Hugh Hefner’s original Playboy Club hits auction block, its controversial history to ‘fade away’
The site of the original New York Playboy Club built by Hugh Hefner, which is located in Manhattan’s world-renowned Upper 5th Avenue retail corridor, is set to go up for auction in early 2024.
After sitting vacant for years, the nine-story, 50-foot-wide building on East 59th Street near The Plaza Hotel, Bergdorf Goodman department store and Central Park will be sold at a foreclosure auction on Jan. 17.
The once ultra-exclusive nightclub built by Hefner in 1962 and its controversial history are likely to "fade away" from the iconic retail corridor upon securing new tenants, Bob Knakal, lead broker with JLL Capital Markets, told Fox News Digital.
"Most people when they talk about the history of the building, they think of a Playboy Club. That was a famous place in New York for quite a while, but we believe that the next incarnation of the building is kind of up in the air. It could be a number of different things, Knakal said.
Today, the gray and glass building blends in among adjacent city structures, but in its heyday, the $4 million cocktail club was frequented by A-listers like Tony Bennett, Johnny Carson and The Beatles.
You could only earn admittance to the club by possessing an exclusive key decorated with the Playboy logo. Comedian Dick Gregory described it as "a status symbol, like a Mercedes is now."
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Gloria Steinem, a feminist activist, famously went undercover as a Playboy bunny at the Manhattan club for a magazine expose.
Under the alias Marie Catherine Ochs, Steinem reported about "uniforms so tight one could barely move; swollen and blistering feet from hours of working in high heels; and near-constant harassment by the drunk businessmen who made up most of the clientele," an article for History.com notes.
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Steinem wrote that after one night when roughly 2,000 men came through the club, she estimated there had been maybe 10 who "looked at us not as objects ... but as if we might be human beings."
In 1986, the club closed and was later remodeled into a bank building.
As for the building's future, Knakal says the location is a prime spot for "top retail brands."
"The interesting thing about the building is, although it's a mid-block building, it almost has the presence of a block-front building … the exposure is terrific. A lot of retailers that have their own buildings like Cartier or Harry Winston – the real top retailers – we think that one of those retail brands could create an extraordinarily special presence for themselves by building a new retail building there," Knakal said.