Plato's Retreat: The Notorious NYC Swingers' Club That Ruled and Fell With the '70s
- Aug 1
- 7 min read
Updated: Aug 2
For eight years in the middle of the disco era, there was a place in Manhattan where you could grab a plate of barbecued chicken, take a dip in an Olympic sized pool, and watch forty or fifty naked bodies moving together on a mattress the size of a basketball court. That was Plato's Retreat, the heterosexual swingers' club that ran from 1977 to 1985 and became just as famous, in its own way, as its flashier neighbor a few blocks south, Studio 54. Both clubs opened the same year. Both turned New York's hunger for nightlife into something the whole country gawked at. Only one of them let you take your clothes off at the door.
It's worth remembering what New York actually looked like in the mid-1970s, because it wasn't the glossy backdrop people picture now. The subways were covered in graffiti, whole blocks of the Bronx and Harlem sat gutted, and the city itself was functionally broke. Plato's Retreat didn't happen despite that city. It happened because of it, a place built by people with nothing to lose in a town that felt like it had nothing left to lose either.
How a Bankrupt McDonald's Manager Got Into the Swinging Business
The man behind Plato's was Larry Levenson, a twice divorced Bronx native who'd spent the mid 1970s selling soda and ice cream on the beach at Coney Island, after a stint managing a Brooklyn McDonald's. His life changed one night at the Golden Gate Motel in Sheepshead Bay, where he met a married woman named Ellie who introduced him to the city's underground swing scene, a scattered world of couples arranging trysts across apartments and motel rooms all over Brooklyn. Levenson had a simple idea: why not put it all under one roof? "I wanted to make things more convenient," he said later.
From a Basement on 23rd Street to the Ansonia Hotel
In 1977 he rented a basement under the Kenmore Hotel on East 23rd Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues, and opened his first version of Plato's Retreat. It caught on fast enough that a caterer with organized crime ties, Frank Pernice, took notice. "Right now you got a grocery store," Pernice reportedly told him. "I can turn it into a supermarket." Levenson took the deal.
The supermarket turned out to be the basement of the Ansonia Hotel, a grand old building on Broadway between West 73rd and 74th Streets that had spent years as the Continental Baths, the gay bathhouse where a young Bette Midler once sang with Barry Manilow on piano. Plato's opened there on September 23, 1977, in a pouring rainstorm. Levenson was terrified nobody would show up. Instead, a line stretched around the block. "I cried," he said. "It was the happiest day of my life."
What It Was Actually Like Inside
The rules were posted right at the door: no threesomes, no one admitted fully dressed, and if the female half of a couple left the mattress room, her partner would be asked to leave too. Couples paid twenty five dollars to get in, a fee that crept up over the years and reportedly hit eighty five dollars by the mid 1980s. Single women were welcome. Single men were turned away outright, a rule Levenson enforced strictly to protect the club's couples only reputation. Beyond that, though, he was famously unpicky about who got in. "I had some uglies there," he once said. "If you had all beauties there, it would be very intimidating."
Inside, there was a buffet loaded with barbecued chicken, spare ribs, and three kinds of salad, a dance floor run by DJ Bacho, an Olympic sized pool with its own small waterfall, a jacuzzi that held sixty people, a steam room and sauna, ping pong and pool tables, private cubicles for the shy, and the club's centerpiece: the Mattress Room, known to regulars simply as the Mats, where a couple hundred people could and did pile onto interlocking mattresses on a busy night. "Once you take your clothes off, everyone's the same," Levenson liked to say. "Bus drivers were partying with doctors and Wall Street people."
Same Era as Studio 54, No Velvet Rope
Plato's shared its DNA with Studio 54 in more ways than one. Both clubs opened in 1977, both rode the same wave of disco mania and post Woodstock permissiveness, and both drew a steady stream of famous faces. But where Studio 54 ran on velvet rope exclusivity and a VIP room, Plato's had no VIP section at all, and its famous visitors simply blended into the crowd. Sammy Davis Jr. reportedly caused a stir whenever he showed up. Richard Dreyfuss, who lived a few floors above the club at the Ansonia, was said to be more interested in meeting adult film star Jamie Gillis than sampling the buffet. Buck Henry and members of the Saturday Night Live cast were known to stop by after tapings. Future Minnesota governor Jesse “The Body” Ventura was such a fan that he reportedly wore a Plato's Retreat T shirt into the wrestling ring. Levenson himself became a minor celebrity, turning up on Donahue and, on slow nights, hosting sunrise shows where he lip synced Elvis's “The Wonder of You” in a velour robe and a jeweled crown.
Screw Magazine, Porn Stars, and the Regulars
Levenson had a head start on the era's sexual openness. He'd been friends since high school in Brooklyn with Al Goldstein, founder of Screw magazine, and the club became a fixture on New York's adult film and raunch press scene. Porn performers Annie Sprinkle, Jamie Gillis, and a man known only as Danny the Wonder Pony were regulars. Screw threw its tenth anniversary party at Plato's, in a room hazy with cigarette smoke and camera flashes. The writer Anthony Haden-Guest, who visited occasionally as a guide for out of town friends, later said in the 2008 documentary American Swing that he was the one who first drew the public line between Plato's and Studio 54, calling the two clubs the twin engines that made New York “the world's most exciting city.” He wrote about those visits years later in Avenue Magazine, describing a club that could feel less like the Playboy Mansion and more like a dim, crowded locker room, where, as one of his friends put it, “everybody could have been your mother or your father.”
Bigger Digs, Bigger Trouble
By 1980 Levenson had outgrown the Ansonia and moved Plato's to a much larger space on West 34th Street, bragging on television that franchise locations would open around the country within months. None ever did. Not long after the move, Levenson was robbed and badly beaten. Some blamed the chauffeur his partner Mary was rumored to be involved with. Others suspected the arrangement with Pernice and his associates had gone sideways. Levenson recovered and returned to the club in a wheelchair, still smiling for the cameras.
The IRS Comes Knocking
The bigger threat turned out to be the IRS. In 1981, Levenson and his partners, including Pernice and a second silent partner named Hy Gordon, went on trial for skimming an estimated 2.3 million dollars from the club and keeping the books off the premises. When a prosecutor asked why the records weren't kept at Plato's, Levenson had an answer ready: "Where would I keep them, in the swimming pool?" The jury laughed, then convicted him anyway. He was sentenced to eight years and served roughly forty months at the federal prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, a facility mild mannered enough that Levenson later joked he'd joined Alcoholics Anonymous there for something to do, despite not drinking, and won the prison pinochle tournament.
AIDS, Ed Koch, and the End of Plato's Retreat
Levenson got out in 1984 and returned to a club that was already dying. AIDS had reshaped the city's entire nightlife landscape, and Mayor Ed Koch's administration had begun shutting venues linked to what the health department called high risk sex. The gay S&M bar the Mine Shaft was padlocked on November 7, 1985, the first casualty of a new city health code that banned oral and anal sex on commercial premises. Closing only gay venues risked violating the city's own anti discrimination law, so officials turned to Plato's next. According to a UPI wire report from that November, an undercover police officer named Philip Kouril paid the club's forty five dollar admission fee, went inside, and reported witnessing group sex along with two separate solicitation offers, one from a man asking ten dollars and one from a woman asking twenty five. The city shut Plato's down on prostitution charges and for lacking a certificate of occupancy. A local New York news crew caught Levenson on camera that week, furious and vowing to fight the closing order in court. He denied the prostitution allegations and insisted the club followed the new no oral, no anal rule to the letter, but the order held. Plato's Retreat closed for good on New Year's Eve, 1985. Koch, informed of the closure while on vacation in Japan, said simply, "I am delighted."
What Happened to Larry Levenson
Levenson never recovered financially. He spent his final years driving a cab around Manhattan, still cheerful, according to former patrons who recognized him from the back seat. "I thought we had a great family," he told one of them. "But I guess I was mistaken. It was just me." In 1999 he showed up at Screw magazine's thirtieth anniversary party. He died months later, at 62, following complications from quadruple bypass heart surgery. Filmmakers Jon Hart and Matthew Kaufman, who'd gotten to know Levenson while he drove a cab, told his story in the 2008 documentary American Swing, revisited at the time by both The Daily Beast and The Village Voice.
Plato's Retreat never got the cultural rehabilitation that Studio 54 eventually did. No biopic, no nostalgic reunion parties, no plaque on the Ansonia. But for eight strange years, it was as much a symbol of pre AIDS New York as any disco ball on 54th Street, a basement where bus drivers, doctors, porn stars, and the occasional talk show host all took their clothes off and, according to Levenson at least, became exactly the same.
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