Continental Baths

Overview

Gay bathhouse-cum-performance-space in the Ansonia Hotel basement, launched Bette Midler and Barry Manilow, installed what Ostrow claimed was the world's first purpose-built DJ stage, and trained Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan, who would go on to define house and garage music respectively.

Operating in a 40,000-square-foot, multi-level basement originally built as Turkish baths and a swimming pool beneath the Beaux-Arts Ansonia Hotel, the Continental Baths opened on September 12, 1968, the brainchild of Steve Ostrow, entrepreneur, former opera singer, and married father of two who opened the doors a year before Stonewall. Financed in part by his father-in-law, Ostrow transformed what he described as the squalor of existing venues like the Everard Baths into something he advertised as 'the glory of Ancient Rome': 400 private rooms, a waterfall-fed 'Olympia blue' pool, sauna, steam room, STD clinic, and a licensed bar and café. The capacity reached nearly 1,000 men at once, 24 hours a day, with an estimated 10,000 weekly patrons at peak, a radical act of gay public space in the years around Stonewall, despite some 200 documented police raids during the club's life. Ostrow installed a cabaret stage and baby grand piano that launched an extraordinary run of pre-fame talent: Bette Midler, who earned the nickname 'Bathhouse Betty' and debuted 'Friends' here accompanied by Barry Manilow (often in a towel) before a towel-clad gay audience, used the room to build the divine-miss persona that would define her career. Other early performers included Peter Allen, Nell Carter, Labelle (Patti LaBelle), Melissa Manchester, The Manhattan Transfer, Melba Moore, Lesley Gore, Cab Calloway, Sarah Vaughan, Andy Kaufman, and Freda Payne. Celebrity audience members reportedly included Bob Fosse, Mick Jagger, Rudolf Nureyev, and Andy Warhol, a crossover that eventually alienated the core gay clientele, who by 1974 felt 'like we were part of the décor.' Live performance programming ended that year as straight attendance displaced the room's gay audience. The Baths were also an early incubator for New York's DJ culture. Ostrow installed what he claimed was the world's first purpose-built DJ stage; the early sound system ran basic Thorens TD-160 turntables before being upgraded to 16 Bose speakers driven by a Phase Linear amplifier and two high-torque Lenco turntables with a custom broadcast-knob mixer. Resident selectors Bobby 'DJ' Guttadaro (a Fire Island veteran) and David Rodriguez anchored the dancefloor in the early 1970s; soundman and lights operator Joey Bonfiglio upgraded the system and, crucially, invited Larry Levan into the booth around 1973–1974. Levan, a young patron already working at the Baths, was joined by his best friend Frankie Knuckles (still in high school in the South Bronx) for Monday and Tuesday daytime shifts. Manager Don Scotti recalled Levan as a 'creative genius' who 'knew how to read the dance floor so that it never went cold.' Levan left for SoHo Place by end of 1974, unhappy with the sound system; Knuckles took over his slot before the venue's closure sent him eventually to Chicago's Warehouse. The line runs from the Baths to the Warehouse and Paradise Garage, and through those rooms into house and garage. The Baths closed permanently in 1976, undone by the loss of its gay core audience, declining conditions, and police pressure. The space reopened in 1977 as Plato's Retreat, a heterosexual swingers' club that ran until the city shut it down on New Year's Eve 1985 under public-health ordinances at the height of the AIDS epidemic. The Continental's cultural footprint survived in two 1975 artworks made at its peak: David Buckley's film *Saturday Night at the Baths*, shot on location with Ostrow and manager Don Scotti, and Terrence McNally's Broadway play *The Ritz* (opened January 20, 1975, at the Longacre Theatre), loosely modeled on the space and one of the first plays with unapologetically gay characters to reach a mainstream audience, Rita Moreno won the Tony for her role as Googie Gomez. Steve Ostrow died February 4, 2024, at age 91.

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