Continental Baths (local, Ansonia Hotel)

The Continental Baths opened in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel at 2109 Broadway in 1968 and closed in 1974 (a brief 1975-77 reopening as a mixed straight/gay club followed). Its founder, Steve Ostrow, ran it as a full spa: pool, sauna, massage, disco floor, and — most famously — a cabaret stage where openly gay entertainment was performed to a bathrobed audience. The cabaret is what made the Continental famous. Bette Midler's Tuesday night residency in 1970-71, with Barry Manilow at the piano, was reviewed in the mainstream press and gave both performers their first national exposure. Regulars included Cab Calloway, John Davidson, Peter Allen, and — the reason critics started coming — visiting singers who wanted a New York try-out room with a genuinely engaged audience. Midler's *Live at Last* album cover features her at a Continental piano. The city's bathhouse closure order of 1985 came too late for the Continental — it had already closed under commercial pressure a decade earlier — but the space remains a monument to a specific moment when gay New York had enough purchasing power, enough style, and enough courage to make its subculture into mainstream cabaret. The Ansonia Hotel itself is a beaux-arts landmark; the basement is now storage. What the visitor sees: the Ansonia's spectacular Broadway façade at 74th Street, and a plaque on the exterior (installed by the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project in 2019) noting the Continental's tenancy in the basement. Free, sidewalk-accessible, on the west side's standard subway grid (72nd Street 1/2/3). Combine with a walk south to the Continental's siblings — the West Side had a dozen bathhouses in the 1970s.