Do I Look Fat?(Loehmann's Inc.)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 23-APR-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

What is it about the Ansonia Hotel, at Broadway and Seventy-third Street, that makes people want to take off their clothes? In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, naked men, sometimes ten thousand of them a week, used to hang out downstairs in the sauna, Turkish baths, and massage parlor of the Continental Baths, where Bette Midler got her start (clothed), singing torch songs poolside, accompanied by Barry Man-ilow, to an audience of men wearing white towels (black towels on formal nights)--the very same outfit worn by the undercover cops who frequently raided the place. In 1977, women started getting naked, too, when the baths reopened as...

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