Spending Christmas 1971 at the Continental Baths

I wonder how many people actually spent December 25, 1970 taking in the scene inside the Upper West Side’s infamous Continental Baths?

According to this Village Voice ad from December 23, “the world’s most liberated club” was hosting a special Christmas show (ladies admitted at 11:15!), and then a New Years’ celebration as well.

Opened in 1968 in the basement of the then-faded Ansonia Hotel (right) on West 74th Street, the Continental Baths was a “sexual Xanadu”—a place where gay men in towels could dance, socialize, and be entertained by not-yet-famous Bette Midler (and her piano player, Barry Manilow), Nell Carter, and Melba Moore.

The Baths operated until the mid-1970s, when it was rebranded as swingers’ paradise Plato’s Retreat. Perhaps they too had a Christmas Day special?

This New York magazine article from 1973 offers a detailed look inside “New York’s most Weimarian nightspot.”

Where gentlemen got their hair done in 1852

The St. Nicholas Hotel, between Spring and Broome Streets on Broadway, was an opulent marvel of a hotel that catered to New York’s wealthy elite in the years before and after the Civil War.

Opened in 1853, it was the first hotel to offer “water closets” with hot and cold water as well as gas in every room.

Guests also had the opportunity to get coiffed and groomed, thanks to Phalon’s, the “hair dressing establishment” located in the hotel.

“A clean hairbrush for every visitor” Phalon’s advertised, reports a 1934 New York Times article on wood engravings, from which this 1853 print was likely made [from the NYPL Digital Collection]

The St. Nicholas bit the dust in 1884.

Vintage ads fading away on brick buildings

This Chatham Square faded ad is tricky to decipher because it’s actually two ads, one painted on top of the other.

The newer ad is for Turkish Trophies, an old cigarette brand. Underneath it is the word “for” in yellow, and a long word with a fancy F.

That’s for Fletcher’s Castoria, a children’s laxative popular in the 19th century. Fletcher’s had ads all over the city; here’s one on 109th Street and Second Avenue.

Thurston & Braidich are described as “drug merchants” whose store at 130 William Street was damaged by a fire in 1901, according to a New York Times piece that year.

But in his 1902 obituary, Adolf Braidich is described as a gum importer. Whatever his game was, an ad bearing his name is still holding up in Tribeca.