Real Estate

11 perv-palaces transformed into apartments and offices

Every time a strip club shutters, an angel loses its wings — so y’all better grab an umbrella, New York, ‘cause it’s about to downpour feathers.

Larry Flynt’s famed Hustler Gentlemen’s Club, on 12th Avenue between West 51st and West 52nd Streets, is about to give way to a different, sadder kind of erection — a new 240,000-square-foot office and studio building intending to replace it, if buzz-killing developers Jack Guttman and Steve Schwartz have their way.

Apparently the strip club, despite those exorbitant ATM fees, owes a couple million in back taxes, so the timing couldn’t be better for them to hang up the clear platform heels and close up shop, cigar lounge and all.

But what about us? First bed bugs on the subway, now this? This city is going to hell in a handbasket.

Here are ten more erstwhile perv dens that are now just boring old real estate:

344 W. 38th St., Manhattan

When you were a member of the Hot Lap Dance Club — a pop-up strip club that would set up stakes in different loft spaces throughout the city back in 2007 — you literally got a membership card that fit in your wallet to flash at the door. How I know this is not important. What is important is that the vice cops eventually busted the club at this mixed commercial/residential Clinton location for prostitution. Owner (and, shocker, lawyer) Louis “Big Lou” Posner plead guilty in a no-jail-time, community service deal.

136½ W. 15th St., Manhattan

Note the casualness of this listing in Chelsea — it’s a two-family prewar townhouse; has original wooden floors; a charmingly renovated garden. Oh, right, and it used to be a brothel. (Hey, there’s a fine line between real estate brokering and the sex trade.) But that was back in 1901. Now it’s just a $6.5 million “investment opportunity” with a solarium, yawn.

635 W. 42nd St., Manhattan

Douglas Elliman
Robert Gans — the owner of Penthouse Executive Club, which has a “top-rated” steakhouse to go along with its many “Harem rooms” — was sued by the Midtown condo board for allegedly running an escort service (with help from his gal pal) in his 41st-floor apartment at the Atelier “without permission,” even landing the condo the nickname “NYC’s sexiest building.” What’s the expression? Better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.

14-16 E. 67th St., Manhattan

Bob Guccione’s townhouseJim Alcorn

Talk about a Pet-friendly building! If the walls of Penthouse founder Bob Guccione’s mansion could talk, they’d probably be bleeped in this family newspaper. But that didn’t stop hedge funder Phil Falcone from buying the jazz mag meister’s 25,000-square-foot residence in 2008 for $49 million before gut-renovating it, adding an indoor pool, sauna, security room, elevators, movie theater and heated sidewalks.

304 E. 78th St., Manhattan

Splash News
The so-called “Soccer Mom Madam” Anna Gristina reportedly served up Coors Light  to johns at her UES brothel. Beer goggles never hurt if your $2,000 date doesn’t quite live up to her airbrushed photograph. Gristina copped to a no-jail plea in 2012.

1098 Lafayette Ave, The Bronx

The Father, the Son and the Pole-y Ghost, am I right? Former Bronx strip club Platinum Pleasures is set to become the new home of Reggie Stutzman’s Real Life Church. Poor Platinum has been closed for a while now after having lost its liquor license, and now there’s no chance for a resurrection.

92-77 Queens Blvd., Rego Park

Goldfingers Night ClubDaniel Shapiro

There’s only one place easier to spend a gazillion dollars at than a strip club, and that’s a Starbucks. So it makes sense that the site of the infamous Goldfingers strip club — which shut down in way back in 1999 after neighbors moaned and groaned — will be the new home of a drive-thru outpost of the coffee giant, plus a Retro Fitness.

153 Lincoln Place, Park Slope

The Park Slope Hotel was zero percent hotel, 100 percent brothel — so much so that they actually refused prospective guests just looking for a place to sleep. Now it’s a luxury, converted Victorian condo building called “The Lincoln,” which, according to Urban Dictionary, may have also been one of the services on offer.

320 Washington Ave., Clinton Hill

Reven T.C. Wurman
GILF hunters would be in hog heaven at this chimeric Brooklyn pad, which started out in the 1850s as living quarters for elderly women (The Graham Home for Old Ladies) then, by the 1980s, became a brothel (the Bull Shippers Motor Lodge). Not that those two things are mutually exclusive — a lid for evert pot, people! Now it’s a renovated, red-bricked condo.

2109 Broadway, Manhattan

Babe Ruth’s former digs, the Ansonia, got a fun little addition to its basement in 1968 in the form of a gay bathhouse called “Continental Baths” — Roman-inspired and open 24 hours a day, it had a disco, cabaret, ample drugs, a pool, a K-Y Jelly dispenser and could squeeze in 1,000 dudes at a time (public orgies went down on the reg). You better believe “Bathhouse Betty” Bette Midler performed here many a time before it closed in the ‘70s.