Steve Ostrow, Manhattan Bathhouse Impresario, Dies at 91

Steve Ostrow, the founder of the Continental Baths – an extravagant sex club and performance space for gay men that flourished in the early 1970s in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel, a Beaux-Arts landmark on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and launched the careers of Bette Midler and Barry Manilow – died on February 3 at his home in Sydney, Australia. He was 91.

His death was announced by Toby Usnik, a friend.

Mr. Ostrow's 1968 business plan was to create a gay fantasy, a palace dedicated to hedonism. Built around the turn of the century by a brass heir named William Earl Dodge Stokes, the Ansonia was perfect for his venture.

Spanning an entire block on Broadway, from 73rd Street to 74th Street, it is a flowery wedding cake of a building, with domes, balconies and gargoyles. When it opened, there were Turkish baths and a huge swimming pool in the basement, billed as the largest in the world; seals in the lobby fountains; and on the roof an urban farm with goats, chickens and a bear.

Its illustrious tenants included Babe Ruth, Florenz Ziegfeld and Theodore Dreiser. For decades, even as the building's fortunes faded in the years after World War II, performing artists and music teachers called it home. (The seals and the farm had disappeared since 1907, by order of the Ministry of Health.)

Mr. Ostrow, an aspiring opera singer and cantor at his local temple, was on his way to a singing lesson at the Ansonia when he discovered that the building's enormous basement, with its dilapidated pool and baths, was available for rent.

Coincidentally, he was looking for a place to open a gay bathhouse, a place where men could have sex with other men. There were only a few in the city at the time, but they were dirty and depressing. They were packed too, with lines around the block.

Mr. Ostrow, who had a wife and two children, saw not only a market but an opportunity to explore his own sexuality. In 1968, it was not only illegal for two people of the same sex to have sex; it was illegal for them to dance together. Bathhouses and underground gay bars like the Stonewall Inn, run by the mafia, were the rare places where gay men could congregate, albeit precariously.

The Continental Baths was robbed 200 times that first year, until Mr. Ostrow made arrangements with the police to “donate” 10 percent of his profits each week to a fictional “police ball,” as he recalled in a self-published memoir : 'Live at the Continental” (2022).

Mr. Ostrow was a showman through and through, and his vision for the Continental Baths was expansive, a kind of Roman fever dream. He built a mirror disco and a black marble steam room. There was a restaurant, a chapel, a gym, a travel agency, a boutique and a VD clinic. There were hundreds of private rooms and thousands of lockers. There was a private elevator to the roof; Mr. Ostrow rented that too and built a beach in the sky, trucked sand and set up cabanas and umbrellas.

Men came for the weekend, or longer. At first it cost $5 a day. But Mr. Ostrow offered a special “condominium rate,” as he called it, for those who wanted to stay for months. His interior designer rented one room and equipped it with a waterbed, paintings and a television set.

The Baths were a haven for closeted men still married to women, for young men who had escaped a restrictive upbringing and found themselves in the city, and, inevitably, for celebrities. Rudolf Nureyev was a regular customer.

When Mr. Ostrow persuaded a young singer named Bette Midler to perform on a small stage near the pool on weekends, the Baths became a destination for more than just sex. Her performance at the Tubs, as she called the place, was irresistible and quickly attracted a heterogeneous, celebrity-studded audience: Mick Jagger one night, Helen Gurley Brown the next.

Barry Manilow, then a struggling pianist and jingle writer, was hired to accompany Ms. Midler. She strapped on a belt, sang and teased and donned fantastic costumes, fine-tuning the act that would make her famous. Her version of Bob Dylan's “I Shall Be Released” was heartbreaking and beautiful (Grainy images can be found on the internet), a striking anthem for the struggle of gays at that time.

“Actually responding to this… dare I call this place a house? … has been the best experience in the world,” Ms. Midler told Rex Reed of The Daily News in early 1972, when she performed at the Baths for the last time. “I mean, you have to be good to keep the guys fascinated. Gawd! Whenever I bored them, they could go upstairs to take a shower.

Mr. Reed was not bored.

“There is magic in the air,” he wrote. “Magic that takes away the violence of the cold, dark streets. The insecurities, hatred, fears and prejudices from outside disappear in a haze of camp. It is Mary Martin asking if we believe in fairies. Yes. We do.”

Mr. Ostrow invited dozens of musicians to perform, and the place became a strange, steamy nightclub, whose mores were just right for the sexual revolution.

Patti LaBelle played at the Baths, as did Sarah Vaughan, Melba Moore, the Manhattan Transfer and the comedian Dick Gregory.

When Eleanor Steber, a former star of the Metropolitan Opera, performed in October 1973, Mr. Ostrow billed the concert as a black-tie, black-towel affair. Bloomingdale's sold black towels, embroidered with the words “Continental Baths” in silver disco font, for $25. New York society figures attended the event, The New York Times reported, noting that Felicia Bernstein, Leonard's wife, was in attendance, dressed in a cream-colored Adolfo shirt and pants. The ushers wore gowns.

By the mid-1970s, Mr. Ostrow was a public figure driving force of the sexual revolution and political operator, wanted for his influence within the gay community. In 1976, mayoral hopeful Bella Abzug and others held rallies at the Baths. Mr. Ostrow even considered a mayoral bid.

But by now the Baths were slipping away. Mr. Ostrow's embrace of the heterosexual (and clothed) audience for the musical performances did not sit well with his patrons, who felt increasingly exploited, like towel-covered zoo creatures. Then, perhaps inevitably, “pansexual suburbs,” as Rolling Stone magazine put it, replaced the bold names, before being chased away by a more dangerous mob. Drug use increased and the place became unsafe and dilapidated. The party was over.

The Continental Baths closed in 1977. The financiers of what would become Plato's Retreat, a heterosexual sex club that would be as infamous as the Baths, took over the Baths' lease and its significant debts, and drove the club out of the Ansonia for a time. few years before moving to another location. In 1981 they were arrested on charges of tax evasion.

The basement of the Ansonia is now a parking garage. There are strips of mosaic tiles on the floor, ghostly artifacts among the cars and concrete.

Stephen Allen Ostrow was born on September 16, 1932 in Brooklyn. His Russian-born father, Louis Ostrow, worked in the advertising and layout departments of newspapers and magazines. His mother, Nettie (Cooper) Ostrow, worked part-time.

Steve studied singing at the Henry Street Settlement in Manhattan, hoping for a career as an opera singer. But when he was 18, his father died of cancer, and Steve stayed home to support his mother.

While working for a loan company, he joined a small opera company. There he met Joanne King, his co-star in “La Bohème”; they married in 1960. Mr. Ostrow then started his own loan company, and the couple moved to Matawan, NJ, where he served as president and cantor of their local Reform temple.

But Mr. Ostrow was charged with mail fraud in 1966 (for making loans to out-of-state customers, which was illegal at the time), and his business imploded. Two years later, he recalled in his memoirs, he saw an advertisement in The New York Times asking investors to open a men's health club and steam room. His father-in-law lent him the money.

Mr. Ostrow is survived by his children, Scott Ostrow and Maria Jaul, as well as five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. He and his wife lived largely separately after the Baths opened and separated in the early 1980s. Joanne Ostrow became an Episcopal deacon and served as a police chaplain for the Los Angeles Police Department. She died in 2001.

After his life as a bathhouse impresario, Mr. Ostrow sang with opera companies in San Francisco, Germany and Australia, where he settled in the late 1980s, became a singing coach and founded Mature Age Gays, a support group. In 2021, he received the Medal of the Order of Australia for his service to the LGBTQ community and the performing arts.

'I think the Continental Baths changed things more than Stonewall' Larry Kramer, the activist and playwright, told New York magazine in 1998. “They were clean and you could talk to people, and Bette Midler would sing to you.”