmoil.
Built 83 years ago to be the most extravagant hotel in the world, the Ansonia is moving toward the distinction of having one of the most complex landlord-tenant conflicts in the tangled housing history of New York. Regulatory agencies and courts are choked with petitions and lawsuits. One Manhattan housing court judge, Orin R. Kitzes, is assigned on a nearly full-time basis to oversee settlement negotiations. If they fail, he will resolve several hundred cases involving rent levels, payments and building services. ''It's the largest case in the courthouse,'' said Judge Kitzes. ''It is the most complex too, considering the volume and complexity of the issues.''
If there is no settlement, lawyers for tenants say the hearings, trials and appeals could continue indefinitely, certainly into the next decade.
''It's better to negotiate than to keep on fighting, that's my personal bias,'' said Max M. Kampelman, the chief United States negotiator with the Soviet Union on nuclear and space arms and one of the Ansonia's 21 owners. He described himself as a ''silent partner,'' and said he had no knowledge of the disputes.
The owners, who use the collective name of Ansonia Associates, are members of three separate partnerships headed, respectively, by Albert Schussler, Stanley Stahl and Jesse and Herbert Krasnow; all of the general partners are active in New York real estate.
The tenant lawyers, David Rosenholc and Kent Karlsson, say intermittent negotiations in the past six years have repeatedly stalled because of disagreements among the many owners. Landlord lawyers deny any such fissures and blame the Ansonia's two rival tenant organizations for causing disruptions.
The tenant groups and their lawyers have recently begun to cooperate with each other, but they still follow different strategies. The organizations are the 18-year-old Ansonia Tenants Association and the four-year-old Ansonia Tenants Coalition, which split from the older group after that organization's acceptance of a contro-versial settlement of a year-long rent strike in 1980. The coalition has taken a more aggressive approach to the dispute and, as of last week, its lawyers began to prepare their housing-court cases for trial because of dissatisfaction with progress in negotiations with owners.
Since 1980, there have been many other rent strikes called to protest conditions in the building. The tenant groups have accumulated nearly $2 million in rent payments, which are held in escrow accounts; the interest payments from these accounts subsidize all of their organizational and legal expenses so tenants are not financially pressed to settle the dispute. But nothing at the Ansonia is simple. The Ansonia was the idea of W. E. D. Stokes, a developer who built some of the first West Side brownstones. After inheriting $11 million in the 1890's, he started work on the monumental residential hotel on Broadway, between 73d and 74th Streets, at the northern edge of development at the time.
He hired a French architectural firm, Graves & Duboy, to build and furnish the $7 million, 17-story hotel, which had 400 residential suites and a total of 1,218 rooms. After completion in 1904, it was soon known as the Upper West Side's wedding cake because of its mansard roofs, turrets, cupolas, balconies and ornate limestone work.
The hotel had every luxury of the period, including hot, cold and warm water faucets in bathrooms, Turkish baths, huge bathing pools and restaurants with interiors reminiscent of Versailles. It was the kind of place where seals swam in the lobby fountain and baby bears romped around Mr. Stokes's rooftop farm.
The hotel's guest list included Enrico Caruso, Igor Stravinsky, Florenz Ziegfeld, Theodore Dreiser, Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey. From the beginning, the hotel's offbeat location, ambiance and thick plaster-block walls attracted musicians, singers and teachers -and that tradition continues today with nearly half the tenants having some relationship to opera or theater. Current tenants include such big names in opera as Theresa Stratas, Ashley Putnam and Eleanor Steber, and the pianists John and Richard Contiguglia.
Management and ownership of the hotel has changed many times over the years, but its decline can be traced to the Depression. One owner was jailed for swindling tenants of rent, another removed 100,000 pounds of copper and tin ornaments from the building and, by the late 1940's, the Ansonia had six pages of fire, safety and building violations on file at city agencies. Improvements were made during the next 25 years, but tenants say the repairs barely kept pace with the building's failing systems.
