End of an aria

If you listen carefully, you might hear the faint hint of a melody on the wind, a quavering aria from another time leaking out of the Beaux-Arts edifice that towers above New York's West 74th Street and Broadway. It's the sound of an era fading - at the legendary Ansonia building, the divas are disappearing.

Only a few elderly opera singers remain, paying 1970s rent. As their neighbours die off, the apartments 'go condo' and Wall Street types who wouldn't know Pavarotti from manicotti shell out millions to move in.

'This is not the old Ansonia,' sighs Alexandra Yu, a resident for 54 years, as she casts a plaintive glance at yuppies pushing baby strollers and pulling yapping dogs through the marble lobbies where aspiring sopranos once sang the night away. Yu believes no one has yet done justice to the Ansonia's history and is planning to write a book about it. 'They might as well tear it down,' she says.

Built as a residential hotel between 1899 and 1904, the Ansonia is one of the Upper West Side's oldest and most famous buildings. And like New York itself, it has gone through scores of incarnations.

The Ansonia was once the height of glamour: socialites sipped champagne in its huge ballroom, seals frolicked in a lobby fountain and paparazzi staked out the entrance.

In the years leading up to the roaring 20s, the building became a hotbed of intrigue. Gangsters died within its spacious suites. Spies mingled with dictators in exile and larger-than-life sportsmen held court. Later, in the gritty 1960s and 70s, the Ansonia's fortunes mirrored those of the city as a whole; the middle classes fled to the suburbs and left behind a falling tax base and a rising crime rate, which brought the city to the brink of financial ruin.

The grand building fell into a state of disrepair and the owner rented the basement out as a gay bathhouse, where singers Bette Midler and Barry Manilow kick-started their careers, crooning to young men in towels. In the 70s, the gays moved out and hairy-chested, gold-chain-wearing swingers moved in. They frolicked naked at a club called Plato's Retreat, which boasted a 50-person Jacuzzi and a mattress-lined orgy room.