In 1939, a cabaret and piano bar was added to the first floor. Outside the striped awnings that once adorned each window on the Central Park West facade disappeared, as did the light well still present along the building to the south. By 1950, the elevator men were gone as the cars were upgraded to new automatic versions from their prior manual operation. This configuration lasted for nearly twenty years as the Hotel Peter Stuyvesant was operated by the Knott Hotel Corporation as a Class A hotel. The neighborhood itself would change as the IND Eighth Avenue Line with its 5-cent fares opened in 1932 and replaced the uptown trolley system that once used the 86th Street transverse. More importantly, the independent subway line tied the uptown property and those near it to the bustling metropolis forming in midtown Manhattan, only one and a half miles to the south. The property was operated as a residential hotel up to its sale to Wilger Realty Corporation in 1941. By the late 1940s and 1950s, two other renovations again would change Hotel Peter Stuyvesant's footprint. In 1949, the partitioning on the second through twelfth floors again was changed to incorporate nineteen apartments per floor. In 1957, the western dining room and the cabaret, the latter having established a poor reputation with the police, were renovated to accommodate new medical and legal office space. In 1960, the property was sold again to Soltzer & Lampert, real estate operators. In the 1960s, the notability of the building was limited, although Fred Rust and Bill Davies taught ballroom dancing in the first floor ballroom until 1967. Their departure appears to coincide with another sale of the property. Stuyvesant Apartments, a partnership formed between Simon Haberman and Walter Schulze, purchased the building on April 17. 1967. The building underwent an alteration completed in 1970 replacing all internal partitions, while maintaining its external features, and including eighty-nine apartments on the upper floors (eight per floor but nine on the ninth), a group medical center on the first floor, and a garage in part of the cellar. An entrance to the lobby was added on the Central Park West side, with the former entrance on West 86th Street being retained as an entrance for the medical center. The then-owners renamed the property as The Orwell House after the English author whom one of the sponsors enjoyed. That moniker remained until the early 2000s when the resident-shareholders decided to change the name to simply 257 Central Park West. In 1978, Stuyvesant Apartments converted the apartments to co-operative ownership, selling most of the apartment units to the residents.