Where the Boys Aren't
MAN on the premises!
Martha Morales, the evening supervisor at the Webster Apartments, a large, brick home to 370 women of varying ages and occupations, strode down a long corridor lined with identical doors. She zeroed in on one of them and knocked.
“Can I come in your room?” she called out politely — and then got straight to the point. “We think you have a man in there.”
A young woman opened the door.
There was no man to be seen in the small, modest chamber, just a narrow single bed, desk and a chest of drawers. But there was also a closet. Under orders, the young woman opened it.
Sure enough, crouching inside amid the hanging garments was a terrified-looking male — who proceeded to run for his life. He tore out of the room and disappeared down the hall. Ms. Morales let him go, staying behind to speak sternly to his female host and order her to report to the building’s manager, Maryann Lienhard, the next morning.
This is not a tale from the 1950s. It is straight out of 21st century New York City. With an amused smile but an earnest tone, Ms. Lienhard (who warned the embarrassed tenant that she would get “no second chances”) recalled the incident the other day — just one small drama from a slice of life that many people assume vanished from the city decades ago.
The Webster, on West 34th Street, is one of the few remaining all-female residences in a city that used to have many. Hotels and apartment houses that provided temporary refuge for young ladies hoping to find fame, or start a career (or snare a husband) in the big city occupy a distinct sliver of New York lore. The most famous, the Barbizon Hotel for Women on East 63rd Street, was memorably depicted in Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel “The Bell Jar” as populated by well-to-do “girls” whose parents “wanted to make sure their daughters were living in a place where men couldn’t get at them and deceive them.”
Plath gave the place a thinly fictionalized name, the Amazon. In real life the Barbizon is known for sheltering Grace Kelly while she was studying acting, as well as a young Joan Crawford, Candice Bergen, Ali McGraw, Liza Minnelli and Plath herself. An ad for the hotel that ran in The New Yorker in 1966 boasted, “Many of the world’s most successful women were Barbizon girls.”
Though the Barbizon and others, such as the Parkside Evangeline on Gramercy Park, have succumbed to developers’ offers over the years, sold and remade into condos or luxury hotels, the smattering of all-female residences that remain are thriving, most with waiting lists of prospective tenants. The appeal today is not so different than it was in the past: safety, cleanliness and — especially attractive in modern-day New York — a good real estate deal.
It costs about $1,000 per month to live at the Webster. For that you get a small single room and shared bath but also a hot breakfast and dinner, maid service, use of a large walled garden and a roof deck with a spectacular view of the Empire State Building. (Developers are constantly making unsolicited offers for the property.)
The deal is similar — minus the garden and the roof deck — at the Brandon Residence for Women, tucked among multi-million-dollar town houses and co-ops on the Upper West Side, and the Sacred Heart Residence, run by an order of Catholic nuns, in Chelsea.
The Jeanne D’Arc Residence on West 24th Street, which was established in 1896 as a home for “friendless French girls” who crossed the Atlantic to take jobs as nannies and seamstresses, is even cheaper — between $355 and $510 a month, depending on the size of the room. But you have to cook yourself...
Read entire article at NYT
Martha Morales, the evening supervisor at the Webster Apartments, a large, brick home to 370 women of varying ages and occupations, strode down a long corridor lined with identical doors. She zeroed in on one of them and knocked.
“Can I come in your room?” she called out politely — and then got straight to the point. “We think you have a man in there.”
A young woman opened the door.
There was no man to be seen in the small, modest chamber, just a narrow single bed, desk and a chest of drawers. But there was also a closet. Under orders, the young woman opened it.
Sure enough, crouching inside amid the hanging garments was a terrified-looking male — who proceeded to run for his life. He tore out of the room and disappeared down the hall. Ms. Morales let him go, staying behind to speak sternly to his female host and order her to report to the building’s manager, Maryann Lienhard, the next morning.
This is not a tale from the 1950s. It is straight out of 21st century New York City. With an amused smile but an earnest tone, Ms. Lienhard (who warned the embarrassed tenant that she would get “no second chances”) recalled the incident the other day — just one small drama from a slice of life that many people assume vanished from the city decades ago.
The Webster, on West 34th Street, is one of the few remaining all-female residences in a city that used to have many. Hotels and apartment houses that provided temporary refuge for young ladies hoping to find fame, or start a career (or snare a husband) in the big city occupy a distinct sliver of New York lore. The most famous, the Barbizon Hotel for Women on East 63rd Street, was memorably depicted in Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel “The Bell Jar” as populated by well-to-do “girls” whose parents “wanted to make sure their daughters were living in a place where men couldn’t get at them and deceive them.”
Plath gave the place a thinly fictionalized name, the Amazon. In real life the Barbizon is known for sheltering Grace Kelly while she was studying acting, as well as a young Joan Crawford, Candice Bergen, Ali McGraw, Liza Minnelli and Plath herself. An ad for the hotel that ran in The New Yorker in 1966 boasted, “Many of the world’s most successful women were Barbizon girls.”
Though the Barbizon and others, such as the Parkside Evangeline on Gramercy Park, have succumbed to developers’ offers over the years, sold and remade into condos or luxury hotels, the smattering of all-female residences that remain are thriving, most with waiting lists of prospective tenants. The appeal today is not so different than it was in the past: safety, cleanliness and — especially attractive in modern-day New York — a good real estate deal.
It costs about $1,000 per month to live at the Webster. For that you get a small single room and shared bath but also a hot breakfast and dinner, maid service, use of a large walled garden and a roof deck with a spectacular view of the Empire State Building. (Developers are constantly making unsolicited offers for the property.)
The deal is similar — minus the garden and the roof deck — at the Brandon Residence for Women, tucked among multi-million-dollar town houses and co-ops on the Upper West Side, and the Sacred Heart Residence, run by an order of Catholic nuns, in Chelsea.
The Jeanne D’Arc Residence on West 24th Street, which was established in 1896 as a home for “friendless French girls” who crossed the Atlantic to take jobs as nannies and seamstresses, is even cheaper — between $355 and $510 a month, depending on the size of the room. But you have to cook yourself...